Sounds to me like there are a lot that are “in circulation” if you define that as having been released from the Fed into the commercial banking system for distribution to the public.
I bet a very large amount of $2 currency is sitting in commercial banks’ secure storage because none of their branches see any demand to hand the bills out. Perhaps if they stocked them in ATM’s, but I’ve never encountered that.
I’ve told this story before.
I used to work with a pilot who was quite short and looked and sounded exactly like Mickey Rooney in the height of his celebrity when Mickey was in his 40s. My coworker’s natural regional accent was close to Mickey’s and he’d long since perfected imitating the mannerisms and detailed accent.
Anyhow, in the airline biz it’s cultural that everybody tip $1 to the van driver who runs you between airport and hotel. Per person it’s not much, but at $20 or so per round trip, it adds up to a decent addition to the shit wages.
Ol’ “Mickey” always tipped using the Sacagawea gold-colored dollars. As he handed over the coin he’d intone: “Here, my good [man / woman]; have a gold doubloon for your troubles.” With heavy emphasis on the “Doublooooon”.
Cracked me up every time he did it. Especially when the drivers who were recent immigrants looked at the coin all funny trying to figure out what it was.
You can mess with the clairvoyants and telepaths. But you don’t want to annoy the pyrokinetics.
The mill is used every day in theoretical form as gas prices are $X.XX9
I worked in a bank during the middle of the Presidential dollar coin releases. Multiple coin hoarders would hit the teller windows the day of each new coin’s release. Buying up multiple rolls each time. Although we were the largest retail banking location category in a Big 4 banking company, more often than not we wouldn’t get them the first day.
We would also get people seeking $2, specific series of $100 bills (travelling to a different country like the Philippines where businesses accept USD but were wary of certain types). And the silver dollar people would come every one in awhile, but pretty fruitless as it was rare, and I and many others would’ve grabbed them myself first anyway (legally by exchanging my own money).
I think another significant factor is that businesses hate them. Cash register trays don’t have a slot for them, so they have to be handled carefully lest they end up bundled with some other denomination, and cause a mis-count.
They can also confuse staff members who aren’t familiar with them. We’ve heard stories here of people accused of counterfeiting because clerks, managers, and even police officers weren’t aware that they’re real notes.
So businesses deposit them ASAP, and (with rare exceptions) never order fresh ones from their banks to distribute.
I actually was given one yesterday! By a woman. (I was collecting donations and she dropped a $2 in the bucket.) I told her that was cool and I rarely saw them.
wasn’t there also something called the mil (sp)?
Steve Wozniak had a blog post about buying an uncut sheet of perforated $2 bills, and then having them pulled apart and made into a tear-off pad, rubberized at one end. He says he tipped a waitress in Vegas once by pulling out the pad in front of her, tearing off a $2 bill for her. Not unpredictably, the casino security showed up shortly to interview him. Then the Secret Service tracked him down and asked more questions. (He took the opportunity to provide them his home-made ID card which showed his occupation as “Laser Inspector” and the photo was him with an eyepatch).
@Kimstu brought that up in post #9. It’s a nominal unit of coinage, but the Mint has never made a mill coin.
On the other end of the unit spectrum, there’s supposedly a unit called the Union, which is 10 Eagles or $100. AFAIK, there’s never been a coin or bill denominated in Unions.
There was never an official US $3 bill but I have one printed and circulated in Maryland back in the 1800’s
If you could afford to, it might have been smart to keep the bill (paying $500 of your own money in exchange). The bill would never be worth less that face value, and a collector might have given you more.
This. Very much this. We actually don’t even stock $10 bills in our registers. We take them, along with $50 bills and $2 bills, but those are all an extra burden.
I mean, I don’t know what is behind the decision not to stock tens, but I suspect it’s actually our money-handling machines. If we regularly used tens, we would need another bin in the machines for sorting and dispensing. We take tens, fifties, and twos, but our machines won’t dispense them. Instead they go into the big bin for the cash deposit to the bank.
Which is annoying to the occasional customer who comes in looking specifically for tens or fifties. If I don’t actively have one in my till from a prior customer, I have no way of getting them out of the vault.
So even if we replaced all the registers with a till with an extra slot for twos, the change to all the bill handling equipment would make it prohibitively expensive.
A lot of people seem to think they’re defunct, but they’re still being printed, though not every year. Since 2019, at least 396 million $2 bills have been printed, more than enough for every man, woman, and child in the country to have one each [ cite ]. Not surprisingly, it is the least printed current bill, with each of the other denominations being produced by the billions in the same time period.
The Trade Dollar (1873-1885) is a questionable case. I think its legal face value was $1, a denomination that of course is still being produced. But it wasn’t really the same as a standard silver dollar of the day. It contained almost 2% more silver than the standard US dollar coin in order to compete with the Mexican peso for use in international trade. Its use in domestic transactions was initially limited by law, later essentially banned. In practice it was sometimes worth more or less than a standard US dollar coin, depending on the relative market values of gold and silver bullion. When silver bullion prices fell relative to gold during the 1870s, the melt value of both silver dollars fell. Standard US silver coins could still be exchanged for gold coins at face value, and could still be used to satisfy debts and pay taxes, keeping their high face value, well above melt value. But Trade Dollars could not so be easily exchanged or spent, so their value approximated their low melt value, despite containing a little more silver than the standard dollar. Their status as legal tender domestically is complicated. Initially they were legal tender, but only for debts of $5 or less. Later, their status as legal tender was removed entirely. In 1995, long after it really mattered in practice, their status as legal tender was restored.
Another odd coin was the “half dime”- which was not a Nickle. It was very small and minted of silver. The coin turned out to be too small, and was discontinued.
But yes, now the penny is discontinued, and some people are up in arms, altho several other coins were also discontinued in the past, as several excellent posts and examples mentioned.
That’s great.
Did you mean 1965?
Yes, sorry. It’s in the Coinage Act of 1965. I believe the relevant part is section 102:
All coins and currencies of the United States (including Federal Reserve notes and circulating notes of Federal Reserve banks and national banking associations), regardless of when coined or issued, shall be legal tender for all debts, public and private, public charges, taxes, duties, and dues.
My brother once discovered a half dime embit edded in a stair railing. As you might imagine it was a tiny silver coin. I just googled it and found it was actually the first coin produced by the US mint in 1792 and discontinued in 1873. A coin dealer offered him 5 c. for it.
Back when state sales tax was ~1%, in Missouri, there were 1-mil (red) and 5-mil (green) plastic tokens for that. Besides being useless when taxes were rounded, IIRC, the issuance of state-backed money violated federal statutes for coinage.
I had a couple of those plastic mills in my coin collection, long ago. IIRRC they were smaller than a dime and made from a soft plastic, so they could be bent.
OTOH if the Mint made pennies like that, they would complain they were too expensive to produce.