For what it’s worth, the U.S. Mint still produces dollar coins. However, the page on their web site about the various types of coins they produce says this:
In other words, they gave up on the idea of actually getting people to use dollar coins as currency over a decade ago, but still produce them because there’s still a collector demand.
Actually it was first issued in 2007.
I guess that is destined to be the case so long as the $1 Federal Reserve note is still being printed.
My former boss in 2007 was a huge Thomas Jefferson fan (“the last good President”). He got a sack of Jefferson dollars and would gift us one if we did a particularly good job on something.
What a prince of a guy! Don’t spend it all in one place.
Hey, he pays better than Thomas Jefferson paid his workers.
Don’t worry, you won’t be allowed to have any dollar coins. You clearly have an issue with change.
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eta: But, just for the record, you’re one of the more insightful posters here, so I said that all in fun (fun for me, at least…).
Lots of countries mint coins for collectors that aren’t intended for circulation, though they may be legal tender. For instance, the Canadian Mint produces $10, $20, and $50 silver coins and $200 gold coins, all of which are technically legal tender but no one would use them that way because they cost many times their face value. I think the subject here is dollar coins intended for mass circulation and that the US Mint isn’t currently producing such coins.
Yup, that’s the point I was trying to make. (And, as noted upthread, the “new” dollar coin which the OP described was issued in 2007.)
I believe the traditional board response to this is:
“Poster name and content check out!”
The current situation with the dollar coin is very similar to the Canadian 50 cent coin, which is still a plain old circulation-quality coin in a base metal, but demand from banks is so low that it’s only been made for collectors for a couple of decades.
This discussion got me browsing the Canadian Mint site. There’s some really nice offerings there that I’d love to put behind the glass door part of my illuminated bookshelves, but damn – the cost! This lovely $200 gold coin costs $4,899.95! Much more realistic and probably the best value on the whole site would be a similar silver coin with a $20 face value, which goes for $149.95.
This. I remember when you could buy stuff for literally five and ten cents at the five-and-dime, but that was a long long time ago, and might as well have been in a galaxy far, far away. Now, coins are clutter. If I get coins in change, I just bring them home and put them in a jar, and there they accumulate.
I keep a plastic film can (speaking of anachronisms) full of quarters in the car in case I need to park somewhere where the meters take quarters, but even those rarely get used.
People have been (unsuccessfully, alas) trying to get rid of the penny for eons, but really at this point they should scrap the nickel and dime too. A quarter is the smallest denomination that’s even occasionally useful.
To be honest, I already sort of think of quarters as “Aldi shopping cart tokens”.
Note, coins designed for everyday use in circulation are never made of “99.99% pure gold”, anyway. That’s the point of alloys like “crown gold”.
A while ago a study of the change-making problem suggested that the U.S. really needed a 3-cent piece and an 18-cent piece, or something along those lines. But with all the inflation, maybe it is time to re-optimize the denominations (3 cents are not so useful if all the prices in stores are in multiples of 10, for example).
Why? Why don’t you just spend them as you go? I use coins whenever I use cash. I make it a game to minimize the number of coins in my wallet, but it’s not because I revile them. It’s just what you’re supposed to do to prevent having jars full of coins.
If you don’t like them, just refuse them, and leave them as a tip or whatever. The labour involved in storing them until they accumulate enough value to be “worth it,” and then getting them to somebody who will exchange them for “real money” just seems like so much more work than just spending them as you go. But yours is a really common, and perhaps the dominant, perspective, and I’d love it if you or somebody else explained it to me.
Is it performative? “I’m not so poor that coins mean anything to me!”
Is it because your wallet doesn’t have a coin pouch?
Is it because you don’t like doing the math?
These all sound negative, but I don’t mean them to. I’m just so puzzled, and can’t fathom why this is so hard when the rest of the world doesn’t find it so. I do make it a point to have a wallet with a coin thing that shuts, because otherwise they are a bit of a pain to manage.
I rarely leave the house with coins in my possession, unless I know I’ll have a specific need – such as if I have to park in the “daily commuter lot” at the train station, which requires $1.50 (so I grab six quarters).
This is exactly why. I’ve never owned a wallet that had a specific coin pouch. My wallet’s big enough as it is; if it had a coin pouch, I can’t imagine how fat it’d be.
I usually wear Levi’s jeans, which have the little “watch pocket” adjacent to the right front pocket, and that’s where I put change.
If I get change during the day (for those few times when I use cash these days), it goes into that pocket, and unless it so happens that that particular combination of coins helps in another purchase later that same day, those coins then into the coin jar at the end of the day.
I can’t speak for anyone else, but I use cash so rarely in the first place that the opportunity to use the change in some future transaction is slim. So the 76 cents or whatever I got in change is going to bounce around in my pocket for ages. And leaving them as part of a tip feels really janky, probably because it’s literally me dumping the worthless stuff from my pocket. They don’t want pennies any more than I do. It’s going to be a pile of literally pocket lint and other detritus if I don’t pick out the other stuff.
So the coins go in a jar at the end of the day, just as the wadded-up receipts and such so in the trash. This is definitely less work than leaving them in my pocket where they interfere with my keys and tend to fly out if I’m not being careful. And of course I don’t have a wallet with a pocket; it’s big enough as it is with the various cards and such that multiply over time.
At just shy of 50, I’m one of the people who carries cash 4-5 times a year if that. Generally, it’ll be $80-100 in 20s during road travel, where I might not want to accidently leave a CC behind at a place now 100 miles back on the road, or the old paranoid worries about stopping at a place that didn’t take plastic/had a machine down that hasn’t been an issue anywhere I’ve been in over a decade. But it doesn’t hurt.
Normally, said cash will be used, on the return trip, and coin based change will be deposited into any tip option or the like. And the rest will be slowly used up on otherwise unplanned “free” spending (coffee at Starbucks where I wouldn’t normally bother, or a takeout pizza for the wife).
My FiL though mostly pays with cash, then keeps all the change, and once he accumulates enough, (every year or so) the family does a game where everyone guesses at the dollar value of the change. he then takes it to the bank, deposits it, and splits it into 5 equal shares.
The closest gets 2 shares, and everyone else gets one.
It’s kinda neat, but for me and the wife, we look at it as a couple more chores that could be avoided rather than a mini-lottery.