If they require that all the new technology required to support this in the US be designed, built, installed, & supported by US citizens, then I am for it!
Hell yes, they should have to revamp the currency, and bring out the one and five dollar coins while they are at it.
They should use different size notes and Braille markings, drop the $1 note, and revamp the coins similarly.
I can’t believe how fixated we are in this country on dollar bills and pennies, the latter of which actually cost more to make than they are worth, as do nickels. And we’re fixated that everything must remain exactly the same.
There’s nothing in the Constitution that says the Treasury or Federal Reserve can’t unilaterally change the coins or notes. There’s no Amendment that enshrines the right of any or every American to continue using coins of infinitesimal value.
I’m glad of the ruling, maybe finally something will change.
I suppose that won’t happen. They just went through this in Europe, so surely much of that work will be reused.
Wow…that’s a compliment I haven’t heard.
I always thought our currency was rather ornate but dry, like a 1920s era stock certificate. And with all the natural wonders we’ve got here, no one seems to have thought of using it on the money. Some interesting possibilities exist–for example, instead of the boring old Treasury Building on the back of the $10 bill, why not have a picture of El Capitan? Or the Grand Canyon?
THough you apparently never noticed, they do have dollar coins. No one uses them becaue they are annoying to cart around compared ot bills. People use bills because they like them. Good wallet material. Money manufacture doesn’t need to make a profit: it’s there to grease the wheels and be what people need to get around. Before greenbacks, people used banknotes for the same reason.
As far as the general situation, I don’t care if they want to emboss more, but I don’t want to see some different currency sizes. Generally speaking, screw the jerks who came out with the lawsuit. Life doesn’t have to suit you.
I see. Screw them poor blind people who are forced to rely upon the kindness of strangers to make sure that they aren’t cheated in monetary transactions involving folding money. :dubious:
It will be interesting to see what gets done to comply. Personally, I, too think this may be the end of the dollar bill, thankfully.
Who says reform of note design is only for the blind?
Sighted users would benefit if bills had varied colors–& not this subdued crap we’re getting now: actual bright color variation, with a red bill, a green bill, a yellow bill, etc.
Everybody would benefit from varied lengths &/or widths.
Step back & think: if the cent, the nickel, the dime, the quarter, the half dollar, & the dollar coin were made all the same size & the same alloy, people would flip out! Remember what they said about the Susie B?
So why is it OK for the one, two, five, ten, twenty, fifty, & hundred all to be made of the same material & at the same dimensions, printed in subdued colors?
It’s not neurosurgery, y’all.
Sometimes you just gotta change things.
Actually that’s not quite accurate. Search the link below for “armored” and you’ll read that the coins never had a real chance to circulate. The armored carriers were reluctant to retool and basically refused to carry the coins on any meaningful scale. This means that the vast majority of retailers didn’t get them, which means they virtually never got given out as change.
The coins never got a chance. They have never been anything other than curiosities rarely to be found at banks, rather than circulating coin. More than a few people around here seem to like them; if the people who liked them could get them, they would circulate even alongside the dollar bill.
While that may be true about the older Sacas, the current dollar coins can be found at your local bank any time you want. They are not in short supply.
People don’t use them because they are used to using dollar bills. Remove the bills, and people would switch to coins just fine, just as they did in Canada.
The last ATM I used dispensed three different currencies. Maybe Azerbaijan* has some sort of super secret technology not available in the US :dubious:
*note, ATM manufactured by Diebold
(I dealt with the euro changeover in 2002 while i worked closely with the vending machine and ATM industy. From this I can reassure you on at least 2 of these points:
ATMs are loaded with cannisters that can accommodate a variety of note sizes. I have no reason to believe that the ATMs in the states are any different to the ATMS used anywhere else (Diebold for example makes many ATMS over here). The banks will have a one time cost of replacing some cannisters, that is all.
The note acceptors on vending machines are reprogrammable. You add/remove currencies by hooking up a laptop to them and downloading some new files. The amount of work to do so is about 5 minutes per reader.
In addition to these 2 I don’t believe the cash drawer submission, nor the wallet one. Both will likely work perfectly.
(Deeply own opinion only section)
The downsides from what I can see are being exaggerated by people who plain don’t want to make reasonable changes precisely because every other country does it this way and changing would be admitting that America isn’t the best at something. Helping out the blind and partially sighted should be more important than pride. I would also note that even though I have decent (when I have my glasses on) eyesight, colour differences in notes would make my life far easier when travelling to America, last time i lived in mortal fear of handing over the wrong note to a cashier.
I agree with you, but the fact is, many people do end up carrying lots of singles, for the same reason we end up with pennies mulitplied 100 times. They tend to accumulate as we buy things over time, partly (in my opinion) because of the penny/change/coin issues. A person usually needs both hands to get money out of a wallet. So let’s say you buy something that costs 15.24--chance are you aren't going to look in your pocket or change compartment for .24. You might, instead, pay with a single and a twenty, and get $5.26, but chances are you’ll just put down the twenty and get $4.76 back.
All you coin haters: We will prevail! Just you wait. And after that we’re going to make everybody start switching the way we use commas and decimal points in money amounts. And after that we’ll start writing the dates dd/mm/yyyy.
(I kid, I kid).
I have to concede our government has done a pretty horrible job with the dollar coins. The metal is ugly except when they are brand new, and they aren’t tactile-friendly, in my opinion.
To really address the issue of tactility we would have to change everything. One requirement is that even though the coins no longer contain valuable metals, they should be designed as if they did, so that there is a correlation between size and value. Something like –
Minor coins as follows:
[ul]
[li]eliminate the penny[/li][li]change the nickel to the size of a dime, but no “reeding” (tiny grooves along [*]the edge). Change the dime so it is of the same composition as the new nickel, but exactly twice its weight[/li][/ul]
.
For higher value coins:
[ul]
[li]Develop another alloy for higher denominations. The look and feel should say [/li]“Valuable”; it should at least look like silver or gold and retain its appearance over time.
[li]Coins in this group are reeded, so they can be identified by touch in the pocket. Continuing as with the small coins,[/li][li]have the dollar coin about the same size as they are now, but with the reeded edge.[/li][li]the new “quarter” is exactly one-fourth the weight.[/li][li]A two-dollar coin is exactly twice the weight. [/li][/ul]
Trust me on this, this’ll fix everything.
[side note]My father, a retired doctor who practiced from the early 1950s to about 1990, has told me that being able to identify coins in the pocket was once a common quick test for evaluating a person’s sense of feel. An obvious difference from a time when people used to use coins more.[/side note].
Grease the wheels? Hah!
I suppose the “take a penny/leave a penny” containers, and the Coinstar machines where people gladly pay 8.5 cents on the dollar just to have their ‘change’ turned back into ‘cash’ indicate that the wheels have been successfully greased.
Of course you are right, but we have too many hidebound reactionaries down here.
Changing things like this, down here, isn’t neurosurgery, it’s neuro-rocket-Spock’s-Brain-transplant-moonshot-bitte-ein-Bratwurst-surgery.
In other words, next to impossible.
I’ve seen ATMs in northern Mexico that let you choose pesos or dollars.
I used to ask for them at the bank, but they usually didn’t have them so I gave up trying. For any coin or note to circulate on a significant scale, they have to get from the banks to the retailers, and that isn’t happening. You know how you can get $20 back at the grocery store and ask for it in fives, or tens, or whatever, and get what you want? That level of availability is what needs to happen with the dollar coin before one can say that the public reject it.
Disclosure: my mother is a member of the organization which brought the suit.
Now, that said, it’s unclear to me why people are screaming about the court’s decision. Congress passed a law. That law has to be followed.
Is anyone in this thread taking the position that the law does not mandate some change to the money?
But only if it isn’t overturned on appeal, right?
It might put a lot of small ATM and Vending Machine companies out of business. As it would require them to replace their entire product line. That’s a little different from putting in handicap ramps.