Have you met us? This is what we do.
I’m mildly sad that I didn’t take a few minutes to rummage around for some change the last time I encountered one of those souvenir penny-crushing machines.
They still make them in the UK. Now with KCIII and a “hazel doormouse” on the flipside. I’ve not seen one - only the 50p and it had some standard on the back - not a silvery hookah smoking caterpillar.
Cash is certainly not king in the UK. For some reason (money laundering/tax evasion?) the only cash-only businesses I know of are barbers and when my wife goes, beauty parlours.
Everything else is debit-card. (cash of course optional).
When I was in the USA for two weeks to clear up my mom’s house, I ended up spending more US cash from my leftovers. My mother also collected quarters - like $70 of them. In the UK they have those Coiinstar machines yet you can dump as many (UK obv) coins into the auto checkouts as you want.
At Walmart, their Coinstar machine was broken. I asked the guy at the desk, “Okay to spend about $35 in quarters?” I asked, as it would be a bit of a hassle. He said, “No. The Coin Machine is broken,” I called for the Manager, got approval, and spent almost every last one of those quarters, that time and another. Just counting them out in stacks of four..
If I can tangent, I worked at a Walmart for a while and a few times opened the Electronics outer register at 7AM. You got a drawer with $100 broken into various denominations. This old guy buys something for like $2.75 and hands me a $100 bill. I ask if he has anything less, and no answer. I hand over the contents of my drawer and call up front for a refill. Cash sucks.
It seems like it would take a little bit of planning and guidance through the transition. el donald and company seem incapable of that. After all, competence is carefully avoided.
Sure. When we did it*, we were told it would happen months in advance, there were posters and ads all over the place telling us what’s going to happen, we also were getting new $1 and $2 coins at the same time (using the copper from the cent pieces), and there was a long transitionary period rather than a hard cut-off date, so we could dispose of our old jars of change at the Bank.
This is also how we changed to metric, though that happened before I was born.
*This was for New Zealand, and it happened in 1990 I think.
That’s what professional civil servants are for - as when the UK converted to decimal currency, when it converted the gas supply from coal gas to methane, or when Sweden switched to driving on the right.
The current administration seems to carefully avoid competence.
The political appointees overseeing the professional career civil servants have certainly lacked significant competence, and far too many of the civil servants (particularly those longtimers who have the most institutional knowledge of how things work) have escaped into retirement, fled to the private sector or been terminated for not following insane/unworkable directives.