[QUOTE]
*Originally posted by Necros *
**Ukulele Ike said:
I’d say the worst culprit was the Treasury itself.
I know this was a j/k post, but what the hey. If the dollar bill gets eliminated in favor of the dollar coin, the $2 bill might catch on.
Even strippers deserve a raise. 
As a matter of fact, at my office, the vending machines take dollar coins - either Sacky or Susie. The change machine gives you dollar coins - for ones, fives, tens, or twenties. I think it’s a lot more convenient to get dollar coins if I only have a five or ten than quarters, and then get to use them in the vending machines. I’ll be sorry to see them go.
One question, though - are they really being discontinued in the long run, or are they just not minting more right now because they have an inventory built up? Jeff Olson pointed out that CNN quoted the Treasury as saying they have a lot already. Is this really a policy shift, or just short term inventory management?
Hmmm, I must confess, I had this image of the poor women on stage getting pelted with coins…
But… it brings to mind that I don’t think most club goer’s would be willing to tip five bucks (or not so often), is the two dollar bill still being made? This may seem frivolous, but given that this is their livelihood, would have a definite impact. Regardless of moral judgement of their chosen profession, this would be a consideration for them.
I’m not championing strip dancers here, just after the above post, I thought about it a little further. Honestly, I’m going to use the strip club as an example becuase I’m drawing a blank on anything else. Can anyone think of other jobs that this might impact?
Hey, tip her with a $5 spot – you’ll be surprised at the change! 
I have seen a square coin. It was a 5 cent(or centavos or something) piece. The corners were rounded to prevent cutting and poking-clearly a good thing for something carried in a hip pocket.
A square dollar coin would be easily distinguishable, even to the blind. Corners were tried on the Susan, but there were to many. A Susan may look sharp edged, but they feel round.
As a flea market scavenger, I carry a lot of dollar bills. The Sackie was much to heavy for me. Why couldn’t they have made them weigh less?
I think the gold color was detrimental as well. I’ve seen that color on arcade tokens and a coin that comes on a tequilla bottle. As a result, the Sackie never looked like real money to me.
RE other coins-Here in PA, a local call is 35 cents. I assume that this is true in a number of other states as well. A quarter and either a dime or two nickels are perfect here. Using two quarters does not get you change. Instead you receive “fifteen cents overtime credit”. Transfers on local buses and trains are 60 cents. Again, you receive no change. I always carry dimes and nickels. Pennies pile up in my place. but that’s all.
In China they hardly use coins at all. Even the smallest change is generally bills.
And it looks like that’s where we’re headed. :rolleyes:
I’d rather achieve a cashless economy than have that happen.
Little change purses shall be built into the garters.
It is the wave of the future.
Do not resist.
It’s not just what the government saves on production costs. The public would save by not having to deal with accumulated hoards of tiny-value coins. Any way you want to look at it, such hoards represent a cost to you. If you never bank it, the money’s basically lost to you. You might just have well have thrown it down a storm drain. OTOH, if you do bank it, you have to spend the time to count and pack it for the bank. My bank also makes me put my account number on the rolls. And if you take it to one of those “Cash For Coins” machines (the phrase cash for coins really says it all), you have to pay a fee there, too. That’s the ridiculous part. You worked to earn the money once, and then after it’s degenerated into a pile of pennies and nickels, you have to work again to render it into a useful form.
Not having that problem would resonate with me. I do try to avoid having coins pile up, but it takes a conscious effort to remember to spend them.
Well, Javaman, if you are sufficiently well off that you consider dealing with change to be unnecessary work, might I suggest, not snittily but with sincerity, that you might consider taking handsful of the change that you don’t want to bother with and dumping it into collection units for any and all charities that you feel are worth supporting, or accumulating it and once a month taking the time to drop the whole lot of it off at the office of the one you support most strongly?
There are large numbers of people in the world who would find having even a small supply of U.S. coins to be a plethora of wealth. There are groups trying to do good for one cause or another that are suffering from lack of funds. What is a problem to you would be a blessing to them.
Think it over, and see if it isn’t worth your while to do so.
Wha?
I take them to my bank, in a big tub. They dump the tub in a hopper which sorts and counts the changes. They then give me bills.
No charge, nothin’
I’d recommend getting a different bank!
Fenris
Wrong. Quarters also exist to go into the coin-fed laundry and vending machines on college campuses. Dimes exist for when you run out of quarters.
Quarters and dimes are also useful on toll roads like the Garden State Parkway, where the tolls are 35 cents. It’s much easier to toss a quarter and a dime in the basket in an exact change lane than to go to a lane with an attendant.
In a completely unrelated matter, a White Castle hamburger costs 47 cents plus tax.
Maybe you’ll have to exchange real money for a club specific form of paper cash, much like when you take actual money into a video arcade and you have to exchange it for tokens you can only use there?
The reason the Sac coin is the same size as the Susan B. is the vending organizations in the country. Changing the size of the coin would have meant retooling every vending machine to use the new size. It would have cost millions of dollars and a lot of time. So the Sac dollar had to have the same physical size and the same electrical resistance as the Susan B.
I have to say, having traveled in both Canada and Australia, I like their lack of paper dollars. I didn’t find them inconvienent at all.
Strip clubs would offer fake money. I have danced at clubs that did this for credit cards (then the fake money was exchanged by the dancers at the end of the night, unfortunately for 80cents to the dollar…bastards…)
I spent a lot of time in the Philippines, and somtimes I think the US system is headed there. Coins exist and are in circulation from 5 pesos down to 5 centimos. 10 five centimo coins are worth about .01 American. The bills range from 10 pesos (.20) to 1000 ($20). I would routinely be walking around with a huge wad of bills that would include several thousands. Of course, you also have to take into account that local public transportation was 3 to 5 pesos, and labor and goods dependant upon labor are dirt cheap compared to the US.
I find change useful. I never, ever, spend change for anything. I always spend the next higher bill amount, and pocket the change. I toss all my change into plastic tubs, and when they are filled, take them into the bank. My old bank required that they be rolled and have the account number on them, but my current bank told me that they preferred loose change, because it gives them a more accurate count. Anyway, I seem to spend about the same amount each month, but by saving change, I end up with an extra $30 at the end. This is called “invisible income”, as it seems to come from nowhere. Every six months or so, I add this to my savings for whatever luxury item I’m currently saving for (HDTV right now). For this reason, I find low value coins useful.
However, I wouldn’t mind seeing the penny done away with (the govt. profits from pennies, otherwise they’d be long gone) and the only way I can see for the dollar coin to be accepted is to eliminated bills.
As for the inconvenience of carrying around a lot of them, I never have more than four or five singles at any time anyway. Personally, I think we should eliminate the penny, and convert the dollar and five dollar denominations to coins only. I also thought that the redisigned bills should have been different colors, but nobody listened to me then either.
Sigh. It’s just like every other problem in the US. There is no problem so great that it could not be solved if people would simply do as I say.
Umm… I did my part to make those coins work. Working, in what is now (I’m told by CNN) the largest buisness in the history of human civilization, I did my best to get them into regular use. I stopped using $1 bills when giving change, unless they complained about it. Dollar coins come in these cute stubby little rolls, and I really plowed through them. The vast majority of folks I gave them to got a kick out of the experience, but that was it.
Let’s face it-- Joe American never thought this was a serious attempt at coinage reform, it was just a neat shiny coin. Something to keep, and maybe a few more to give the kids.
Every once and a while, I run across one that has been around for a bit. This is where the coin’s big flaw shows up. THEY DON’T STAY SPARKLY AND GOLDEN! More like a big dirty penny. Great, let’s punish people for using their money by making it degrade every time it’s touched. It’s no fun when a coin you spend is stained permanantly by your own thumbprint.
Keep the diameter, but make it twice as thick. And don’t let them get so grubby so fast. Then, when there’s no possible way to mistake it for another one, you might be able to slap a few coins on the bar and feel like yer in a cowboy movie…
Opal is right, titty bars love to use their own currency, as arcades do.
Oh, and the penny is dead. There is nothing left in the U.S. that can be purchased with it. Our armed forces already understand this.
(I’m in the pit? And delurking here? Aww shit, fuck you too, and first.)
You think you’ll have problems in strip clubs in the US? Think about the trouble poor old Itlay had on changing to the Euro. Before the Euro, the smallest Italian bank note was a 1000 lira note (about 45-ish US cents). The smallest note now is 5 Euros, which is worth about ten times as much.
(A news item about the solution can be found here, but since I didn’t see it on any major news sources, I am taking this with a pinch of salt. For one thing, do Euros stick to magnets? The basic facts are true, though.)