Hello, Momaw, and welcome to your chair. I was calibrating my bifurcator when your post came in.
You have no way of knowing this, but the dollar coin mystery is something we have ceremonially danced around many times in the past. As you may know, the current US dollar coins are being issued with images of our past presidents on them. The improvement over the Susies and the Sackies is that the edge of the new series is smooth, with the words In God We Trust along the circumference. That makes it easier to spot a dollar by feel. The Susies and Sackies edges were milled, like a quarter is.
Despite the improvement, the new coins are being thrown into people’s sock drawers just as fast as the Mint can spit them out. In one way, that’s good, because folks pay a dollar for each one, and it costs a fraction of that to make them. In every other way, the coin is still a failure. I made a point of spending them, and cashiers routinely mistook them for quarters. The Sackies are spent so seldom that a supermarket checker once took one of mine to her boss to make sure I wasn’t trying to pull a fast one. She had never seen one. I’m told the president coins are out there in the millions, but I have yet to see one.
The fifty-cent pieces, sporting Franklin or Kennedy are no longer in circulation. Many millions are out there, in millions of sock drawers. They’re so unusual that a certain rapper decided he could stand out by calling himself Fifty Cent. ![:stuck_out_tongue: :stuck_out_tongue:](https://emoji.discourse-cdn.com/twitter/stuck_out_tongue.png?v=10)
In previous discussions here, the grumping settled down to two tracks. The nuisance track says nobody needs more coins in the pocket. The pull the bills track says the Canadian dollar coin, or Loonie, succeeded only because the government took all the dollar bills out of circulation.
With this quick summary, now you know most of what we have muttered about the dollar and half coins in the last several years.
On preview, I see that Mama Zappa told of putting $175 together from cookie money, and she didn’t mention any dollar coins at all. She also talked of the nuisance of handling piles of coins. Woops! Where’d that Sackie go?