You’re thinking of one of those “rewards” cards that grocery stores use.
I think the store card mentioned is like a gift card with an actual cash amount, that you can use to purchase something at that store.
~VOW
There actually is a store out there (Kroger?) that really is putting the cash amount on the “rewards” card.
Even if the Treasury had the ability to circulate dollar coins at will, dollar coins wouldn’t help with this particular situation, because there doesn’t seem to be a shortage of dollar bills.
Correct.
There is (currently) no shortage of any paper denomination.
Also - dollar coins ARE in circulation. People certainly do use them at the store I work at. Also half dollars. Our self serve machines - when they’re accepting cash - take them as well. The obstacle to dollar coins is not the Treasury and not the supply, it’s the unwillingness of the general public to use them.
Even if we did increase use of dollar coins that wouldn’t help in this particular instance because of the shortage of quarters, dimes, nickels, and pennies.
The unwillingness of retailers to order them is the bigger issue. The $1 denomination enters circulation almost exclusively as change, not through consumers consciously deciding to acquire it, and except for some high-value vending machines, dollar bills make more sense for the people who decide what to give out as change.
Just the other day I had a pharmacy purchase that was exactly $1. When I gave a dollar coin to the person at the register, she went to the back and asked the pharmacist if it was actual money. (It 's a good thing I didn’t try a $2 bill.)
How often does anyone ‘consciously decide’ to acquire particular coins or bills? (Excepting those rare antiques you got at that auction…) You take whatever you get out of the cash machine (I guess round denominations like $50, $100, $20 would be most common) and whatever cashiers give you as change. Would anyone be unwilling to use any part of their change, especially whole dollars?
Every time I go to the commissary I ask the cashier if (s)he has any dollar coins in the till. I also get three dollars in quarters; on the way out to the car I quickly check to see if there are any I need to fill out my collection, then give most of them to the bagger as a tip.
Years ago I started a pit thread after some guy borrowed money from me ($20?, $50?). I forget the details, but when he finally paid me back it was with a big pile of dollar coins.
It was a dick move, IMO. I’d given him a single bill and he returned a pile of heavy coins that cashiers don’t have a slot for, and that I didn’t want to carry around in my pocket.
I remember a lot of posters arguing that the coins were just grand, but man, was I pissed off.
OK, good point. I was saying to myself, “Who would be unwilling to find a couple of 1-dollar coins in their change?”, but was not envisioning receiving a big sack full of them. Seems like a dick move regardless of denomination, though, nor would a big sweaty wad of $1 bills be much more welcome (lighter, though).
Random trivia: coins £1 and up are legal tender throughout the United Kingdom for payment of any amount, whereas eg £50 notes are legal tender in England and Wales but not in Scotland…
Like many here do, I throw my change in a container at the end of my day. I went to use the coinstar machine at WalMart and was going to get a gift card so there would be no fee. The lady at customer service saw me and said that she’d take the cange and run it through their machine and give me cash with no fee. Sure, why not.
A few minutes later she paid me $82.10 out of her register. We were both happy.
I use the dollar coins for tips. Never had a waitress or bartender give me the stink eye for doing so. If I get any reaction it’s more like “I’m going to show these to my kids tonight!”.
Yep, we get that with the younger new cashiers - they don’t recognize dollar coins or half dollars. The fact half dollars come in different sizes just adds to the confusion. Also have people questioning $2. I’ve also had them come to me in a panic, trailed by an angry customer, because they’ve encountered an old paper bill without modern features - sure, it’s real money, just real old money.
Weekly or fortnightly - the washers and dryers in my building only take quarters so once a week I stop by one of the banks I use and get a roll.
If the machines took dollars and half dollars I’d get those instead/also.
Once or twice I’ve had customer actually throw change at me, usually bitching about how useless it is. So yes, apparently some people aren’t just unwilling to use it, they’re even unwilling to accept it.
We save it so when another customer comes up a few cents short we can tell them not to worry about it. We also don’t demand the cashiers have their tills balance exactly - it’s more cost-effective to keep lines moving rather than wait for someone to dig that last penny out of their purse, there’s goodwill when we don’t give people crap over a few cents, and we recognize they’re human. I actually do know the tolerance level because I work in the cash office, it’s fairly generous, but we don’t usually tell the cashiers what it is because they’re less likely to abuse the limits if they aren’t quite sure where they are.
Yep, we’re doing that, too, now. At one point a manager posted a sign on the CoinStar machine giving everyone that offer, but CoinStar objected. Seeing as right now CoinStar is supplying us more rolled coin than the bank is higher management decided pissing them off was a bad idea. So now we make the offer verbally, but don’t advertise is on the CoinStar machine.
Once in awhile someone asks me if the dollar coins, half dollars, and $2’s are annoying when I’m balancing the books and counting the money. No - it’s part of the job. We have a way to process them, it’s no big deal, no more aggravating that, say, gift cards, traveler’s checks, and coupons.
Record number of dollar coins I’ve had in a day was, if I recall correctly, 53. Put them in a bag with the rest of the bank deposit for the day. We do deposit all of those, we don’t retain them and put them back in the tills so if you get one in change from my store it’s because it came in earlier that day.
Ummm, it’s the dollars that come in two sizes, AND colors…
Want to have fun? Pay with SBA’s!
I once knew an old guy with a puckish sense of humor who would get crisp new sequential $2 bills from the bank, take them to a local print shop, have the stack gummed along one edge, and put them in a checkbook. Later he’d tear off a bill and give it tellers, waiters, sales clerks etc. as payment, just for the fun of seeing their reaction.
That’s fantastic, and sounds like something my dad would do. He was known for tipping with $2 bills, and loved the reactions they got. When he passed, he didn’t have any in his house. So my brothers and I went down to his favorite watering hole to see if they had any $2 bills in the till. “No, we haven’t had any around here in a while. We had a long time regular who used to pay with them all the time, but it’s been months since he’s been in.” So we shared who we were, shared a beer, and shared a few tears. He’d have gotten a BIG kick out of gumming them together.
I can’t be bothered to get them bound, and wouldn’t want to carry around that many anyway. But on the rare occasion that I actually go to a physical bank, I’ll get a $200 bundle of $2s. I usually keep 5 or so in my wallet for tips. I’ll get the occasional roll of $1 coins too.
I was on a long call last week that didn’t require much attention, so I sorted and rolled a big pile of coins. The non-pennies (I’m not going to bother rolling pennies) added up to about $100. Not worth a trip to the bank on their own, but I’ll be sure to bring them next time I need to go.
There were a ton of foreign coins in there. I must have raided a pile that belonged to my wife, because I’ve never used Euros. There was some older stuff too. Deutschmarks, Czech koruna (I had to look that up), etc. I find some level of funness in coins for some reason.
One time back in a small town in Arkansas my payment at a store included a half dollar. It was obvious the young man had never seen a half dollar before. He looked at the front and the back several times and then read out loud to himself the words “half dollar” on the back. He then asked me, “Mr., is this a half dollar?” I said that yes, it was indeed a half dollar. He still looked perplexed and then asked me “Well, how much is that?” I had to explain that it was 50 cents, the same as two quarters.
Or five dimes - what a concept! 
I once used SBAs at a movie theater, to pay for the ticket. The painfully young clerk looked at them and asked “Is this American money”
I don’t suppose the In God We Trust and E Pluribus Unum on the coins, plus the USA meant anything either.