To make room for the bigger designs on the back, the mint decided to move the inscription “United States of America” and the designation of value “quarter dollar” from the reverse to the obverse side of the quarter, and the year of minting or issuance from the obverse to the reverse side.
Which means that to accomodate the aditional text on the front, Washington’s head had to be made smaller.
Americans wont accept the new dollar coins unless the one dollar bill is removed from circulation. We are a people that a resistant to change (no pun intended). At my job, I have customers that still comment that the new $20, $50, and $100 bills look like Monopoly money. As for the new quarters, i like the my self, but have not yet seen the Georgia version even though I’m in Atlanta, but have seen plenty of the others.
Arnold, I see your point. But I still wonder, why the redesign? After all, it’s only a 25-cent piece.
MidnightRambler, cool handle. How’s Mick? I don’t entirely agree that we’re automatically resistant to change. If change is for the better, I’ll welcome it. But in the case of the higher-denomination bills, I think the older design was more attractive (granted, this is a subjective opinion). The font of the number in the lower right corner on the back of the 20s and 50s clashes with the rest of the bill. And there is less detail on the new bills, which would seem to make them easier to counterfeit.
The new bills also make me wonder about the aesthetics of the $1 coin.
“You can observe a lot just by watching.” – Yogi Berra
I used to find coins more æsthetically pleasing than paper money–they can be differentiated from each other by touch, while a paper note feels pretty much like some other scrap of paper. Besides, a coin doesn’t burn like paper. In fact, coins look more like “real money”. They’re nifty.
But… In the US, they aren’t “real money” anymore. There is no metal standard. “Copper” pennies are made of zinc, “silver” ones of copper. Inflation has struck; not only is the dollar devalued, but new metal money–really simulated coinage, as much a printed symbol as paper money, continues to be minted–or is it printed?
If old coins are still out there, not being recycled anymore; if “coins” are now base metal imitations of their previous versions–it almost seems as if we’ve run out of gold & silver. (I know that’s not it, but…)
Paper money is made of cotton rag–a renewable resource. It is easily stored, easily compactible, fits into any shape, and doesn’t tear up a wallet. A hundred-dollar bill doesn’t take up any more space than a twenty.
Metal money, on the other hand, is made of mined metal–which means all the drek that comes with mining–and of course is a non-renewable resource. It stubbornly holds its shape, is hard on a wallet, and of course, a hundred in gold would in reality be a hundred times the size of a gold dollar (admittedly, a gold dollar was formerly dime-sized; the new “golden dollars” ain’t gold, and are more like “eagles”–ten-dollar pieces).
), as a <font color="#0a990a">Green</font>, I have to say paper money is better.
“One night your shoulders will ache/The next day when you wake/You’ll sprout wild wings and fly/Just like in Swan Lake”–the Church, “Swan Lake”
[[We are a people that are resistant to change (no pun intended).]]
Midnight
though it is a pretty good pun.
Jil
Ah, but after decades of having all of our paper currency the same size, shape and color, Americans instinctively associate that particular profile with “money.” Anything else (particularly the multi-colored and variable-sized currency of other nations) looks fake or toy-like to Americans. Our money is “serious;” the unconscious mindset is that money should be sober and nondescript, therefore that which is colorful and vibrant is not money. Americans – even otherwise intelligent ones – sometimes get into trouble overseas because they think of the local currency as “play money.”
Various US Treasury officials have publicly bemoaned this mindset over the years; it makes it much harder for anti-counterfeiting measures to be implemented in US currency. (It’s relatively easy to reproduce a one-color printing job, like a dollar bill, and counterfeiters have been able to get close replicas of the paper and inks used in official currency, making it more difficult to tell counterfeit from real currency. Multicolored paper, with wide magnetic stripes and intricate watermarks, are much more difficult – though of course not impossible – to duplicate.)
But, as other posters have noted (and as I’ve noticed, even in my own head), the minor changes done over the past two years to the $20 and larger denomenations has made those bills look somehow “less like money.” Paradoxically, many people are also finding that the new bills, with much larger numbers for the denomenations, are actually more difficult to tell apart (at least at a glance).
The point is that a nation’s money is very important to that nation’s psyche; currency is that which is valuable, by definition. Changes cannot be made lightly to something of such psychological importance.
…but when you get blue, and you’ve lost all your dreams, there’s nothing like a campfire and a can of beans!
The Ryan said:
Besides the uncomfort level of sitting on a pile of coins, my wallet is already thick enough, with the 2 dozen plastic cards and stacks of paper cards I have to carry. It’s getting where I need a backpack for all the ID needed.
John Rush said:
I watched a show on counterfeiting over the weekend. While it was mainly talking about artwork, it did discuss U.S. currency. The biggest problem and driver for the new currency was the availability of computers and color printers. The old currency was easy to duplicate. Thus new features in the new money, primarily including the watermark, and the embedded strip. Also, the number on the lower right corner of the face is printed in special ink that changes color depending on orientation (green to black).
One other thing the show said was the U.S. may start changing its money more often to include new features. So maybe they’ll faze in some of the other mentioned changes.
What bothers me artistically is the bigger pictures look funny. Otherwise I’ve adapted pretty easily to the new money, with no complications on telling the bills apart.
What seems odd to me is having multiple versions of the same bills in circulation. Old and new simultaneously available. That seems like a source for confusion. But I guess it’s the only practical way to change out.
I understand why the Postal Service wants people to buy stamps and not use them, and thus promotes stamp collecting. But I can’t think of a reason why the US Treasury would want people to hoard coins, yet they do promote coin collecting . . . as seen by their recent ads for the new quarters starring Kermit the Frog.
So why?
ShadZ
Silly! That’s not a coin pocket, that’s a watch pocket. Sure, you can put coins in there, but where would you put your pocketwatch? 
ShadZ
The “simple” explanation I can give (as I have a partial understanding of it) is that the mint spends less than the face value of the coin to mint it (ie the $1 coin, melted down, is worth, say, 9 cents in “base” metal). So, in effect, the mint makes a “profit” off the coins. Further, each coin taken out of circulation (hoarded) is one less dollar the gov’t has to honor/pay.
I’m sure folks with a deeper understanding can present this concept better than I can.
A. The only reason that America accepted the decimal dollar in the first place was that the system was already chaotic. At the time, British money was:
4 farthings to a penny
12 pence to a shilling
20 shillings to a pound (paper only)
21 shillings to a guinea (coin only)
and none of this mattered because the most common high-value coin was the Spanish dollar!
For most of history (until Victorian times), mints resisted making adequate numbers of low-value coins because it was just as expensive to manufacture them, but the mint made less money (since their payoff was based on a percentage of the value). For that reason, it was common to find large coins sliced up to make change.
(However, until 1857, small British coins continued to be legal tender at the rate of 12.5 cents to the shilling, which made the cent almost exactly equal to the penny, which is why we still informally call 'em pennies to this day.)
What with all that, decimal dollars didn’t seem to make the situation much worse.
John W. Kennedy
“Compact is becoming contract; man only earns and pays.”
– Charles Williams
In addition to the reasons already cited, there would be a major problem introducing different size bills- we’d have to replace every cash drawer in the country.
Simple – but probably inaccurate – answer: because then they can mint more dollars (and make more money on each one, as noted by a previous poster) without radically increasing the money supply in circulation, which leads to inflation.
A dollar that continues in circulation adds to the value of M1 (the total value of the currency flowing through a given economy, if I haven’t messed up the concept), thus creating slight inflationary pressure (more money chasing the same quntity of goods = more money required to buy those goods as the economy shifts to stabilize supply and demand). That same dollar, if stuck in a closet, means the same profit to the Treasury with no adverse economic effects.
I bet they calculated a certain degree of “collectability” of the new dollar coins, and incorporated that figure into their total quantity minted, thus allowing them to mint more than required for the money supply.
…but when you get blue, and you’ve lost all your dreams, there’s nothing like a campfire and a can of beans!
One of the unexpected benefits to the Susan B. Anthony dollars was that for a time, the coin sorting machines of the era would drop them into the 50¢ slot. So after the dollar coins had been in circulation for a few months, one could get a roll of 50¢ pieces from the local bank and be sure of finding several “Susies” in each, for a net gain of 50¢ per Susie. It wasn’t high finance, but it was fun.
Hometownboy
Sometimes you can do the impossible; most of the time the impossible does you.
—Tim Reid as “Downtown Brown” on episode of Simon & Simon 12/06/84
I meant to respond to this earlier, but couldn’t find any good citations to back up my points.
However: the ecological benefits of a coin are that a coin lasts much longer than a bill (30 years for a coins vs. 1.4 years for a bill.) Also, it takes energy to make the bills (hence environmental impact) and shredded bills have to be disposed of.
So I’m not sure that a bill is the most ecological solution.
Shudder
And the common coins were:
Farthing, Ha’penny, Penny, Tuppence, Threepence, Sixpence, Shilling, Florin (2 Shillings), Half Crown (2 Shillings & Sixpence), and Crown (5 Shillings). Also available – albeit less commonly – 1/3 Farthings, 1/2 Farthings, 1&1/2 Penny pieces, Double Florin, etc, etc. Arrggghhh
Would you believe that in New Zealand some people complained about going to decimal currency on the grounds that it was all “too complicated”?
BTW: What’s a Spanish Dollar?
Wow, ya spend time in this forum, and you see all kinds of new faces. Anyway…
I’ve seen the new Sackie, and I like it. I’d never use it, but it’s cool to look at. It is pale gold in color, and it’s between a quater, and half collar in size. It has a smooth edge, no ridges. I hope it doesn’t stay though. I hate coins…even though I realize they are much more efficient since they last so much longer than paper.
Adam
“Life is hard…but God is good”
The Spanish Dollar was a Spanish gold coin. “Dollar” was its name. (It was also known, I believe, as a Real, and as a “Piece of Eight”.) The U.S. Dollar was based on it, since there were more Dollars in circulation in the early US than Guineas, anyway.
John W. Kennedy
“Compact is becoming contract; man only earns and pays.”
– Charles Williams
Just to inject a note of numismatic history into the discussion, here’s an edited excerpt from Eric. P Newman’s article “The Earliest Money Using A Dollar as a Unit of Value.” (Or read the whole discussion of Maryland’s paper dollars of 1767 at http://www.ece.iit.edu/~prh/coins/PiN/ted.html
“The word dollar was a translation into the English language of the Germanic word Thaler which was originally applied to a large 15th century silver coin of provincial Austria. The Scandinavian countries had translated Thaler into daler or Rixdaler for their currency unit. The word Dollar in the English language was the commercial reference to silver coins of the same general size as the Thaler, but became applicable primarily to Spanish-American silver coinage of the denomination of 8 reales because of the extensive use and circulation of that coinage throughout the world. The piece of 8 reales was more commonly called the Spanish Dollar and after 1732, that expression was often modified to Spanish Milled Dollar to reflect the introduction of edge milling and circular shape to such coinage.”
Furthermore, the coin of 8 reales was often chopped into pieces for change. Each pie-shaped 1/8th real was called a “bit” and two of them made a quarter of the original value.
Sometimes the bit would be divided in half to produce a “picayune,” a term most often associated with the South as a synonym for something small or nearly worthless.
Hometownboy
Atheism is a non-prophet organization.
Thank you.
I guess the answer to the original topic question: “Is the new USA dollar coin also doomed?” is going to be determined by a combination of usability, necessity and desire.
If the new coin looks different enough not to be confused with any other coin (in a similar manner to the Canadian loonies and toonies) and accepted in machines and the like, then that would seem to satisfy some of the usability criteria.
Necessity – well, if the US mint withdraws the dollar bills that should fix that.
And then there is desire. You Americans seem particularly conservative and protective when it comes to your “greenbacks”… whereas we crazy folks – out here in monopoly money land – seem to change our currency regularly.
Here in New Zealand we have 1 and 2 dollar coins, and have been talking about 5 dollar ones. We got rid of 1 and 2 cent pieces, (we round prices to 5 cents), and I was out of the country for a few months last year and came back to find all the notes had become plastic.
Come on, live a little!