In circulation or minted recently? They are so worthless an awful lot of them are sitting in coin hoards or being thrown away on being received and thus not really being circulated.
I remember a vending machine at one of my old jobs that kinda blew my mind because it would let you use $5 bills to pay for stuff. (Machines that will take $5 bills are – or used to be – unusual, right? It’s not just me, is it?) Of course, if you did indulge in that privilege, you were going to most likely earn yourself some Sacagawea dollars in change, which I wasn’t necessarily all that thrilled about. But at least I could get rid of them on my next trip to the vending machine, which I made sure to do.
Yes, that’s why they had to make upwards of 7 billion per year.
I can’t find an estimate for the USA, but the estimate for British pennies (pretty close in value and size) is that 60% of them are used just once. If you’re not continually pumping new supply in, they’ll vanish pretty quick.
$2 bills? Probably 1988, when they were replaced by $2 coins.
$1 or 50c coins? Frequently, when I still used cash.
Australian, messing with your data.
What is wrong with $5? It is big bills like $100 that they may not want to deal with in a snack machine, one would think.
IIRC there was a brief period before credit/debit card acceptors became common on vending machines where the bill acceptors were being rejiggered to take both $1 & $5 instead of just $1.
Of course it also depended on what the machine was selling. E.g canned sodas were a lot cheaper than packaged sandwiches, microwaveable soups, or other lunchy stuff. So the sandwich machines would need to accept 5s long before the soda machines did.
Which also suggests that any one person’s experience of vending machines depends on where and how they encounter them in search of what.
It’s been many years since the last time I paid a vending machine with anything other than a tap from a card or my phone. IIRC it’s also been 2+ years since I last used a vending machine for anything.
After my last trip to the US, I was going through my left-over US cash, and discovered I had a $2 bill, which I didn’t expect. I figure some cashier must have mistaken it for a $1 bill at some point, and I didn’t notice it either at the time. It’s the first US $2 bill I’d ever seen in person, so now it’s sitting on my desk as a souvenir.
There were some strip clubs that wanted the dancers to get bigger tips. Whenever you bought drinks or food, the change was always $2 bills. If you tried to spend it anywhere else, people knew where you had been.
That takes me back to 1980. While driving through Nevada, we ate at a restaurant attached to a small casino in Winnemucca. They gave change in Eisenhauer dollars, to encourage you to hit the dollar slot machines.
I’m old enough that I’ve gotten $2 bills, two different 50-cent pieces, and three different dollar coins. I also had an older dollar coin in a belt buckle.
Most cashiers around here tend to give out any $2 bills as soon a possible. That way they don’t have to deal with them when cashing their drawers out.
That was how it was with the vending machines at my office were when I started working there in 2017. The all took both $1 and $5 bills, and also had credit card readers. This included the ones that sold less expensive snacks and drinks, as well as the ones that sold pricier lunch items. But even the snacks and drinks all cost a dollar or more at that point, so I see the logic of accepting $5s. If you paid with $5 you were likely to get $1 coins as change.
Then at some point during the pandemic era when I was working from home, they replaced the vending machines with a grab & go setup (similar to the grab & go food kiosks I’ve started seeing in airports). Now there are just shelves / fridges stocked with food and drinks, and a self checkout machine. The self checkout is completely cashless.
In 1981 My girlfriend and I stopped overnight at El Capitan in Hawthorne. The breakfast buffet was $2 apiece, I paid with a $10 and got back six Ike dollars. Not wanting to drop them into a slot machine I wandered over to the craps table instead, the only player at the table. GF had never played craps before so before each roll I would explain what I hoped would come up and what would be a loser.
After a few minutes of this the dealer said to my GF, “You’re going to have to leave!” She protested she was with me – like me she thought it was because she wasn’t making any bets but it was because the dealer thought she was under 21.
As she was digging her drivers license out I said quietly to the stickman, “Watch this; she’s 29.” The dealer’s eyes bugged out a bit, she walked back to her spot and didn’t say a word the rest of the time we were there. I hit a streak and walked away with twenty bucks, enough to buy gas back to San Jose.
This was true when I was in college, around 2004. I would use these machines to get change for the laundry which only took quarters. You’d get dollar coins first, but there were only like 3 or 4 that would just keep recirculating
I’ve received the Kennedy 50 cent coin in change. That was a long time ago.
This thread has been going for a while, so I hope this isn’t considered a hijack, but… why DON’T people use 50ȼ pieces?
I understand that, in the US at least, people dislike dollar coins because they prefer dollar bills, and they have both.
But there is no paper fifty-cent unit, so why the hatred for the coins? We don’t really need them, but we could just as easily do without nickels, too, or use 50-cent pieces but not quarters. (I’ve always thought that pennies, dimes, and fifty-cent pieces would be more sensible, or, now that the penny is on its way out, just dimes and fifty-cent pieces.)
I understand that it all boils down to inertia and cultural weirdness (like the (to me) bizarre reluctance to use the $2), but is there any other reason?
The size of a 50 cent piece bothers some people. IIRC They don’t fit in the little coin purses.
That seems like an easily solvable problem now that we’ve stopped making them out of silver. They made the dollar coins smaller in the, what, 80s, with the Susan B.?
When coins are deemed 99.98% useless by most of the populace, and especially the younger populace, dithering about which coins we should begin to use in some hypothetical coin-filled future seems … silly?
They could declare all US coins to be void non-money tomorrow and some of America would whine about the loss of value in their big bucket of coins they never use and never intended to use, but life would go on nearly totally unchanged for nearly everyone.
Nothing would change for me, that’s for sure.
There’s a hardware store I regularly go to that always gives out two dollar bills as change.
I think I read once that that’s what some veteran-owned businesses do, as a reminder of their service, and in hope that you’ll come back for that reason.
Cash is still used pretty widely at lower incomes. It comes with having more limited access to banking services. Apparently 1 in 4 transactions for households with less than $25000 annual income, which is a non-trivial amount
Let’s not be so hasty to write them off just yet.
It seems that there is a significant portion of the population that just can’t handle coins. They either refuse to spend them in the course of ordinary purchases, and then accumulate them, or refuse to use them full stop, paying only with cards. There are arguments for getting rid of them, the biggest being inflation—in 1913, the lowest coin minted was the penny, and its adjusted value is currently 33ȼ, more than the penny, nickel, dime, or quarter. We could clearly go to quarters only without affecting much, or just round to whole dollars if our math-phobic population could handle the cognitive strain.
But if we’re going to have coins at all, why not think about them?