So you pay extra for the convenience of not using cash?
quid = 1 pound sterling
shilling = 1/20 pound
penny (still in circulation) = 1/100 pound
Interesting question. Is it possible for you to take your custom to some other laundromat with high-tech payment options and newer model machines? Just let the crappy laundromat go out of business.
No, pretty much all the same. Doesn’t seem to be a priority anywhere near where I am.
In general, the quarters used in a laundromat come from the dollar bill changer, so for the most part the quarters just circulate around the room. Not entirely, though. If I go to the laundromat, it might only cost me $12 or so to do laundry but if I convert a twenty-dollar bill to quarters using their machine, I’m going to leave with about eight dollars in quarters. So that sort of leakage is why the owner needs to constantly buy quarters. I heard of one laundromat owner near here who, after being unable to buy enough quarters from the bank, resorted to a social media plea for local people to sell their quarters.
There is a reason for that. My wife and her mom once put a boatload (could have been a mighty shitload, hard to tell after all these years) of rolled coins into one of those vacuum tube delivery systems. Apparently the system had enough power to get the capsule out of the car side machine, but not enough to boost it into the bank.
Legend has it that the drive-thru was down for days as they disassembled it to get the canister and then put it back together. There was forever after a sign “no rolled coins” on the machine (which was somewhat proudly pointed out to me the first time I accompanied her on a trip to that bank).
Yes, there is a “penny” but it is hardly the same as the huge copper cartwheel that used to be the Penny. Those were impressive
It was 36MM in diameter, and full oz/ 28 grams* (about the size of the old US Silver dollar). The new decimal Penny is 20mm and not quite 4grams- and they are considering getting rid of it.
- yes, I know this was replaced by a 31mm 10 gram coin.
So true, and the same is true for nickels. By their very existence, pennies and nickels create the need for themselves like a self-fulfilling prophecy, since they enable merchants to manipulate us with prices that end in .95 or .99. Now I realize that, in most of the country, there is also sales tax to be considered, but that’s really not much of a justification for their continued existence, for two main reasons. First, many of the smallest purchases either have no sales tax, or the tax is figured into the price. If your locality charges seven percent sales tax, the lack of pennies and nickels would make this impossible to collect on a purchase of one dollar… but when’s the last time you went anywhere and spent just one dollar? This brings us to the second reason, which is that the total bill you have to pay at a cash register is usually much, much more than a dollar. If you’re using a debit/credit card, the sales tax can be added to the total just as it always has been, while the necessary rounding up or down for the tax on cash payments is relatively insignificant, and would be a wash over time.
I’m convinced that if we did away with pennies and nickels today nobody would miss them after a few months. OF course, with our system of coins fossilized 120 years ago and more, the problem goes much, much deeper than just dropping pennies and nickels or even eliminating dollar bills in favor of dollar coins.
I read somewhere in the past few days that the government is starting to look at even cheaper ways to make coins, in order to alleviate the coin shortage. So I’m sure we are stuck with everything the way it is, until perhaps one day when physical cash is completely eliminated as a medium of exchange.
The system here in South Africa is simple and straightforward, and I’ve never heard any complaints about it.
Coins smaller than 10c were discontinued years ago. But prices can be any odd number of cents. At the register your purchases are added up and the total may be an odd number of cents. If you pay by card, then the exact amount is charged to your card. If you pay by cash, the total is rounded down to the nearest 10c. So if the total is 19.99 it will be rounded down to 19.90 and the cashier will give you 10c change for a R20 note.
So you can save a few cents here and there by paying in cash, but it’s hardly worth the hassle. Merchants pay the cost of card use, and a tinier cost for cash use. Presumably they adjust their prices slightly to cover it.
I would imagine that merchants would have stopped pricing goods at Rx.99 to avoid the rounding down or has that not happened?
It hasn’t happened, prices still routinely end in .99 or .95. The reasons are that a) you may buy a whole basket full of goods, and the total is added up before rounding, and b) a large number of people pay by card anyway.
The laundromat I go to was having problems with quarters as the bank was limiting the owner to so many. But they ended up giving him a waiver and he can now get as many as be wants.
To avoid breaking a twenty on laundry day (which is every Sunday), during the week I make sure to put aside a few fives or a ten so I’ll have it for laundry. Or, failing that, I bring my own quarters as I have a huge bowl of them.
At the Dunkin’ I go go every morning, I always give them exact change as they rarely can make change.
My Kroger store in Cincinnati (and I assume most if not all of them) haven’t been giving out rolled quarters for at least two months now, and they also got rid of the change dispensers at each checkout line. The 5/3 Bank branch in the store will only make change for account holders. My regional credit union will give only two rolls of quarters per account holder per week. That’s plenty more than I need for laundry but it’s a bit of a hassle since you can only do that at the main office and definitely not at the drive-thru (for the same reason @Folacin mentioned). My landlord did send out a message that tenants can exchange quarters for laundry (they run the machines and collect the money) but again only at their main office which is even farther than my bank.
This seems the more convoluted, expensive way to do it. I’ve always wondered why laundry sticks to quarters instead of tokens like video game arcades have used since the 80s. I don’t think switching coin slots to take tokens is that expensive since coin-op video games do it routinely, so you only need to swap out your coin-changing machine(s). It makes it so that any ‘quarters’ that walk away are straight profit, you have to handle less cash, you can run various specials as promotions (like ‘5 for a dollar’ on your slowest night), and you’re not dependent on change supply.
I don’t like tokens or stored value cards in laundromats because you end up with some money in one of those forms that you can’t spend anywhere else. I used a laundromat a few months ago, and it only took quarters. The washer I used cost $5, so I had to stand there and feed twenty coins into the machine. It would have been easier if it took dollar coins and at least those I can use elsewhere.
This is what usually happens in other countries. At some point it becomes necessary to make a change, and the government can simply decide to do it. It used to be that way in the United States as well; the government routinely dropped or revised denominations through the years. When the half-cent was discontinued, I doubt if anyone asked retailers if they approved the idea. Today, by contrast, everyone seems to think they have a divine right never to give up pennies or dollar bills, as if discontinuing either should be done only by a supermajority vote in a national referendum.
Since starting this tread, I’ve been searching around elsewhere in the internet, and the coin shortage seems to be unique to this country. It’s even come up in Der Spiegel, but again without the root cause of the problem ever being acknowledged.
Just because a laundromat doesn’t have the latest and greatest machines doesn’t mean they are crappy or deserve to go out of business.
I’ve found it more likely that I’ll have a pocket full of change than I’ll have a lot of cash in my wallet.
Mostly this is because I’ll withdraw money from the bank, spend it, and get back change. Sometimes I pay exact change if I have it, but that’s not super common. Lather, rinse and repeat until I end up with a relatively large amount of change, and not so many bills.
I also end up with extra pennies eventually, because I use the silver change in vending machines, but the pennies hang around until I unload them on some poor cashier as exact change.
Naw, since taxes usually make that just over $1 anyway,
Well, suppose 25 years from now a quarter only buys you four minutes of drier time, and it costs five bucks to run the washer and we still have only quarters and lower, should the laundromats that won’t implement card acceptors go out of business then? I think they should. Something’s got to change, and since it seems that it won’t ever be our coin denominations, it’ll have to be something else.
Let the cash businesses that wouldn’t allow things to evolve suffer the consequences of their shortsighted stubbornness.
You’re seriously doing this “whataboutism?” and talking about a laundromat 25 years not having the latest washing machines? Seriously?
I’m guessing most machines that take quarters would have evolved by then and would take credit cards or something.
Hell–in 25 years there may not even be a need for cash (paper or coin) anyway.