What, you don’t have gumball machines?
Seriously, I don’t understand why we cling to our stupid dollar bills and pennies. Both should be gotten rid of.
Though most of it was done during an era when Politicians actually made decisions and then went ahead and acted on them.
Those days are seemingly long gone.
I can purchase 8 minutes of parking for a dime. I can also get a single piece of candy, like a tiny York Peppermint Patty for a quarter, or 20 minutes of parking. I think that’s about it…
You know… If we normalized roughly to 1911 purchasing power, we would have:
Coins. - 25 cents, 1 dollar, 2 dollars, 5 dollars
Bills. - 20, 50, 100
We’ll cancel our subscription to WWII. 
I think we’d also need a higher-denomination bill, perhaps $500 or $1000. But I think this would be a good approach.
I love dollar coins but almost never see them in circulation. IMO the way to make people stop collecting them and start USING them is to quit the silly “series” thing. Make so many of one kind of coin that they stop feeling special. Who collects Washington quarters? No one. Who collects state quarters? Every kid in America.
Higher denomination coins are inevitable, but all we’ve done is find the WRONG way to introduce them into circulation. Sheesh. Australia, I’m laughing with you.
The stupid thing is that people object to eliminating the penny because they feel (falsely) that they’ll be cheated out of two cents when the retailer rounds a cash purchase to the nearest five or ten cents. But at the same time, people don’t care about individual pennies. They leave them in those “take a penny, leave a penny” dishes, they don’t bother picking them up off the pavement or they even throw away the ones they do get.
And BTW, upthread someone mentioned that the Canadian government introduced plastic bills. I don’t think the Bureau of Engraving and Printing will accept that. I remember seeing a documentary on PBS about the testing that they do when contemplating a change in the currency. One of the tests shown was to crumple a dollar bill into a tiny package and then see if it’s still usable when uncrumpled and laid flat.
Precisely. The Sacagawea gold dollar was supposed to be the Next Big Thing, and they had commercials encouraging people to use them. They dumped enough of them into the mainstream that every man, woman and child in America could have had four or five of them. And what happened? People thought they were special and hoarded them. Even though they were not at all rare or collectible, people saved them instead of spending them, removing about a billion coins from circulation. So naturally, their next idea was to release limited runs of each president, making them seem even more collectible. Heckuva job there, U.S. Mint.
It’s not the Mint’s fault. You can’t have two different types of currency for one amount. You especially can’t ADD a new type of currency to an existing model and expect the old type to vanish on its own. I love coins, I love the very idea of using coins to buy stuff. I’m not going to go through the bullshit necessary to use dollar coins. Every store I go to gives me bills back. There are only a few items I buy regularly that are cheap enough to buy with dollar coins. Overall, coins are still too worthless to bother putting in your pocket when you go shopping.
Congress needs to put on it’s big boy underwear and actually update a system that hasn’t changed appreciably in 150 years. It actually sort of sickens me that “cost savings” is the excuse for this, when ditching the paper dollar can save us hundreds of millions every year.
As would getting rid of the penny, which actually costs more than face value to make. (And I believe the nickel does as well.)
I could argue for a $25 bill, but I think that just changing to no bills under $20 would be hard enough for a start.
I rarely see gumball machines, and when I do, they usually want TWO quarters, not just one. I think that having the quarter as the lowest value coin would be a good start.
I love my squished pennies, but I’m willing to give them up for the Cause.
People are reactionary idiots. There’s really no other way to explain it satisfactorily. You could make some valid arguments for keeping dollar bills over coins, but there’s no actual good argument to make for keeping pennies, and getting rid of them is met with the same tremendous public disapproval.
One reason that the penny hasn’t been eliminated is pressure from the zinc industry.
To a much greater extent than other countries, the US suffers from paranoia about government. A sizeable fraction of the less educated wing of the Right believes that any change to the coins or currency is a first step to invalidating all the existing coinage or currency, with the goal of impoverishing all the right-thinking people who’ve hoarded currency outside the banking & tax system.
Waking up those nutbags is something that historically the left & center-right have avoided like the plague.
Based on the precedent in the US, any reasonably possible abolition of printing new $1 bills would still provide that existing $1 bills would remain legal tender indefinitely. Hey, even those large bills from the 19th century and the emergency-issue 50 cent bills from the Civil War are still legally valid. In the unlikely event that some family has been hoarding cash since the Civil War and now wants to buy something from you with it, you can generally rest assured that you can spend anything they give you.
My biggest source of dollar coins in the past was as change from the machines at the post office where you could buy stamps without standing in line. You’d put in bills, get your stamps, and get all-coin change. If it was more than a dollar, you’d get a dollar coin in there. If you paid for $7 worth of stamps with a $20, you’d get a lot of dollar coins.
95%* of the coins I receive go into a jar, which is periodically taken to the machine in exchange for an Amazon gift card of equal value. The other 5%** I use when I’m paying cash–I try to pay with exact change, mostly to get rid of the coins in my wallet. So the coins get spent making up the “57 cents” part of a $4.57 purchase when paying with cash.
*yes, I made up this number on the spot.
**see * except I had to do math this time.
Then the zinc industry needs to start a huge marketing campaign to get people to take upprintmaking as a hobby, and have classes and stuff. That uses up a lot of zinc!
Only sort of. I have like, 2 pictures, and they were actually taken in my bedroom, not in the club. And they’re not very good pictures. No wait, I have three. I have one taken at a club with a waitress friend. But I’m wearing a long dress in that one.[/end hijack, promise.]
I agree with your logic. I wasn’t suggesting the don’t-confiscate-our-matress-hoard crowd are making logical sense. I AM suggesting they are a very vocal minority of illogical conspiracy theorists who get surprising traction with the rest of unwashed America.
There was acuatlly quite a hue and cry when the BPE started making the new design bills with the larger off-center portrait, colors, etc. Despite lots of assurances that the old bills would still be good forever, the paranoid kvetching didn’t die down until long after the new bills had been in use and no sign of revenooers coming to confiscate the old bills had been seen.