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.