I’m sure this is all right and true and correct but – I just can’t get too spun up about the dollar coin. I put it in the same category as eliminating daylight savings time. The change just isn’t worth the headaches. I’d rather our politicians were using their political capital to force changes that are worth the squeeze, like addressing climate change.
When I visited my parents who were living on a U.S. Army base in Germany back in the 1990s, I found that they had already eliminated the penny from circulation over there…and this was 30 years ago! None of the facilities there (including the commissary and PX) would accept or return pennies. If you paid in cash, prices were rounded to the nearest nickel. I was told it was because the U.S. Army was tired of the expense of shipping tons of pennies overseas for change, because people tend to either hoard them in a jar or throw them away. And the reason for this is because they are essentially worthless.
It isn’t.
This has not happened here, AFAIK. Grocery prices, for instance, are often in amounts down to the penny. It’s only the total that gets rounded up, or, by law, rounded down, and then only if you’re paying cash. If you’re paying by debit or credit, the world continues to run as it always did. It’s just that physical pennies no longer exist.
So as I said upthread, basically the same reason that rednecks shot up early metric road signs and America shares with Liberia the dubious honour of being one of the very few countries in the world who haven’t adopted the metric system.
Now that you mention it, I seem to remember that. Ah, America, where the almighty dollar reigns supreme, especially when it’s bribing politicians! 
I can’t really disagree with that sentiment, except to point out that the alleged “headaches” are mostly imaginary, and the resistance to change is almost entirely political and regressive.
FWIW, I agree with all of the above, and honestly, (a) and (c) are pretty much the same reasons why we still have dollar bills, too. A significant fraction of Americans hate change, and hate, even more, a proposed change that’s backed with evidence based on “many other countries have done this, and it’s been a great success.”
With the rise of inflation, I think now, or actually probably after the election, is the best time in a long time to revisit the idea of overhauling the cash supply.
At this point I don’t consider a dollar to be money I consider it to be change. You can’t buy much of anything for a dollar. Dollars are what you get after you bought something for a five or more likely 20 dollar bill and got some money back. And then use them just so that you don’t get more. In other words change.
If I ran the circus, we would have 10 cent 50 cent and dollar coins, and then 5, 20 and hundred dollar bills. I don’t see any reason to bother with anything less than tenths of a dollar, we got rid of the half penny coin in 1857 when it the penny was the equivalent of about 36 cents, and cash was much more important. So rounding to the nearest 10 cents shouldn’t be a heavy lift.
Seriously: who is asking them? The Secretary of the Treasury? Congress?
I’d guess that a bigger factor will be how many Americans have gone cashless.
A 2022 Pew Research study indicated that, at that time, 41% of Americans say that, in a typical week, they do not use cash for any purchases at all (up from 29% in 2018). Conversely, only 14% say that they use cash for all, or most, of their purchases. Those who still use cash are more likely to be lower-income, and (not surprisingly) those who usually have cash on hand tend to be older.
As going cashless grows, the resistance against getting rid of pennies (or dollar bills) is likely to decline.
When the nickel 5 cent coin was introduced, did people claim to be stumped by it being the “same size” as a quarter?
That was way back in 1866. At that time a nickel was the only price for anything sold in the US. Just talk to anyone older than you for a while and they’ll tell you how everything used to cost a nickel.
But they had bees on them.
Well… Hockey season…
Gimme 5 bees for a quarter you’d say.
Well, I don’t know about asking, but the latter is why the new Catalyst series of bills (still scheduled to start with the ten in 2026 but we’ll see) doesn’t include a change to the one dollar bill. That design is fixed by law. And it doesn’t include the two because they barely print the two.
Fourteen years ago I started a thread complaining about some idiot who borrowed money from me and eventually paid me back with 50 dollar coins.
Replies pretty much mirror the replies in this thread.
I vaguely remember that thread!
What’d you do with your fat pile o’change in the end, anyway?
I’d forgotten, so I looked through the 14 year old thread. I exchanged them at the bank for real money.
Yep, right down to the first response you got.
My opinion hasn’t changed over the intervening years. I don’t hate change, I hate change.
Exactly!
I like the dollar coin and am in favor of dumping the penny and nickel, but this stat shows why the point is moot. There’s much bigger savings going from paper to plastic then going from paper to zinc.
For anyone interested, the GAO has an interesting graph of the year by year savings that aggregates into 5.5B in 30 years in the highlights doc here:
It includes the upfront costs as well.
That was minted in 2011? This is the first time I’ve encountered one. Shows you how little I’ve seen them.
If that coin was gold colored it was very faint, nearly non existent.