The plain truth is that there’s been so much inflation since the 1950s that we could drop 1¢, 5¢, and 10¢ and the smallest coin would still be worth less than the smallest coin of my childhood. We should really drop all current forms of cash and produce new currency in coins of 20¢, 50¢, $1, $2, and $5, and bills in $10 and $20. It won’t happen, of course.
This is anecdotal, but I’ve noticed in the last few years that large and even medium bills are being treated with suspicion in more and more places. A lot of shops have had those counterfeit-detecting pens for a long time, but most places used them only on 50s and 100s, even though 20s have been the most commonly counterfeited bill for several years.
In the last 2 or 3 years, though, more and more places are using them on 20s and even 10s. And it seems like more and more places are only grudgingly accepting big bills at all.
Maybe not. We’ve accepted the blue $100 and yellow $10 bills without protest.
They’re not all that blue and yellow. In fact, I’d forgotten about it until you mentioned it.
Thanks, now this thread has spawned an earworm:
Now down on Rampart street at Willy’s Den
He wasn’t selling but a little gin
One cat wanted a bottle of wine
He hit that cat for a dollar and a dime
Five years ago I started a thread whining about some dude borrowing $50 from me, then paying me back with 50 dollar coins.
I thought it was a dick move.
Ah, that was you.
There were some great points made in that thread by Bearflag70 and Peremensoe.
In fact, each denomination above $2 now has different multiple colors in it, where there used to be strictly green and black.
Wait, what? I see mostly $20s and $100s at work - and the blue of the $100 is quite noticeable - but I’ve never noticed another color on the $20. What is it?
There is background color on both sides, fading from green, to what they call peach, and back to green. There is a pale blue eagle on the left of the face side, and a pale blue TWENTY USA USA TWENTY on the right. The 20 in the lower right face color-shifts between copper and green, depending on viewing angles. Then the reverse is full of tiny yellow 20s.
It’s not real dramatic, but I expect you’d notice if someone gave you one of the pre-2003 ones.
The current $5 has a bunch of purple background stuff, and a big purple 5 on the reverse, and the $50 features both red and blue background printing. All of them have the tiny yellow denomination-numbers scattered across the reverses.
Well, now we all know who we should be trying to pass our counterfeit money to.
Coupons, checks, and $100 bills do not go into your drawer. They cannot be used to make change for anything, so once received you are keeping them. They are almost always placed under the cash drawer to be removed at end of shift. Some businesses have a drop safe right by the register, and they go there.
That brings us down to 6: only 6 kinds of bill are useful for making change.
Nobody makes a space for a $2. Almost nobody uses them, and few people realize they are still being made. (I happen to see a few $2 bills every week. Most are from 2009, but about 1/3 are from 1976.)
And that brings you down to 5.
Apparently the only reason we still have pennies is the zinc-mining lobby. I say we appease them with a new copper-clad zinc coin in a useful denomination ($1 would be ideal).
I have heard the quote that a quarter today has the buying power a penny had after WWII. They got by just fine with no coin worth less than that. So we drop the penny, the nickel, and the dime, and round transactions to the nearest quarter. Then we introduce useful coins worth $1, $2, and $5. Stop making $1 and $2 bills. Maybe make a $10 coin for gifts to the grandkids and stuff.
Then again, more than half the legal transactions in the US are handled by a credit or debit card, so maybe fixing our money isn’t a huge priority.
That’s seems a bit much. If you go by the CPI, it’s more like $0.13. Still a good argument for losing pennies (yeah, I know, cents) and nickles.
“Buying power” is difficult to quantify, however. On balance, I’d say that most things cost a lot less than they did in, say, 1950, but others have become so freakishly expensive that it might push the average way off in the other direction.
(Something that really stuck in my mind was an episode of Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar in which Johnny had to make a long-distance call from a pay phone. By the time he was done pumping coins into the phone, I reckoned he’d spent about fifty inflation-adjusted dollars.)
At a guess, the majority of things that are definitely cheaper are probably things that you’re liable to pay cash for.
We have dollar coins. The Sacagawea/Presidential brass dollars work just fine, or would if we would just use them. (I do.) Anyway there’s a billion of 'em already minted, and designs already planned out for future years. Ongoing current mintages are low because of the stockpile, but could be ramped up whenever we needed to.
The nickel-mining lobby has some pull too, which makes it a little harder too.
Silver dollars did not circulate back east, but paper currency was distrusted in western states, and there was a large silver lobby in states like Colorado and Nevada, of course. Many large banks kept bags of dollars as part of their reserve requirements until the collector value became immense for certain types.
Agreed the smaller denominations of coins should be dropped as they are worse than useless, but $5 $10 and $20 coins make sense. I’m not at all persuaded that $50 or $100 notes should be considered “large” denominations at this point, they don’t buy very much these days.
The zinc industry wouldn’t garner nearly the profit from a dollar coin as they do from pennies. The reason pennies generate so much profit for them now is that the government stamps out so many of them. A denomination of $1 would mean a fraction of the number of coins, and of the amount of zinc sold to Treasury.
That can’t be right. A quarter’s got to be worth far more than a post-WWII penny, although not nearly as much as thirteen of them. A
One cent in 1945 translates to anywhere between 11 and 76 cents today, depending on what measures you use. By the most common, consumer price index, it is indeed 13.
Paper bills weren’t necessarily trusted in the east, either - it depended on the reputation of the bank issuing them. Some were only accepted in areas near the bank, some had wider circulation. In the 19th century, the New Orleans-based Banque des citoyens de la Louisiane issued $10 notes that were widely accepted up and down the Mississippi Valley.
The bank printed their notes in French and English, with a large “TEN” on one side and “DIX”"on the other; people said you could see the “DIX” before you could see the note. The notes became known as “dixies”, and steamboaters would talk about going down to “dixie land”. The songwriter Daniel Emmett picked up on it, and wrote “Dixie’s Land”, which was a huge hit. According to one theory, this is how “Dixieland” and “Dixie” became nicknames for the South.
But little evidence to back up that theory.
No, the legacy continued long after the nationalization of banking - both as a concession to western mining interests, and as a sort of hard headed cussedness suspicion of “Eastern Establishment” banking. Even well into the 1960s banks routinely exchanged bills for silver dollars. The Redfield “hoard” was acquired in just this way. Silver circulated out West, but bags languished in bank basements in the East.
What changed was the “spot” or market price for silver finally exceeded the face value for good, but also certain collector coins became quite valuable. So banks were soon cleaned out of their stash as savvy buyers arbitraged their paper notes for Carson City minted “Morgan” dollars. Even the US Mint was forced to disgorge their supply, in the end reduced to dispensing tiny bags of silver shot pellets before reneging on silver certificates altogether.