What’s wrong with that? Haven’t you ever been frustrated by trying to feed a dollar bill into a vending or ticket machine that won’t accept it?
I heard another reason the golden dollar failed was that the main armored carriers were pretty much geared to carry only the four kinds of coins we commonly see in circulation, and refused to retool. Personally I was a big advocate of the dollar coins, and spent them wherever I could; only I could hardly ever get them even from my bank. What’s more I think in this matter the government was entitled to dictate, as they have done in all the other major industrialized countries.
To have a paper denomination worth 0.78 EUR? Isn’t that just a tad pathetic? Vaguely reminiscent of one of those basket-case countries where you need a wad of 7000 whatevers to buy a pack of gum?
Can I ask if you’re male or female? I would think women would like the dollar coins more, due to ease of transport with purses. Having a weighty coin in my pocket is very annoying, especially with keys and a cell phone in there as well.
I agree. As a male, I carry keys, cellphone, and my glasses in my front pockets and a wallet in the back. Whenever I get change in coins it goes to any number of places other than my pockets - The nearest “charity” bin, fountain, the sidewalk, or (if I’m at a drive-thru) my “toll money bin” in my car. Even is I buy something that costs $5.01, and pay $6, that 99 cents is not going in my pocket. I simply can’t stand it.
How do men in other countries cope with the jingling pocket situation? From what I’ve read in our earlier discussions on this topic, most people in Canada, the British Isles, and Europe seem to like having higher value coins.
I’m a guy and I think we should have a dollar coin and the two dollar bill and get rid of the single dollar bill. It’s the only way to make dollar coins work.
Or have a dollar coin and a 2 dollar coin and have the 5 be the smallest paper currency. The coins don’t have to be heavy, just clearly marked.
Well, that’s just a symptom of the problem. The way our money works now is totally skewed toward using paper for virtually every purchase and accumulating piles of change. If we had some higher denominations mixed in with the coins, you wouldn’t accumulate so many lower value ones, because you’d be more inclined to spend them as you go.
How many dollars do you plan on carrying? And isn’t this why they make bags? I carry one all the time. Some of them are very professional looking. Others are just bookbags. In this day and age, a person carries a lot of shit with them. Buy a bag. They work very well.
I can’t think of a worse idea than putting a cell phone, money and car keys into a bag. There’s a reason people hate cell phones - people who carry them in bags can’t set them on vibrate.
I can very easily carry 10 $1 bills in my wallet with absolutely no discernable difference; 20 $1 bills is noticeable, but not hindering. 10 $1 coins would be annoyance to the extreme. Plus, coins fall out of pockets quite often. I’ve never heard of someone have bills fall out of their wallet.
The I-love-coins/I-hate-coins see-saw isn’t helping, folks. Let’s stick to the factual question of what the mint is planning to do about high-value coins and why, not what you think it should do.
a) designing a replacement coin to be very similar to the failed previous version would seem to be setting the new coin up for a similar failure.
b) Not that many vending machines are/were set up to accept the SBA/GD anyway(excepting transit and stamp machines, at least around here), so it was a largely moot point.
True, true–inertia tends to trump logic, both in the corporate world (vending machines) and elsewhere. Lest you think this is the first (or second, counting the SBAs) time the government has released a failed coin, one needs only to take a look at 2-, 3-, and 20-cent pieces. God only knows what they were thinking two centuries ago. The 20-cent piece’s journey to fruition helped secure a politician’s bid for re-election in the Senate, as I recall–perhaps such was the case with the Sac dollar too?
The 2, 3 and 20 cent pieces were specifically designed to match the price of stamps. I forget why that was so all-fired important at the time, but there was a rationale.
No, actually, according to Coins: Questions and Answers by Clifford Mishler, only the three-cent coin (and the three-dollar gold coin) were issued to facilitate the purchase of stamps. The two-cent coin was introduced after the Civil War to ease the dearth of circulating pennies. It was no longer minted after the penny shortage ended. As for the 20-cent coin, even the encyclopedic Mishler isn’t sure why it was minted: either it was introduced by a Western senator to increase the use of silver (a take on Kefra’s claim above, I guess), it was the first step in a “metric coin system” which would also have included a 40-cent piece, or it was to be used as an international trading coin akin to the Trade Dollar or the unsuccessful “Stella” (four-dollar gold coin).
The 20-cent coin certainly wasn’t introduced to buy stamps, as a first-class stamp cost three cents during the 1870’s, when the 20-center was introduced.
The 3 cent was intended to match stamp prices, issued 1851-1889 initially in silver, and later in copper-nickel. The 2 cent was issued in the middle of this era, and didn’t match stamp prices, since the 3 cent piece was already serving that function. Postage rates apparently dropped to 2 cents, but that was after the 2 cent piece was already discontinued.
The 20 cent piece was an interesting piece of politics. There was a shortage of small coins in the western US because the western mints were not allowed to mint small coins (pennies and nickels weren’t made of silver - the silver mining interests were involved). A lot of things cost a dime, apparently, and people were getting ripped off when they paid with quarters and got a dime or a Spanish bit (12.5 cents) back. The 20 cent was a politically palatable remedy - it was silver and could be minted at the western mints. The senator somebody referred to was John Percival Jones of Nevada, who sponsored it. Nevada = Comstock Lode, and, yes, they probably would have been irate if SF or Carson City had been given the go-ahead to mint pennies or nickels. The 20 cent piece was terrifically unpopular, and was minted only from 1875-78.
The actual 20 cent piece issued in 1875 seemed to have more to do with pork barrel politics, and the story I gave was essentially synopsised from that link.
Don’t forget, though, that prices were extremely low in those days, too. Even until the massive inflation of the second half of the XXth century, there actually were many things that you could buy for a penny, or nickel, or a dime, or a quarter. So it’s no mystery why someone in the year 1850 might have thought we needed a 2c or 3c coin.
What would make a person from that era shake their head in disbelief is that we still have pennies, when each one is probably worth a 20th of what a penny was to them.
They don’t have the spine to make Americans eat their vegetables. Afraid they won’t get re-elected if they administered reasonable tough love.
IOW, until Congress gives the cease and desist order to the mint to stop printing the entrenched paper $1 bills, the dollar coin has no chance of replacing it.
Likewise, the plan to kill off the pennies needs Congress’s order of execution, but the self-serving political weasels won’t put the bullet into that lame horse either.
Write you congressional representatives and beg for currency reform so that they know it’s safe to take the next step.
