Coins are the best money to bury, when you don’t trust the banks. The bills get eaten and molder. Coins can be used as ammo in a slingshot. Coins can be used to replace fuses when you want to burn down your house. You can make a battery with coins. You can recover coins at the sewer plant, and recirculate them without people knowing where they’ve been. None of those things can be done with paper money.
They must be copper or zinc, musn’t they?
Failed? From whose perspective. Every coin minted but not used is a dollar in the Mint’s treasury. That’s why the rash of “special edition” coins.
The real reason that the dollar coin is doomed to fail is that we hate them . They either 1) look like quarters, or 2) look (and feel) like hub-caps.
HA!! My nomination for Post of the Day!
Sometimes I think the reason many Americans hate change in the pockets is because it has always seemed so worthless. It seems like you have to have a couple of pounds (weight, not currency) of change before you can buy anything with it. Just a pain in the ass if you can’t buy anything but a newspaper with it, right? But what if…?
I remember when I lived in the Netherlands before the Euro. One day I was at the store trying to buy some food and I realized I was out of Guilder notes. “Shit!” thought I, “I have to go to the ATM. All I have is some change!”
Then it hit me. I had a few 5, 2.5 and 1 guilder coins in my pocket. Probably more than $10 equivalent. It was a Eureka moment. I COULD ACTUALLY BUY SIGNIFICANT STUFF WITH POCKET CHANGE!!!
I haven’t felt the same about change since that day and I have become a STRONG proponent of eliminating the U.S. dollar bill in favor of 1, 2 and maybe 3 dollar coins.
Harvey Milk on the 3 Dollar Coin?
Hey, indulge me a little. It would fly out here in SF anyway.
You wouldn’t have to eleminate a dollar bill to get dollar coins to be used, if they were really a super great convenience. I don’t forget what I have as money on me reguardless of it’s form, so I won’t think I’m going to starve and then find a miraculous stash of coinage.
Harvey Milk? Why, he was as queer as a… ohhhhhhhhhhh! :smack: 
I just went to my bank this morning and bought a roll of 25! Granted they are for my FIL but they look pretty cool.
It’s extremely common to tip $1 to dancers on stage. Table dances, that’s another matter–they usually cost $10-20 depending on where you live (some places more). Yes, some guys do go up to the stage and tip more, or tip mulitiple $1 bills, but most of the time it’s just $1.
At least, this is what I’ve seen at the clubs I’ve worked at, including the club I was a waitress at just over a year ago here in Atlanta).
Screw dollar coins. I absolutely hate the sound of change in my pocket. Luckily, we still live in what is nominally a democracy, and enough of us bitch at our Congresscritters about any attempt to get rid of the dollar bill to make sure it never happens. “Because Europe does it” is never a decent reason for doing anything! 
Ok here is my reason for not wanting to use dollar coins instead of dollar bills:
I’m a woman. Maybe 1% of women’s clothing has pockets in it. My wallet has a tiny, useless zippered coin compartment that will hold about 10 coins, max. That means that I either have to get a separate coin purse to add to the other billion things in my purse, or my coins have to float around loose at the bottom of my purse, where I have to rummage for them under all the other purse debris. Coins are great if you have pockets. Otherwise, they suck.
Oh, plus handling coins instantly makes your hands smell funny. Ew.
They could mint a coin with a pile of horseshit on one side and Idi Amin on the other and people would use it everyday **IF **we got rid of that damn one-dollar bill.
The dollar bill won’t be going anywhere as long as we have a Kennedy in the US Senate. The Bureau of Printing and Engraving gets all the paper they use for currency from one company in old Teddy’s state and he won’t let anything happen to threaten their monopoly on that, nor reduce the amount of business they’re getting, since bills last on average about 18 months, whereas coins last about 30 years…
Damn right, and I didn’t appreciate the eyeroll in the post you were responding to.
I really don’t get this ‘democracy’ line that the paper money advocates keep harping on. This would be a change that should be far less significant than anything that really does matter, like preventing botched Presidential elections, maintaining a constructive stance on environmental issues, and so on. Deciding what coins and bills we should be using ought to be hardly more earthshaking than an accounting decision. Did you vote in the coins we have now? Than ‘democracy’ shouldn’t give you the right to keep them as they are. The fact that we keep banging our heads against the bricks about this, in my opinion, does not reflect positively on the United States.
And the whole idea of large-value coins is that they don’t accumulate, because they get used, unlike our coins, which do accumulate in pockets because they can’t be used for much.
See my last post regarding the accumulation of coins.
Actually I thought women had a slight advantage with coins over men, since both paper and coins tend to be in the same place; namely your purse, while men usually carry paper and coins in separate pockets.
Dredging coins out of the bottom of one’s purse is misery. Having to have an extra coin purse is a pain in the ass. The coin pocket on my wallet is totally insufficient (seriously, it can hold just a few small coins and that’s it. It’s hard to get quarters in and out of it)
Me no likey coins.
Oh, and as for the accumulation of coins? Perhaps we will have to agree that different people spend their money differently. Just because a coin has more value doesn’t necessarily mean that they will not accumulate. If they’re inconvenient for me to dig out, I’m not going to dig them out to spend them, thus, they will accumulate.