You mean Crane & Company, I believe.
The concern from some Americans seems to be an increase in the pocket bulk of coinage if bills are replaced by coins.
I believe this is because coins are viewed as the byproduct of a transaction which involved the tendering of bills. Coins, in and of themselves are so low in value, they are not presented as payment, but rather accumulated change.
As a Canadian who’s been through the transition from paper to $1 and $2 dollar coins, my experience is that the $1 and $2 dollar coins have some actual value and they are used as payment where smaller denominations might not be.
To pay a $10 transaction with quarters is inconceivable (40 coins). However, it is not unusual to pay with $10 worth of $1 and $2 coins. It does require a change of habit from simply reaching for a bill from your wallet, but it does eventually become normal.
During the past few years, I’ve been paying almost exclusively with plastic. I might have the same $20 bill in my wallet for 3 weeks before I need to pull it our for something. Therefore, what coins I might need on a day to day basis are usually sitting in the ashtray of my truck. The point is, with EFT transactions, I rarely accumulate coins.
Years ago when I was in London I was buying something that cost 1.10 GBP. Being American, I handed the cashier a 5 pound note then searched my fistful of coins for 10 pence. The cashier helpfully pointed out to me that I had several one pound coins in my fist as well. :smack:
It didn’t even occur to me to use all change for the purchase.
Did you seriously just realize this?
Great, now you’re finally aware of what many of us have been trying to tell you for a while now. So if you think something as bullshit as paper vs coin is commercialized, what do you think happens with actually serious stuff like food safety? Airline security? Environmental protection?
And the truth comes out. The coiners just want things to be “like they were back when.” Maybe we can get Leave It To Beaver back on TV, too.
Yeah, but besides having things like they were back when, longer lasting money, and more convenient vending machines, what have the coiners ever done for us?
(I don’t care about the dollar coin one way or another. $5 coin would be sort of silly. Let’s get rid of the penny ASAP. One time a couple months ago the guy at Taco Bell forgot to give me the penny from my 51 cent change, and I noticed it and didn’t even say anything because I didn’t even care. If he did that for every other transaction he’d wind up with a whole dollar more at the end of the shift!)
This isn’t the impression I get from blogs and other commentary on this issue, elsewhere on the internet. I haven’t seen it here, but elsewhere it’s typical for obviously conservative people to object to the coins and insist on keeping things as they are. Moving to more coins would make us, so they imply, unpalatably like Europe and Canada, while also recognizing–and even surrendering to–the effects of inflation. Besides the matter of not having dollar coins in wide circulation, this is also why we still have pennies and nickels that cost more to make than they are worth. Every other country in the developed world has adjusted their currency to provide more appropriate denominations, as jjimm’s example illustrates. They all had the same inflation during the 20th Century that we did, or worse, but that didn’t stop them from thinking outside the box. By contrast, we’re still stuck in that box–permanently, it looks like.
Yet Hong Kong has had the (polymer) HK$10 bill and the HK$10 coin (worth about US$1.20) in parallel circulation for years, and there’s no resistance whatsoever to using the coin. The American resistance to a similar situation is something more fundamental.
Heck, even when I was a kid in the '80s/'90s you could get a soda or a snack from a vending machine for 50 cents. This will often cost you more than a dollar today, which means getting the machine to accept a dollar bill (not easy if it’s worn or bent) or scrounging up a handful of coins. A dollar coin would make buying things from vending machines much easier.
It usually takes me like until my third day in Halifax or Quebec to get back in the groove with the loonies and toonies, but even those first two days I do not find myself excessively weighted down (and I’m not a heavy plastic user, I prefer cash for small purchases).
The American people really haven’t resisted the coins much, because the coins have never been common enough to resist. I’m pretty sure all of the pushes to introduce dollar coins have been less than half-assed. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen one in circulation that didn’t come out of a post office stamp machine.
From what I’ve seen elsewhere online, it’s mainly the retailers. By and large, we get our cash nowadays either from ATMs, or from retail cashiers–either as change, or as cash back on debit card purchases. No coin will circulate until retailers accede to the idea of ordering and using it en masse, but for all intents and purposes they have absolutely and completely rejected the dollar coin. Dollar coins cost more to transport than dollar bills, being heavier. This is a cost that could be offset by eliminating pennies, but that, in itself, is another uphill battle. It’s one that we shouldn’t have to fight, but there it is.
Besides cost fears, merchants have no real incentive to accept any modifications to the current arrangement. They pay people to stand there all day and shovel out shrapnel coins to their customers. These workers have cash drawers designed to make this process as efficient as possible.
There is at least one advantage of such low-value notes for foreigners: after you get home, you can exchange them at the bank, in contrast to coins, which are usually not exchangeable.
No one wants the dollar coin. Who wants a $5 coin taking up space in their pocket. I can carry a hundred dollars in fives in my shirt pocket. Can’t do that with coins. You lose coins. I have never lost even a $1 bill.
So what if it’s costly. We do equally costly thing every day but no one questions that. It’s just easier to change this.
Canada has just announced that it is getting rid of the penny. 
I don’t think things are quite as pleasant as all that in the UK. I’m not old enough to remember decimalization, but I am old enough to remember that people were still grumbling about it 16 years later.
I remember a Ben Bova novel–I think it was 1999, and it was published some time in the 1970s if memory serves. Part of the background to the story was generally deteriorating social and economic conditions, and there was a mention of a soda machine that “only took half dollars”, as a sort of grim foreshadowing for the 1970s-era reader.
The Scottish banks were still printing £1 notes when I was there ('89-'92). Do they still do that?
The Royal Bank of Scotland does. The UK has a bit of an odd arrangement where certain banks can print their own currency.
Why would dollar coins have to be “huge”?
And the complaints about weight/bulk baffle me, they really do. The last time somebody told me that dollar coins would weigh too much, I pulled all the coins out of my pocket: An assortment of small stuff, 12 quarters, and 18 dollar coins. The weight and bulk of the cell phone and wallet in my other pockets were much more noticeable and annoying.