One of our favorite SDMB topics … $1 coins!
I’ll take them.
As I said then, bitching about dollar coins now is logically exactly like bitching about quarter-dollar coins would have been in the '70s. But people didn’t. Everybody used quarters, nobody had a problem. So the difference now is purely a product of inertia and ignorance.
Tell that to the coin slot makers, then you can complain about my inertia.
(Meanwhile, I don’t use them partly out of not wanting to confuse them with quarters, out of good reason, as I have received many of them in change lately, and mistook them for quarters at first. At least part of the time, though, they were given to me as quarters by the cashiers, so I’ve come out ahead so far.)
I’m surprised it’s taken three weeks for someone to bring this up here. I probably would have done it myself, except I was too busy posting comments to the original report, which appeared in several different online venues.
I don’t think that’s as much of a problem as is commonly believed. The vending machine industry has been advocating the dollar coin for years. I also need to retract some of my past rantings about the armored car companies, which I thought were refusing to handle the coins. It turns out that Brinks, at least, is also pushing for the coin to be more widely used. It surprises me a bit, because I think that a dollar coin would actually cut into their profits.
I’ve never had this happen to me. I know they’re just a tiny bit bigger than a quarter, but they obviously look and feel different.
I’ve seen some laundry machines that had to be refitted with whole new ESD coin boxes (to accommodate wider trays for more quarters) when the price for a wash there went above $1, whereas with dollar coins in wide circulation they could have simply changed out the trays. So in that case the lack of a well-used dollar coin cost the owners of the coin-op machines more; presumably the makers of the equipment were fine with making the sale.
In my recent experience, electronic coin acceptors are taking dollar coins; that capacity is available and is already the standard in places with new equipment, even without popular use of dollar coins. Particularly for machines dispensing higher-value items, like subway farecards and books of postage stamps, the ability to give change in dollar coins is also more cost-effective for a number of reasons.
Here’s a solution to the problem of getting the public to accept $1 coins:
Announce that you will simply stop printing $1 bills and flood the banks etc. with coin. As the bills wear out, do not replace them. Just don’t make them. Provide the $1 coin instead.
When folks complain, the Fed should simply repeat again and again:
“This decision makes sense, and will save the public 150 million dollars a year. We will not be printing any more $1 bills”
Or the short version “Tough shit, you’ll get over it”
I don’t have a problem with phasing out $1 bills for $1 coins, as long as larger denomination bills are still available. (Strippers might not like being pelted with coins, though.) I don’t really like to carry too many $1’s anyway.
But they really need to concentrate on phasing out pennies and switching bills to plastic to make them more durable and counterfeit-resistant.
I like 'em. And I’d be happy to use them if I were given them in change but I’m not going to specifically go to a bank and ask for them, which is pretty much the only way I’d ever get them since nobody uses them.
People always make the “what about the strippers” joke in these threads but it would be easy enough to sell $1 scrip at the club for g-string stuffing.
I think that the whole issue will become moot soon enough. I rarely use cash anymore. It’s getting easier and easier to make micro-payments with smartphones. That’s where it is all headed.
It was a dumbass idea to make them so similar in size to quarters. But I would like to see them used more widely. I use coin-operated machines in the apartment building laundry room weekly. Each load is $1.50 and normally I do four cycles (a load each of whites and colors, each load washed and dried). So I have to carry 24 coins to do laundry.
I think the US ought to eliminate the penny, nickel and dime and introduce one-dollar and five-dollar coins (and perhaps a two-dollar coin). At the same time, eliminate the one-dollar and five-dollar bills and introduce a $500 bill.
I’m not typically a patron of such places, but based on my interest in the issues of coins and denominations, I know that strip clubs are also strongly in favor of a phaseout of paper $1s, so that customers will stop thinking that $1 is an acceptable tip. They already do as much as they can to discourage $1s, such as giving change only in larger paper denominations (plus coins, if necessary). Right now, strip clubs as an industry are the most avid users of $2 bills.
I understand that Australian strip clubs have started producing their own “Stripper Dollars” to tip the dancers.
The vending industry is the problem. Ever since the US Mint chose the wrong size and weight for one new Dollar coin, we’ve been stuck with it because the vending industry screams like stuck pigs at any attempt to fix the problem. We need a coin bigger than a nickle, much thicker and heavier, a non-round shape and engraved writing rather than milling around the edges.
Something you will be able to reliably reach into a pocket filled with change and pull out. And the vending industry is just going to have to suck it up. This is just another example of business interests whining about something, when once the change happens will prove to make them much more than the cost of the change.
Big Brother loves you.
They don’t seem to mind it in Canada.
I doubt that the vending industry is the problem. I’m sure that the machines can distinguish a dollar coin from a quarter.
They can. That’s the problem. Changing the size or weight of the dollar coin now would force the industry to upgrade every machine that currently accepts them.
Right, what the vending industry wants is for all the rest of us to accept and use the current dollar coins. As I said above, most newer vending machines with electronic coin acceptors already handle dollar coins just fine (and with vastly lower jamming and nonrecognition rates than electronic bill acceptors), though though some people think they don’t. Even the guy who maintains a particular soda machine in my town told some people a while back that machine couldn’t do it, but I demonstrated that he was mistaken–put in a shiny new Millard Fillmore, saw the machine register it as “1.00,” made my selection, received my drink and correct change. He had just heard the idea that it was a problem for vending machines, and never talked to anybody who actually knew. And, apparently, nobody before me had tried.