You know, you could just carry around about a dollar’s worth of coins at a time and gradually spend them down.
It’s come up in other threads. I make a point of having a wallet with a coin pouch, pay with coins when I need to, and it’s really easy. But for reasons that seem primarily cultural, people just won’t. (Which, fine; you do you; I just find human cultural behavior really interesting.)
That’s funny because Walmart was the first big promoter of the first new dollar coins (after the Susan B.)
I won’t because I don’t have any. I refuse to participate. On the very rare occasion that I get change I leave everything except the quarters in the little change thing or just on the counter. The quarters go in my car to use in parking meters every once in a while but even that’s going away. More and more those are using an app.
FYI, Coinstar offers the option of giving you a gift card to Amazon and other retailers, without the transaction fee. That’s what I did the last time I used a Coinstar machine.
That’s whaty they did here in Canada.
Many, many Canadians HATED switching to dollar coins. It was an unpopular move. But within a few years, you had no choice, because dollar bills die quickly. (They are also easily distinguished from quarters.)
actually, I dont know if it’s still true but the postal supplies vending machines in the post office lobby used to give the dollar coins out as change I had a 5 dollar bill and only needed 2 stamps and the 3 something back I got in change was 2 “sackies” and a “suzy” …and the normal change
a security guard told me Collectors were "buying " the sackies by putting in bills and then hitting the return button which gave you your money back but in dollar coins…
A major or minor currency reform may turn out to be successful or turn out a disaster of epic proportions, but in no case is anything decided by asking random dudes what they like or hate. Also goes for interest rate cuts and so on.
Isn’t this a problem that will solve itself? 4.5B pennies minted in 2023 or about ~1.6% of the total circulation. This is down from the most recent peak of 9.4B in 2015.
In fairness minting was even lower in 2009-2010 in the wake of the financial crisis; it may be premature to assume the a permanent downward trend. However one difference is that total coin production dropped during the crisis unlike today where minting higher denominations is increasing.
Aside from the financial crisis, penny production is at the same levels at the late 60’s and early 70’s.
Data from:
In the (USPS) plant I work in, the hot coffee vending machine charges $1.25/serving, but the bill reader has been on the fritz forEVER. If I want to get a cuppa joe, I have to stick a couple of ones in a soda vending machine and press coin return to get Sackies or SBAs.
You would think so, but in my limited experience it doesn’t work for some reason.
I recently shared an AirBnB with my older siblings. My brother left his coin purse which was stuffed full, along with other change loose on the nightstand.
So, now I have a coin purse (one of those ones that opens like a flower) which I carry occasionally, and I find that it somehow accumulates >$1.00. I think it comes down to not wanting to spend the minimal time it would take to fish out exact or coin reducing change.
I can’t remember the last time I saw a (Canadian) vending machine that didn’t allow tapping a credit card.
Our machines also let you do that for an extra dime, but I’ve been resisting that payment method.
Why? This is the future, man. Embrace it. We may not have flying cars, but at least we have this.
Hey, ten cents is ten cents, man.
And to be candid, with what I’ve observed about human behavior during my sixty-eight years, the thought of everybody having the ability to operate several hundred pounds of machinery a couple of thousand feet into the sky that I’m walking around under gives me the willies.
Exactly. It’s basically nothing.
How many cups of coffee do you estimate you buy a year? I’d say no more than 500, and probably much less. 500 cups of coffee is a $50 surcharge, per year, in return for which you save tons of time and don’t have to mess around with cash. Convenience is worth paying for.
Well, yeah. If flying cars were actually viable in safety terms, they would have been invented by now.
I used to have a job where I received tips. Since the tips were settled at the end of the day, on any day the amount of change was less than a dollar. But multiply that by 5 working days and I always had quite a bit of change in my pocket when I went to the grocery store. I did try to spend that change down at the store, but first had to change my habits. I eventually trained myself to reach for the change before getting out the wallet. I found that cashiers were especially happy to get pennies; I was especially happy to get rid of pennies.
That’s my biggest issue. I love to travel light:
• No wallet, just a thin card holder with two credit cards
…and driver’s license and insurance cards.
• Two keys (house and car… just the key, no fob).
• A few bills in my front pocket.
I jettison change whenever I get it, and actually get annoyed when there’s no tip jar or “Leave a Penny” dish (“No place for tips? Okay, I’m going to leave 17 cents on the counter. Pocket it, or give it to the next person. Don’t care, don’t want it.”)
Loose bills or attached to the card holder?
The idea of a vending machine offering a cash discount is blowing my mind.
