Regarding Whose face used to be on the dime?
[ol]
[li]People call it the “Mercury dime”, but the figure on it is Liberty, all the same.[/li][li]Dollars were abandoned for a long time because people didn’t like them. They were too large and heavy, and were almost entirely limited to use in casinos and as gifts to children.[/li][/ol]
Which is why when they were redesigned as Susan B. Anthony dollars they were made smaller.
How about the 50-cent piece? Did they exist before Kennedy?
Which ironically made them too small (i.e., easily confused with quarters, at first glance. Which is why the Sacagaweas were gold-colored.)
Yes, they did. Ben Franklin half dollars were replaced by the Kennedy.
Ah yes. I remember that now. Thanks.
And lack a milled edge.
All in all, the Carter quarter was so poorly designed (or the design was so compromised) that one can’t help but wonder if it was deliberate. It certainly went a long way towards discrediting the dollar-coin concept.
It is extremely difficult to get Americans to accept new money. Coins have to be round, with negligible rims, and bills have to be green and gray and of the traditional (since the 1930s) size, or there’ll be screams of “Monopoly money!”, and yet when it’s designed within those limits, people scream that it’s too hard to distinguish.
That’s an argument that’s frequently put forward, but the public rarely have much say.
That’s demanded by the vending-machine industry.
I’m pretty sure most of the “people” are indifferent. It’s more like a handful of lobbyists and politicians.
Mind you, the Anthony dollar was genuinely unusable. The best that could be said of it was that you occasionally hit the jackpot with dollar-bill changers. The milled edge was particularly perplexing, as it could only have resulted from sheer idiocy or sabotage. Certainly, the BEP were never keen on dollar production being handed to the Mint.
Sacagawea dollars never had a chance so long as bills continued to be produced. Merchants, understandably, don’t want to dick around with two kinds of dollar, so the only places to get dollar coins are banks and railway stations…and they go right back to the banks and railway stations as soon as they’re spent.
Nevertheless, the Mint remains strangely enthusiastic. Sacagawea and presidential dollars continue to be minted (the former have been redesigned annually since 2009) despite a lack of Fed orders. Presumably for the collector market. The result has been that Treasury now has an absurdly large surplus of the damned things.
You may be misinformed. There was a push for greater acceptance of the Saggie, and it seemed that the public was playing along. The spoilsports were Walmart and various merchants. Apparently they prefer dollar bills because they are lighter.
Stan Collender: [INDENT]As I mentioned in my original post, the Golden Dollar actually was enormously popular with consumers when it was introduced. The problem was that they couldn’t get it because retailers, banks, vending machine operators, and others businesses hated it and refused to carry it.
[/INDENT] More: http://capitalgainsandgames.com/topics/dollar-coin
Still more: [INDENT] And from that perspective – consumer awareness – the coin was a huge success. Positive awareness of the coin reached 85 percent within three months and the demand for it was so great that there were block-long lines around many of the Wal-Marts where it was first available.
But in spite of the consumer demand, the golden dollar was a huge flop. Why? The problem was that consumers wanted but couldn’t get it.
Banks initially refused to carry it because they said they already had a large supply of previously issued dollar coins like the almost universally reviled Susan B. Anthony and didn’t want or need any more. Even worse, they couldn’t or wouldn’t guarantee that you would get all or mostly golden dollars if you asked for a roll of them in a bank. You got what they had…period…and that usually was Susan Bs.
But it was worse with retail outlets. What Congress didn’t realize or care about when it authorized the golden dollar was that it costs businesses more to get coins than bills because they’re heavier and the delivery charges from Brinks or some other armored carrier are higher. Plus, you had to order dollar coins in bags of 2000, which is way more than most retailers need and want to keep in their safes. Because consumers ultimately didn’t care whether they got a dollar bill or dollar coin when they made a purchase, businesses saw no reason to pay extra to have the coins delivered or to take the extra risk of having them in their safes. Ultimately, therefore, they didn’t order them and you didn’t get one in change.
But the most infuriating situation of all was the vending machine operators who had actually been among the golden dollars strongest proponents and had lobbied hard for the legislation that required it be produced. The reason was that the dollar bill acceptors broke down often on vending machines and the machine owners and opeartors thought that a dollar coin would take care of the problem.
Because of this, the Mint projected the demand for the coin based in large part on the assumption that vending machines would be converted quickly so that they could accept it.
The problem was that the vending machine operators and owners suddenly realized once the coin was available that it was going to cost them about $50 to retrofit each machine so that it would accept dollar coins…and most flatly refused to spend the money. They wanted the Mint to pay for the retrofitting, which it wasn’t authorized to do.[/INDENT]
http://capitalgainsandgames.com/blog/stan-collender/2381/tea-partiers-want-new-dollar-coin-and-refuse-listen-free-market-process
I say the vending machine lobby dicked us around with the Susan Bs and they dicked us around with the Golden Sackies. We need to pass punitive legislation to teach them a lesson. I’m calling for retro-active penalties, the suspension of habeas corpus and martial law. Forget about the coins – it’s time for pitchforks.
There was (and still is) one very simple measure that would lead to rapid adoption of dollar coins.
I presume that would be the one simple measure that was adopted everywhere else in the world? 
You won’t believe this one simple trick a local country used to promote dollar coins!
I personally prefer dollar bills to coins. In Israel where the smallest denomination is the 20 Shekel note (worth between $5 and $7.50), I keep finding my pockets bulging with 10 Shekel and 5 Shekel coins. Maybe it’s my old American habit of paying with bills rather than digging for change.
In any event, I’m getting off topic.
Retailers hate the dollar coin the same reason they didn’t like the half dollar: You have four bins for coins in your cash drawer. If you have five different coins, you’re going to have to put two coins in the same bin, and likely to miss-make change. If the dollar coin and the quarter are about the same size, it’s too easy to pick up a dollar coin when you meant to give a quarter back. This is actually one of the main reasons while cashiers (and the stores they work for) are so ambivalent about dollar coins.
To solve this problem, drop the penny which customers and cashiers both hate. You drop the penny, and add in a dollar coin, and then you have four coins for four bins. Plus, you don’t have to deal with pennies which no one wants.
Of course, this is all becoming moot as we move to a cashless society. I usually take out $60 from an ATM for emergencies, then have it sit in my wallet for months. I rarely use cash, and will even choose one place over another because one will take payments from my Apple Watch which means not having to dig out my wallet. Plus, it’s a lot faster than those no chip-in-a-card payment systems.
The standard American cash register drawer has slots for five denominations each of bills and coins. If we dropped $1 paper and $0.01 metal, we could use dollar and half-dollar coins, and for that matter $2 bills too.
Sorry, but that’s no help at all. Here’s the current situation on bills:
$1, 2, 5, 10, 20, 50, & 100. That’s 7 categories. That means that 50s, 100s, and the occasional 2 all go in the same slot–along with any coupons and/or credit card slips and/or checks.
As for the coin bins, only four are usable for loose coins. The fifth one is for unopened rolls.
No, it gets used for unopened rolls, random oddments and paper clips, precisely because we don’t have five coins in wide everyday circulation.
There’s also no need to keep coupons, checks, or $100 bills in the drawer, as none of these will typically be given in change. They go underneath the tray, or into a separate drop compartment.
The ideal drawer configuration is thus, $50, $20, $10, $5, and $2 bills; and, $1, half, quarter, dime, and five-cent coins. Five and five.
Just get rid of the two obsolete units.
Many stores I shop at only keep $10, $5, and $1 bills in the tray. All the $20 and higher bills go under the tray, it seems.
The tray could easily accommodate $2 bills and $1 coins, especially if the $1 bills went away.
As mentioned before, the US is peculiar in that the unit of denomination at purchasing power of the dollar, is still on paper.
Then again I once held in my hand a Guatemalan 50-CENT banknote, issued back when the Quetzal was pegged 1:1 with the US Dollar and the country was so poor 50 cents was a hefty amount.
Another peculiar phenomenon – even as the currency unit went down in relative buying power, the Grant and the Ben are downright unwelcome in many places. Which makes it quite annoying to me when BoA ATMs issue me 50’s in some cities. Am I really expected to make that many greater-than-$50 cash transactions in Baltimore?
ETA: *legal *transactions, you jokesters, I’ve lived in Baltimore.
I dunno. Our last trip to the US in April 2012, I found it quite telling how often 50s and 100s came in handy. That really brought inflation home to me. Our previous visit had been just seven years before, and 20s on down largely sufficed.