Spend it, spend it, spend it. Let’s get people using them. IMHO, that’s part of the reason why they don’t catch on. Too many people hoarde them like their some sort of trinket instead of money. They are worth exactly $1.00, and even if they fail it will be a long time before they are worth significantly more.
As for availability, I just got a roll of 25 from my bank last week. I took them out with me on Saturday night and bought all my drinks with them. I also tipped a girl with one of them, but I think she thought it was quarter!
It was at a BofA in Orange or Anaheim. They said that they’re only giving out a maximum of five because if they sold as many as people wanted, they’d run out immediately.
The other day, I was buying a single stamp at the US Post Office’s vending machine. It takes pennies, and I was feeding it 33 of them when I ran out at 32. I only had a $1 bill left, so I used it. Just as it got sucked in, I felt my 33rd penny in my pocket. So I put it in, got my stamp and asked for change. Lo and behold, I got a Sackie dollar instead of the SBA dollar.
So if you’re in the Crystal City, VA, area, go to the post office on Crystal Drive and put in a dollar more than your purchase in the vending machine, and you’ll get Sackies.
I think the Sackie will do better than the SBA for reasons:
[ol]
[li]They’ve just redesigned the $10 and $5 dollar bills to be similar to the $20, $50, and $100. Soon (I hope) they’ll announce that they’re stopping production of $1 bills. They only last about 18 months average, so I think they can claim that the coin will be economical.[/li][li]Sacagawea and little Jean-Baptiste are cuter than Ms. Anthony. Who wants ugly people on their money? (I’m sure the Brits are hoping Charles goes before Elizabeth so they won’t have his mug on their money. At least William has an infusion of fresh DNA from Diana to bring into the royal family. [Gawd, could you imagine if Charles and Camilla had produced children? shudder])[/li][/ol]
To clarify a bit, but please don’t jump down my throat cuz I don’t have precise references: Susan B. Anthony dollars are collectors’ items, but only certain ones. When the coin was introduced in 1979, the U.S. Mint churned out around 300 million coins in one year in the high hopes that the coin would take off. When the public was slow to accept the coin, production in the later years dropped sharply, such that very few were produced in 1981. Those later coins are rarer and thus more valuable. If you get any Susies today, check the dates; I’ll wager they’re all from 1979, and not worth more than face value to a collector.
Same thing goes for the new dollar coin. IIRC, around 300 million coins were produced just for the Wal-Mart promotion. There are just too many coins for them to be worth more than a dollar, at least during our lifetimes, which will be shorter than the lifetimes of the coins in production today. Just spend 'em. The more people have and see them, the more they’ll circulate and gain acceptance.
It’s been decades since the Candians introduced the one dollar “Loonie”. Canadian $1.00 bills haven’t been around for years. About 4 years ago, they introduced the “twonie” a two dollar coin, and subsequently pulled the $2.00 bill, and in even that short of time, it is now very hard to find a canadian $2.00 bill. IMO, the twonie is a neat coin, with a two-tone design and it’s a weighty enough piece to make it feel like its value.
Absoultely true. A basic economic addage is “bad money drives out the good.” Basically, when a more useful/valuable/better currency comes out, people hoard the new currency and refuse to spend it, then continue to use the old currency. Under the mercantile age when money was backed by governmental precious metal stores, this had the doubly bad effect of also causing rampant inflation (look at the French scrip from the 1780’s… one of the major causes of the famine that led to the French Revolution was the governments attempt to issue new paper money to pay off debts, and the ensuing inflation that it caused). Now, since currency no longer has any relation to real money except as representational, the new coin will probably not cause any economic problems, but what WILL happen is bacause of the new coins novelty and usefulness (coins are infinately more practical for vending machines than are bills), people WON’T spend it, therefore keeping the old money (the dollar bills) in circulation, and thus ensuring its own failure.
All of this is true, and good advice. U.S. currency, as a collectors investment, is laregly worthless, since the U.S. has never officially pulled any of its currency, all money every printed or minted in the U.S. is worth exactly what the face value is printed on it. Thus, a 1930’s red-seal U.S. $1.00 note is worth about what a 2000 green-seal Federal Reserve $1.00 note is… with of couse the exception of silver currency, since a dimes weight in silver is worth more than ten cents…
Another interesting fact about the Sackies… They are exatly the same diameter, thickness, weight, and has the same electromagnetic properties as the Susan B. Anthony. This took some ingenious planning on the mints, since legislation (and practicality) required that
a) The coin look different then all other coins, especially the quarter-look-alike Susie and:
b) The coin had to be able to be accepted by coin changing devices that accepted the old Susan B. Anthonies. And they do. Try it. Go to any machine that accepts Susies, and put your shiny new golden dollar in. It will accept it as a dollar. Thus the new coin can be spent like the old one without retooling any of the coin accpetance machines.
<rant>
I agree. It’s meant to be used, not to be collected, but it seems to me that a few collectors already have most of them. So, short answer, yes. It’s a collector’s item, but only because people are hoarding them. That and the fact that they don’t make enough of them. The plan was to give them to wal-mart to be given out over several months before any banks got them, so they would make their way into the hands of the general public. Apparently the general public was so enthralled by the concept of a “new” coin that nobody wants to spend them.
– and no, last time I went to wal-mart and asked for them in change, they said they were out.
I recently got a 1999 SBA coin from the stamp machine. And a 1979 at the same time, and a golden dollar.
The “sackie” dollars will corrode being exposed to air AFAIK. So a mint-condition coin won’t remain mint-condition unless you store it properly.
I saw a news clip a few months ago that the mint is churning out 500 million sackies. That’s 1/2 a billion. And the reason you haven’t seen many in circulation is because people are filling their sock drawers with rolls of them. I don’t know why. I kept one, but I spend the rest that I get as quickly as I can to try to put them into circulation.
She was married. Her husband was hired so that Lewis and Clark could have access to her skills. She spoke multiple languages and knew the customs of several of the peoples that they expected to meet along the way.
It was pretty important that she was a nursing mother during the journey. This showed that the party’s purpose was not to wage war.
Why would you make a remark like that? Are you trying to bring her morals into question? A teenage girl helped to support her family and guide one of the most important journey’s in the United State’s history. If you want to call someone’s morals into question perhaps you should look at who would get a 14 year old pregnant or use child labor in a very dangerous job indeed.
She was married. She had a child. She trekked across North America with her child to help her husband at his job. Can you even imagine what that must have been like? Personally, I question someone who makes snide remarks about women who do amazing things.
I like the new dollar. I had 10 and I spent all but one. I want more, but they seem to have dissappeared.
Now, is it just me, or are the gold coins cheap looking? They look like arcade tokens and weigh next to nothing. I heard they only cost 12 cents to make. How about the mint tries to give us a coin that makes money seem like it is really worth something?
Sorry about the snippage, I like to try and keep things short. Which brings me to the topic at hand. The post in question, while seeming quite useless (and well… incorrect), didn’t seem all that snide to me. Now, if he had called her a tramp or something because she was supposedly unmarried, that’s a different story. It is my (not quite humble) opinion that a lot of people here (ok, ANYWHERE) pick some pretty weird things to be offended by. He was wrong… give him a break. At least he didn’t get all huffy and opinionated about it.
next.
Ok. it has been established that this factoid was in fact, an incorrect factoid. So I won’t go into that. But the fact that is was, in fact, a statement of fact and not an opinion (getting dizzy yet?) means it has a lot more to do with the thread than your opinionated attack.
Oh, and what it has to do with the thread… well, I would guess he was replying to this post by Sycorax:
And finally… Sycorax asked what it is made of…
88.5% copper
6% zinc
3.5% manganese
2% nickel
Just one of the many pea-brained factoids available about the sackie on http://www.usmint.gov/
It’s been years since I was collecting coins as a hobby, but as I remember it, there was nothing special about any year of the SBA’s, 79, 80, or 81 (or 99).
That is not to say that none of them are collector’s items. IIRC, two different types of S mint marks were used, I’m not sure which year, I’m thinking 79, but it could be 80 as well, or all three. There’s a “filled S” and a “clear S”, the filled S was kind of “fat” and didn’t really have any space between the curves, the clear S did. I can’t remember which one was valuable, but you won’t find either in circulation, they were in proof sets. At the time I remember, I think the valuable one was around $100, but that was several years ago; it could be either more or less now, and my guess would be less.
My dad has a big bottle full of steel pennies from 1943. I just tried to figure out what they were worth online. That was a little harder to do than I planned, but one site seemed to think that they were worth about a buck a piece. Wow! Not that good old dad’s steel pennies are in mint condition. But for the sake of argument let’s assume that is correct. They would be about 100 times their original value. Good work Dad. However, if Dad had invested those pennies in something that averaged a return of 8.5%. His investment would be about 105 times what he originally put in.
You’d be better off using your Sackies to buy mutual funds than putting them in your sock drawer.
It’s the 1979 clear S that’s valuable. Apparently San Francisco changed their mint mark in 1979 from the filled S to the clear S, so all SF coins since then have the clear S.
Also, on the heads side, most of the 1979P SBA’s have a narrow border between the edge of the coin and the polygon. Late that year they switched to a wide border–1980 and 81 SBA’s have a wide border. 1979P wide border SBA’s are very scarce, however, and I get the impression they may be worth a substantial amount (i.e., in the thousands of dollars).
I kinda like the Sackies. I’ve wanted a gold-colored coin for quite awhile. All the same, I don’t want the George Washington dollar to go anywhere. Call me a traditionalist. As for the SBA dollar: Ugh! Could they possably have found a more butch woman? She looks like George Washington with a hair bun. The only way the Treasury could ever make SBA’s rare would be to take 99.9% of them (ie, the ones still in their warehouses) and melt them down into a giant statue of Susan B. Anthony.
Lance Your dad’s steel cents, we pay 5 cents each. This is about what they’re worth the last 10 years or so. We sell them, in quantity, for 10 cents each. And, to show you the fickleness of coins as investments, had your dad bought in say, 1947, a 1795 silver dollar in average condition which would have cost him $30 from a dealer, he could sell it to me today for $2000. Had he purchased a newly minted Booker T. Washington Commemorative half dollar for $1, I would give him $9. for it today. As for his paper investment at 8.5% per year, that was an unheard of rate during most of the 50’s 60’s and 70’s.
The 1981 SBA’s were only issued in official “Mint sets”. We sell them for $4 each and would probably pay $2.50 each.
“Wheat” cents we pay 1 1/2 cents for each. Sell them for 3 cents each in quantity.
Cabbage The 1979S SBA that is worth money is the clear S variety from the proof set, as you said. It is still about $100 retail. I would pay $80 for one as a dealer. This is not the S mint coin you would have gotten from circulation. And the wide border SBA from 1979 is worth about $10 or so. Sorry to be a bubble burster.
If all goes as planned, the public will accept the new coin, and begin spending it. Eventually you won’t want to keep it any more than you want to keep a dollar bill. I had one, and spent it on a Snickers. It is only a dollar, afterall.
, and your post adds to mine, and is as correct.