Kind of a poll, kind of a general observation. Mundane on both counts. . .
I’m on a business trip to Washington, D.C. this week, and used the Metro. To get my Metro card, I added paper money to the vending kiosk, and got change in “golden dollars”–the gold colored, Presidentially-faced dollar coins that made an appearance about 10 years ago or so. Remember “the Sackie?” I do. Brought back some fond memories. Admittedly, there were a pair of Susan B. Anthony dollar coins in the mix too.
But after a few minutes of rifling through the collection of Adams, Jeffersons and Van Burens I’d recently acquired, I realized that it was at least a decade since I’d seen any of these things. Nowhere else in the U.S. do they seem to be used. . . at least to my knowledge.
Has the “golden dollar”(both Sackies and Prezzies) thing kind of fizzled out? Is it strictly a D.C. regionalism? Do you use them regularly, or are they more of a novelty? Are they pretty much “collected and hoarded” out of circulation?
I can see the Treasury Department now: “Hey Joe, what do we do with all these bags of things?” “Don’t know, Mike. Put em in machines for change, I guess. . .”
People overwhelmingly get change from retail businesses–and they haven’t seen any value in adding the dollar coin. The average coin drawer has 5 places for bill and 5 for coins. And besides the penny, nickel, dime and quarter the other drawer is usually used for rolls of coins.
I don’t recall seeing a dollar coin anywhere locally–although I suppose you can get them from banks.
The post office machines out here used to give them as change.
I think the real issue is: who uses cash anymore? There’s just not very much use for dollar coins.
When I was in Philadelphia, if you bought tickets for SEPTA (the local medium-range commuter rail) at one of the machines, it’d give you change in dollar coins, too (at that time, Sackies).
It does make sense to give them out in the few vending machine where someone is likely to use a denomination that could give you a substantial amount back in change.
I’ve never seen a vending machine where you can buy a Coke with a $20 bill. If all you’ve got is a wallet full of twenties, then you’ll have to do without.
But for something like a transit station, it does make sense. Especially since the person buying from the machine may not be a local and just have some twenties that they recently obtained from an ATM. If someone is buying a $5 transit card, it wouldn’t make sense to give them an avalanche of quarters as change, plus that would mean the machine would have to be stocked frequently with change.
Of course, getting rid of the $1 and $2 bills and replacing them with the dollar coin would make them easily spendable rather than a novelty.
A couple of years ago I was driving out of a parking garage and realized I had no coins. So I had to use a $20 bill. I got nineteen golden dollars as change, mostly Prezzies, but a couple of Sackies.
havent had to do anything like that since, I don’t know now if it would still work that way.
La county gives them out in change from in their public transportation ticket machines I used the metro link so much that at one point I traded them in for a 20 dollar bill every month
Also the post office gives them out in the few machines that take money (opposed to the atm/cc only machines)
At the rate the cost of a bottle of soda is going up, I’m glad that most take the dollar coins–it beats spending time trying to feed the one-armed bandits moldy dollar bills. In–Out–In–Out…
As mentioned above, dollar coins aren’t given out much because cash vendors don’t want to change their drawers. That’s what it comes down to. Everyone tries to come up with complicated explanations for why dollar coins don’t catch on, and it’s just because of the cash registers. As long as there are dollar bills, they won’t change the drawers. (And we don’t have any inflation to make us change our currency often, the way other countries do.)
It’s not just the cash registers. Even if you magically changed all the registers, the larger retailers that get their change delivered still wouldn’t want to deal with a coin that weighs as much as 26 bills.
No, it’s because no matter what the .gov does to try to get people to use dollar coins, if they don’t withdraw the dollar bill from circulation people won’t change.