It probably is a generational thing, but the transition may have been farther back than many people think. In early August 1978 I returned from a year overseas, and even then I was struck by the way that quarters seemed to have little utility as a medium of exchange except for the most inexpensive items. They were fine for paying the bus driver or buying a cup of coffee. Magazines and daily newspapers were still in the range of 25 cents to a buck or two. But you really wouldn’t have wanted to buy yourself a hardbound book or a full meal with quarters, even then, unless you had no other option. By contrast in Germany, the country I had just returned from, the full service trattoria-style Italian restaurant where I used to visit once a week seemed to do most of its business in coins, and every twenty minutes or so you’d see the waiter circulating around the room with an large old-fashioned coin purse. A lot of people paid in coins; three or four 5-Deutschmark coins could be plenty for a table of two people. Of course, since there’s no tipping in German restaurants, it often made sense to count out the exact amount of the bill; this took care providing change to other diners who only had currency or larger coins.
I never really thought about it until I arrived in Germany the previous August, but once I became accustomed to it I really thought it was a better way of doing things. I used to withdraw my weekly pocket money in 5-DM coins, or in some cases I could even get 10-DM coins. I never got tired of the novelty of buying my lunch with a coin, and often getting change back that I could still buy something with, like a beer. At the local student club a half litre Glas of the local beer was only 90Pf.
So I didn’t much like going back to the pay-for-nearly-everything-with-paper system, and I still don’t like it any better. I doubt if it will ever change; if it one day costs five dollar for a cup of coffee and fifty cents to manufacture a quarter, we’ll still have pennies, nickels, dimes, quarters, and dollar bills. Taxi drivers will still carry only $5 change, and convenience stores will still take nothing larger than a twenty.
If you always have with you as many pennies and nickels as you need, in order to avoid getting more, that can add up to a lot of coins jingling and jangling in your pocket, and you’ll still likely be getting dimes and quarters back. In high-value-coin economies like Japan or Switzerland, it’s true you may start the day with a considerable amount in coin, but you’ll tend to unload it as you go through the day, because the coins you get back in change can still be used conveniently to buy other things. At least, this was my experience in Germany.
Even so, Italy’s central bank often had difficulty in supplying the country with coins, though I’m not entirely sure that was because of the lira’s low unit-value. Commercial banks used to issue 50- and 100-lire notes when they were unable to order like-valued coins from the customary source.
The maximum amount of US coins you’d have, assuming no half-dollars or dollar coins, is 9: 3 quarters, a dime, a nickel (or two dimes), and four pennies. If you spend coins with each transaction, they don’t accumulate. But clearly, a large number of people simply refuse to pay with coins. So each transaction brings coins, and then they’re (apparently) surprised and overwhelmed. My question, sort of answered above, is why won’t they just use the damn coins as they go? The answer seems to be that they’re arbitrarily understood as not-money because the individual purchasing power is too low, and so while coins are accepted as change, people won’t spend them. Either that, or the physical effort of finding coins at transaction time is so difficult that only a trained athlete with mad math skillz could possibly manage it.
Another way to put it, in practical terms, is that 19 cents isn’t always worth 19 cents. With $4.81 cents more, in the form of a five dollar bill, it’s worth exactly 19 cents. But in the form of actual change in your pocket, which requires at least six coins, it’s worth less, in practical terms, because of the physical nuisance of keeping and carrying it, and the length of time that might elapse before you can conveniently spend it, and the time needed to count out six coins when you do spend them. It might not be just the price that’s the factor, but also whether people are lined up behind you at the cash register, whether you have gloves on because it’s cold (it must be easier to fish bills out of your wallet than pennies out of your pocket without taking your gloves off), etc.
I keep all my loose change in a change purse. Actually, I have two, of two different kinds, and I keep them in my car. When I know I’m going to actually pay with cash (and not the usual credit card), I take them out and put them in my pocket. It was once important to have loose change handy to drop in the toll booth box or in parking meters. Parking meters still demand quarters. (Once nickels would do.) I haven’t taken a toll road in a long time but I imagine quarters and halves would still be useful.
Some towns have switched to a parking system in which the spaces are numbered and you pay for parking at a machine located mid-block or on the street corner. And these machines accept credit cards as well as cash. Similarly, some vending machines accept credit cards now. The coin transaction I make is in the laundromat in my apartment building, where each wash or dry cycle costs $1.50 (six quarters).
It’s smack in the middle of the hour of the wolf for me right now; so forgive me if this post doesn’t make much sense.
[ul]
[li] Bills can be stacked with the largest size/denomination bills at the bottom. Since the bill compartment is open, I can reasonably accurately pick any desired denomination without removing all the bills out of the wallet or fumbling. With coins, either I have to remove the whole collection and inspect them, or remove one coin at a time till I hit the desired denomination. Certainly not as convenient.[/li]
[li] If a bill falls out of the wallet, it will land somewhere nearby. If a coin falls down, any of the following might happen: the coin rolls over to the opposite corner of the room, it comes to rest under the refrigerator, and lacking nails, I am unable to pick it up from the floor, especially a penny or dime. To be fair, a note might get blown away by the wind, but this hasn’t proven to be as much of a problem to me. [/li]
[li] You trivialise the “mad math skillz” needed to tender the exact change, but the fact is that some nontrivial math is needed. I actually consider myself diligent and competent enough for this**, but even so, I don’t like to be put on the spot in front of the clerk as well as the ten customers queued behind me. And even if I can get the math right, I don’t want to waste everyone’s time fumbling around with pennies and nickels. The person running the register is especially trained for this (and they have the computer to assist them), so I just hand them a ten dollar bill (or whatever) and let them take care of the rest.[/li]
[li] I am surprised not too many people have complained about the old, smelly, damaged (rusted or torn) coins and bills. I absolutely hate them, and so does my public laundromat. IME, pennies and dollar bills are the worst culprits. While a dollar bill is too valuable to just throw away, I will trash a penny without guilt if there’s even a slight damage.[/li]
[li] Even if the absolute physical effort required for spending a dollar bill and spending a penny are the same, we still must weigh this effort against the payoff. Pennies aren’t as universally accepted as bills (e.g., vending machines); coins, in general, are rejected by foreign exchange people. Moreover, I can diligently keep all the pennies instead of throwing away, and at the end of the year, I might have enough pennies for… a coffee, or maybe a sandwich. But if I start throwing off dollar bills, I will probably be losing a coffee every few days, which is too wasteful by any reasonable standard. To put it bluntly, I can afford to throw away the penny, but not my dollar bill. [/li]
[li] I admit you do bring up a good point: Don’t let the coins accumulate; use them as we go. I am certainly guilty of not following this, mostly out of laziness.[/li]
But then again, it’s not that I hate all coins equally, and want to get rid of them as soon as possible. Yes, I hate pennies, and I could live without nickels and dimes, but I do love quarters; I need them for the parking meters and for the laundry. I hoard them whenever I can. Heck, if I am invited me to someone’s house, I might steal all the quarters while no one’s watching (dropping an equivalent amount in dollar bills, of course). That’s how much I love quarters. The same goes for dollar bills too. I literally can’t have too much of these. Now, if my caffè latte comes to 3 dollars and 54 cents, would you have me give up TWO quarters in order to use 4 of the pennies? Sorry, not interested. I would rather pay a five, and get back 1 dollar bill, 1 quarter, and 2 dimes, politely refusing the penny.
[li] There are some (artificial) scenarios where we can keep getting loose change, but we can’t spend that change. For example, being the hungry student that I was, I sometimes used to buy the $1.21 Snickers bar*** from the nearby vending machine. The machine accepted all coins, except pennies, so I was always stuck with some spare pennies which I can’t return to the machine itself. Do this regularly, and the pennies will add up. [/li][/ul]
**When I and my friends share some common expenses, I sometimes take up the job of noting and splitting up the expenses – using pen and paper (there are also some good websites/apps for this task).
Gonna backtrack a little here, and ask how jz8817 expects me to ‘make it rain’ in here. Last time I used coins, I got thrown the f*ck outta the bar.
Tripler
Apparently, dancers don’t appreciate quarters or ‘Sackies’***** . . .
[sub]*Note: It’s been eighteen-plus some-odd years since I been in one of those kinda bars[/sub]
I do much the same sort of thing with how I keep my change at home. I have a small container that’s mainly just for dimes and quarters, though a few nickels get in as well. If I think I’ll need anywhere from fifty cents to a couple of bucks, say to get on a bus or tip a barista, that’s my go-to change dish. Pennies and most nickels go into a different, larger container which I think used to be a small ice bucket. I used to let all my change accumulate in one place, but found that there were inevitably so many more pennies than anything else that they “buried” all the other denominations, particularly dimes and quarters. It actually became a chore to sift and search through the mass of pennies just to find a couple of quarters.
It’s another symptom of the problem, which is that most of the coins we have now bear little to no relevance to the marketplace in which we live. Allowing for a few special circumstances, they are no longer a medium of exchange. Instead they have become a medium of “change”. If the coins were truly useful in making small day-to-day purchases, we wouldn’t need to separate the denominations into two different change purses or boxes. I don’t go so far as to assert that even the lowest denomination coins should be something you could use to buy a coffee; after all Germany used to have 1- and 2-Pfg coins, and you certainly couldn’t buy anything with those. But it was sure easier to unload them; you’d reach into your pocket for a few marks and the Pfennige and Fünfer were there, too, right in your hand. So if you needed to add 1 or 6 Pfg to your payment, it was easy to do. The existence of higher value coins lends utility and relevance even to the smallest denominations.
What I just said about the former monetary system of Germany might apply here. Japan also has 500- and 100-yen coins in heavy daily circulation, so one might as well grab a couple of 1-yen coins as well when you’re going to pay for something with a couple of coins.
I use cash so rarely that if I saved all my change smaller than a quarter it would almost certainly take me more than a year to save enough to buy a change purse. Therefore, I will never buy a change purse. It just isn’t worth it compared to just throwing all my small change in the trash, much less passively letting it accumulate on my dresser and under my couch cushions, where I can still gather it up and take it to a Coinstar machine every ten years or so. (Actually, whenever I move, which is slightly more often.)
Without a change purse, to pay with change, I have to dig it out of my pocket and count it while people in line behind me are getting impatient. I hate when people in front of me stop to count out change, and I don’t want to be the one to do it. True, it doesn’t take much time or much effort. If someone offered me a sip of Coke every time I paid with change, I’d probably do it. I’d probably do it for a handshake or a smile (instead of a glare, which is what I’m more likely to get). Just about the only thing I can think of so worthless that I won’t put forth the effort of counting change in exchange for it is THE CHANGE ITSELF. If I threw away every penny, nickel ,and dime from now until I died, it wouldn’t affect my life in any way. There is no point at which I would find myself unable to afford something I would otherwise be able to purchase.
As for the idea that you never need more than 9 coins, it’s a lie. Maybe it works in theory, but in real life it breaks down if you do more than one transaction. You spend $4.87 in the morning and then later your dinner comes to $9.31 and you give the girl at the counter a ten and she rings it in before she sees the nickel and penny and it confuses her so she gives you two quarters, two dimes and six pennies back, and you’re tired and wondering if you really did the math right in your head and fuck it, it’s easier to just throw them in the tip jar, even though when did we start tipping for fast food anyway?
^ I think the thinking is that you could pay 10 dollars and 31 cents, and get back a dollar in return. As you said, this can probably be done in theory, but no one would bother in practice.
Ordinarily I’d rather have the coins, actually. A stop at Starbucks, then the market to pick up a couple of items there, and it would be mostly spent anyway. I wouldn’t have the 9 dollar coins with me unless I did expect to spend them very soon. And in any case you shouldn’t often have more than 4 dollar coins, unless you go out of your way to get them. They are the change of a five dollar bill.
I don’t even get the “heavy” complaint. It’s not as if these are like the old cartwheel-sized Ike dollars.
Minor nitpick: For the most of the time when silver coins were in circulation, we abandoned any notion that a silver dollar or quarter derived its value from the silver. This happened mostly because of enormous silver strikes in the West, beginning just after the Civil War. Silver became so cheap after that point that the intrinsic value of the coins was far less than their face value, just like most coins today; that only changed when the silver price did rise sharply in the early 1960s.
How would I do that if I started with 3 quarters, a dime, a nickel, and 4 pennies, as Dr. Drake suggested, and I used 87 cents worth of change in the morning?
I went to a large chain restaurant recently and found they had implemented an at-table electronic system. Orders were still taken by live servers, but drink refills could be signalled with a button on the pad, and payment by card was done with a swipe track on the pad. It even calculated the tip, based on a slider to set the percentage. It also had games available to pass the time waiting for your order.
Your first bill is $14.87, so you use the three quarters and two pennies. Now you have a dime, a nickel, and two pennies. For your $10.31 bill, use one nickel and one penny. You’ll get three quarters back in change, and you’ll still have a dime and a penny (five coins total).
Yes, sometimes it flummoxes the cashier, but if you just say “I’m collecting quarters for laundry,” they get it. It’s not difficult at all.
And so on, and so forth. As to “no one would bother in practice,” I do this every time I pay for something with cash. It takes a fraction of a second.
You may not want to behave this way, and you certainly don’t have to, but it is pretty easy.
I will admit that I deliberately select wallets with a coin compartment, which are hard to find. They only work if you don’t overstuff them, but it does mean I don’t have to deal with loose / jangling coins.
