I hate having to dig through crap in my pocket to find the crap I need. If some crap is in my wallet, life is a tiny bit easier.
Move to some socialist commie country where there is no money and you are glad to have coins in your pocket.
And get the hell off my lawn!
I’ve been using a credit card for cash expenses and paying them a hundred or so a week electronically. It seems to work well.
Try it with twelve quarters. And no, the damn machine won’t take dollar coins, it wants quarters and dimes and nickels. No pennies or half dollars, either.
We really do just need to quit printing the singles.
You know, as an American, I never liked coins much, for all the reasons silenus and carnivorousplant and others have mentioned. To be clear, for me isn’t the weight, it’s the inconvenience of having coins floating around, especially when mixed into my pocket with cell phone, keys, a pen or two, etc.
I don’t spend them much, either. I always feel kind of embarrassed standing in a checkout line searching through my pocket for the exact change, even if no one is behind me. I just about never buy anything from a vending machine. And in any case, as people on both sides of the argument have mentioned, in the US you need a bunch of coins to pay for pretty much anything (dollar coins excepted, but I just about never see them).
So I usually dump my coins into a jar every few days and be done with them. And I trade 'em in from time to time at the supermarket (and because I get an amazon card with them I get full value).
But I always figured that higher value coins would be more useful. If we had a $2 coin, I could use couple of them, instead of 16 quarters, to buy a fast food meal. If we had a $2 coin, I wouldn’t have to get out my wallet, etc.
Then I went to Europe earlier this summer, where there are 2-euro coins and 2-pound coins. And you know what? It was awful. My pocket very quickly reached the point where I couldn’t get anything out, just like in the US, only this time the coins had actual value–at one point I had something like fifteen euros in my pocket–and so I really needed to use them in cash transactions. And it was really difficult to find the correct value that I needed. Much more difficult than opening up my wallet and getting out the bills.
Can’t speak for vending machines, but where cash checkout lines were concerned, there was no question that they move more quickly in the US than in the coin-heavy parts of Europe I visited. Sure looked like people were having trouble finding the right coins they needed… (and btw I am NOT a person who thinks everything is done right in the good ol’ US of A).
So from where I sit there’s good reason not to go to coins instead of bills.
Okay. So for those against the dollar coin, the real reasons are:
[and perhaps partly 3) a faint whiff of embarrassment at being seen to care about small denominations of money: at least, that’s the vibe I’m getting].
But that makes it seem as if all coins are equally vile, and the dollar coin would be no better and no worse than a quarter. If the dollar coin were added at the same time as the penny was eliminated, would that be acceptable?
From my perspective,
I would get rid of the penny in an instant, but see no reason why that would make dollar coins more acceptable. The way I see it, the fewer coins the better.
Just my 2…ah, never mind.
Ah, yes, the “nearly every other country in the world did it without problem, but Americans are ‘special snowflakes’” argument. See also the never-ending threads about why our government couldn’t possibly run a health care system like every other government.
I’ll carry them in my pocket if they are the size of a G-d damn brick if you guys will shut up about them, ok?
There is something of an urban myth about why the $2 bill came into disrepute. One is that $2.00 was the price of a common street prostitute, so having them meant that you had that intention. Another is that $2.00 was what was given to people in order to buy their vote.
I have a few of them in my jewelry box (or whatever you call the box where you keep stuff you never use, like cuff links) but have never visited a lady of the night or sold my vote.
I find it fascinating that society’s attitudes on this seem to have done a 180 in the last hundred years or so.
I’ve read an autobiography of a gentleman who was born in the 1890’s. Silver dollar coins were quite common back then.
And you know what? He and his friends LIKED the coins. And it was BECAUSE of the noise and jingling. They used it as sort of a non-verbal sneak bragging about how much money they had.
I’m definitely one of the coin haters. The moment I get home I take all my coins and put them in a jar never to be seen until they get traded in (which, to be honest, takes a while. I mostly use a debit card).
For me it’s the inconvenience. I have to take everything in my pockets out just to find the right coins ( my house keys if it’s in my left pocket or my headphones, phone, and emergency allergy medication if it’s in my right).
If I were forced to use higher valued coins those too would just go into the coin jar and I would just never use cash.
Just put coins in another pocket. Put coins in your back pocket, or your keys in your right pocket, or whatever.
Really, your statement may make sense to you, but it seems laughable to me. Like the excuses small kids invent on the spot in order not to do something. I really can’t take as a serious argument against coins “I have a key ring in my right pocket, so that’s too complicated”. Again, I immediatly pictured a 5 yo searching for an excuse not to pick up his toys when I read your post.
This is one of those times when I wish this country ran by fiat and not according to the crazy wishes of the loudest whiners, then we could get rid of the penny and nickel and have dollar coins already.
If I were in charged, coins would replace the $2, $5 and $10 dollar bills to put us on line with civilized countries, whose ranks we can aspire to one day join.
I can’t find that any other country has a circulating coin as worth as much as $10. The largest I can find are 500 yen and 5 Swiss francs, which are both about $5.
But it will probably happen sooner or later, since inflation reduces coins/bills value every year.
I guess the main reason is that bills are more difficult to counterfeit than coins??
The stripper problem could be handled by selling scrip at the club.
These days I rarely use cash at all. I can go weeks without visiting an ATM. When I do use cash, I toss back anything less than a quarter. The quarters go into my car and I use them to pay for parking downtown. I hate having change in my pocket now. In the future, the dollar coins will go in my car too. No big deal.
All my coins go in a jar. The jar, when full, gets coinstarred for an Amazon voucher. Works for me.
Now folks like that sneak brag about how much smarter they are on message boards.
The real problem is we still have pennies. Although the Euro is no better in this regard, they have both €0.01 and €0.02 coins which are just retarded. The smallest coin should be the nickel.
Are they? I think a scanner/printer setup with nice thick paper with some cotton content would be able to create some bills that might pass if they weren’t scrutinized.
For a coin you’d need a metal press and metal of close enough weight to work.
I bet more people have printers, scanners, and nice paper than have metal presses and soft, weighty metal.
I think the main reason is the US views progressive change as socialism/communism/Hitler!
Why would one counterfeit small coins? This guy apparently lost money making 500,000 fake nickels.