Thank you. It makes more sense to me when you put it that way. Speaking for myself, even though I have a change purse in my bag that weighs about 50 pounds, it would play out exactly as you outlined.
I don’t know if I am ready to give up my paper dollars, but now I see the benefit of having dollar coins more heavily circulated.
Maybe I’ll get a few and try to start a trend 
I can’t wait for my W coin!
Actually, does that apply to money? I thought it was just stamps.
Speaking of which, with Carter, Bush and Clinton not being scheduled (so I guess it does apply to money too), is there a provision in the program to issue coins upon their demise? Would it make any difference if it was during the run of the current schedule or not?
Why isn’t Reagan on the list?
Generally the places that have bills worth only pennies are places that have gone through wrenching upheaval and inflation, and not places whose financial infrastructure we should seek to emulate in any way.
Italy used to have coin shortages in the days of the Lira, and I remember when I was last there in the 70s commercial banks were issuing their own notes for 50 or 100 Lire, worth, IIRC, only a few U.S. cents at that time.
The old silver half-dollars and dollars were handicapped by being so large, but they were made that way because the system all had to fit together right, so there’d be twice as much silver in a half-dollar as in a quarter, and four times as much in a dollar, although there I think the silver content of the whole dollar was a little less than that of four quarters due to all the debates about free-silver vs. the gold standard in the 1800s.
But more than their size it was probably their value in the prices of the time; the denomination of the coin was too high; a silver dollar then would have been like having a $20 coin today, and even the most ardent advocates of higher valued coins aren’t supporting a $20 coin. Coins *can[/] be lost; if it were up to me I’d like to see the highest values in circulation being large enough to be useful for some everyday small transactions, but not worth so much you’d kick yourself over losing one.
I like the new Washington. He looks like a badass (NSFW language)
About the till drawers? What are you kidding? Don’t they have those with dividers that you can pop in and out? It’s easy that way to add another place for the dollar coins. It would probably cost 5 bucks to buy one like that in a store that supplies such things. And also, paperclips? Get a freakin paperclip holder, don’t put them in the till.
But i’m going to go on the record that the naysayers here would be surprised at a well thought-out coin system. Here in Denmark, I’d say that most of my purchases end up being done with change. In a bar, a beer might cost 20 kroner. I get back four 20 kroner coins. Easy. I can buy another 4 without reaching into my wallet each time. All I need to do is reach into my pocket and pull it out. They are easy to distinguish here either.
This works really well because most items like this in denmark cost in the tens of kroner, and while they do make .25 and .50 kroner coins, they are rarely used. All of the other coins are useful. I never end up with 20 one kroner coins or what have you. The dollar could work like this if we got rid of the penny and the nickel Then we’d have a pretty good start on a logical system for coins. In denmark it goes like this: small copper, big copper, small silver, medium silver, big silver, small gold, big gold. Obviously these aren’t the real metals, but the value increases with the size of the coin. It helps somehow with the sorting. In the US we could have small silver, big silver, and gold, leaving room for a bigger gold when we want to make the 2 dollar coin. Also the reason why it works so well here is that it’s divided into tenths of a unit. Kind of. A kroner by itself is worthless, so the defacto method of thinking of small purchases is in ten kroner increments. We think in dollar increments in the US. It’s funny how, although this isn’t the exchange rate, a kroner is functionally a tenth of a dollar. a cheap beer in the US is 2 dollars, here it’s 20 kroner. An expensive beer is 5 dollars or 50 kroner. A value meal from burger king is 48 kroner. If we wanted to do this in the US we could simply get rid of the penny and the nickel and have an easy life change-wise.
And yes, we’d still have pennies in our prices, only that the total would be rounded either up or down to the nearest dime, which won’t hurt anyone unless you make a habit of buying 1 cent pieces of candy one at a time. You can even cheat the system! Buy 14 and save 4 cents!
The way some people here go on about vending machines and cash registers, you’d think the economy of all Western Europe came crashing down in flames when everybody had to switch over to the euro.
Before then, Germany had 7 or 8 commonly circulating coins from one pfennig all the way up to 5 marks, and once in a while you even came across 10-mark coins. Somehow they managed to find a place to put them in their tills.
Just for comparison purposes, I’ve included a picture of my results!
On the left you have my Danish money:
20 kr. x 2
10 kr. x 1
2kr. x 2
1kr x 1
53 kr. or 9 dollars. Even if you use the 10 to 1 conversion rate you get 5 dollars 30 cents. This is quite usable. Now I had a random sample of coins from my last trip home lying around. This is on the right, and I had.
five quarters
three nickels
one dime
seven pennies
That totals up to $1.57 which is kind of useless…
And don’t forget, each time you reach into your wallet, you also have to put the change back in your pocket, not to mention the extra hassle of separating the receipt from the coins and dollars.
I’d be totally in favor of dropping the penny and nickel. Why in Og’s name do we need anything smaller than a dime?
People alive today who are old enough to remember the pre-inflation era must think everybody’s nuts today. (Well, they probably do anyway, that’s their job.:D)
Pennies are freaking useless.
Nickels are close to useless.
I kind of liked the disparity between my experiences in Canada and my Canadian friends’ experiences here. See, in Canada, the only green bills are $20s. (I think that’s right) So when my buddy looks in her wallet and sees all that American money, her unconscious lizard brain says “yay! I am rich!” when actually she has maybe $50.
Whereas I go through my bills for coffee and Timbits and subway tickets and Chinese food and suddenly I look in my wallet and I am sad because I am low on bills and it looks like I need to go to an ATM. Then I reach into my pocket and whoa! Loonies and toonies! I have like twenty bucks in here!
I like that little jolt of delight. Ergo, coins.
Good point. I was thinking of making this. People think that getting rid of the dollar bill is some sort of travesty, but in our past we paid for most purchases in small change. If you’re my age (25) talk to your parents. My dad remembers when a coke cost a nickel. A dollar was a big deal to have as a kid.
I’m probably a little younger than your parents’ age, but even I remember that a movie in the afternoon often cost just a buck, or even less. Around that time, there were all sorts of cool airplane models that I could get for a buck or two.
My older brother and I once went on a group campout–I think this was in 1968 and I was 10. My parents handed us each a tenspot for the week, and I was flabbergasted.
Here is a weird one I noticed today (got a handfull of dollars for Vorlon Jr’s school lunch fund)
Half the coins have the edge printing stamped so the top of the letters are twards George, the other half were twards Lady Liberty.
Way to go on the quality control, Mint… :rolleyes:
Not a mistake, just due to the manufacturing process method. See here:
However, there is a mention about omission of the edge writing on some samples (scroll down to the Washington dollar):
The edge lettering on UK 1 pound coins is likewise found facing both “up” and “down” in roughly equal proportions. No way round it without some kind of tedious sorting process to get all the coins the same way up.
You don’t need to put the new dollars loose in your pocket. About 20 fit into a 35 mm film canister where they don’t jingle and they take up very little pocket space.
Well, okay, but I don’t see the point of carting around all the weight of 20 dollars in coins when you could just have a $20 bill in your wallet.
I’m one of the waaaaay pro-coin people but dollar coins come in handy most when you just have 2-5 of them in your pocket–not 20 of them. We still definitely need bills for larger denominations (say, $10 and up).
And down they go!!
My bank stopped getting them. When my current pocketful of eight Washington dollar coins runs out, it’ll be back to bulking up my wallet with singles…
You’d be surprised. At least half of coffee customers do. That shit gets tiring real fast, because they always wait until right before (or right after) I pop open the register. Then they spend five minutes hemming and hawing and jamming their hand into their pocket and counting out coins slooooowly, until I and all of the customers waiting in line want to jam the milk steamer through their head.
FWIW, I still have not seen a single one of these Washington dollars.
Wait, that’s George Washington? I thought it was supposed to be George Scott!
