That’s not going to happen until inflation makes such a bill necessary in routine commerce. The $100 being taken out of circulation because of concerns about money laundering is more likely.
Dropping the penny and the nickel simplify rounding for humans that are used to rounding to a decimal place. Cash registers and computers wouldn’t have a problem with any system (rounding to 5’s is actually easier).
Not sure I follow your concern about sales tax. There would always be sales tax and it would round to the appropriate place. This is no different than sales taxes now that are specified in fractions of a percent.
You make a good point about the quarter. You couldn’t really have dimes and quarters without nickels.
In any case, there are logical reasons for changing our coins and bills, but I do not think they provide enough benefit over the cost. Especially since physical money is quickly becoming obsolete.
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Presumably the $2 bill would become more popular. So if you pay for a one dollar item with a fiver, you get 2 bills back. One dollar coin might change hands in half of all transactions. Contrast that with the status quo where perhaps the average number of singles that changes hands is (0+1+2+3+4)/5 =2
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The weight issue is a real one for dollar coins. Retailers prefer bills because they don’t want to pay Brinks to haul around that extra weight. In terms of the preceding calculation, one half of a coin still weighs a lot more than 2 bills. Indeed, in the past banks even refused the one-time charge of shipping back Susan B Anthonies in exchange for the far more user-friendly Sackie-coins. And if the banks and retailers won’t cooperate, public preferences are irrelevant.
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None of this applies to the penny issue of course.
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American business can be pretty obstinate. The vending machine lobby mau-maued for a one dollar coin. Then when it was introduced they refused to shell out the $50 per machine necessary to convert them to the new coinage. They thought the mint would pay for that! These were the same clowns who pressured big guv to make the Susan B effectively indistinguishable from the quarter – it would be easier to convert the machines, you see.
Every few months Americans gather here to argue this same question, over and over again.
Every time, people from other countries (such as Australia) where the smallest coins have been removed from circulation come in to offer actual observations about what actually happens when a country does the very thing that Americans are arguing about.
Every time, the dirty furriners are ignored and the Americans continue to argue the same stupid shit back and forth endlessly.
Here’s what happens: nothing. Prices are rounded, you gain about the same amount you lose, and the net benefit of no-one having to mess around with practically worthless coins is considered a profit by everyone. Life goes on, much the same as before, and even the people who argued most for keeping the 1 and 2 cent coins got over it and moved on with their lives and nowadays no-one wants them back.
But, of course, since that didn’t happen to Americans, it didn’t really happen at all.
OK, continue your arguments.
Oh, my previous comment also covers changing the $1 and $2 bills into coins, which we also did years ago. No big difference, nothing dramatic happened.
Which will go first, the penny or the USPS?
People live in other countries? 
Weird.
Why? Just because you like coins? Coins are evil, and they should be eliminated completely. Bills down to the 1 cent level. That’s the ticket!
This seems true on the surface, but if you look a little deeper there is an American inside everyone, everywhere, just struggling to get out.
I did not initially believe in other countries until I ventured far afield from my native Oregon into British Columbia. A vast and exotic land that looked just like home.
Only the price and quality of beer were different. Slightly. This must all be the result of some treaty mistake carried over from the past.
The rest of the countries and continents that I can’t drive to must be inventions of Google Earth.
The Frank is now worth 84¢.
One US penny is now worth less than a fifth of the smallest Swiss coin (5 centimes).
With trillions of dollars in debt, the government seems to have other fish to fry.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again -
The way to get rid of the One Dollar bill and replace it with a One Dollar coin is put Reagan’s face on the coin. The political will would be insurmountable, every Republican would make it ISSUE # 1. And a sizable portion of the public would be enthusiastic adopters.
Hermitian, unfortunately you left out the most likely option.
Option 3: Unable to find a cheap enough alloy as zinc, copper, and nickel prices rise, the Mint introduces the first pennies and nickels made of plastic.
You heathens clamoring for eliminating the one dollar bill are overlooking one crucial thing: it’s extremely difficult to tuck a dollar coin into a stripper’s g-string. Is she going to have to strap a coin purse to her thigh?? Huh??
This is another benefit of eliminating the dollar the exotic dancers will get fives in their g strings. Stimulus all around.
No, it’s worse than that. A franc is worth $1.08 at today’s rate, and the 5c coin weighs less than a U.S. cent.
Our stubborn adhesion to outdated and bizarrely oversize and over-heavy coins gets even better. The largest denomination of Swiss coin is 5CHF, and this coin weighs 13g. By comparison, our closest coin in size, the half dollar, weighs almost the same but is worth less than a tenth of that. Those Swiss! They don’t need heavy chump change like we do, and they have a banknote for 1000CHF. They must be rich. While we clutch our pennies and nickels like a poor miser, unable to comprehend that the numbers would come out even in the end, and our lives could be a great deal more convenient if all the coins were eliminated and/or redesigned to take inflation into consideration (and a couple of new coins added as well).
We haven’t really changed our coins in more than 100 years, except to make them out of cheaper metals. And there’s hardly a single damned thing you can buy with one coin, or even several.
You mean $34,999,999,999.99. (And you have to pay with 1.75 billion $20s, because the store doesn’t take large bills.)
I think this group would include the people who kid themselves that somehow we’ll bring back the gold dollar of 1932, presumably by shuttering must of the federal government. To eliminate pennies and dollar bills, resize other coins downward, and introduce a $5 coin would be a clear surrender to inflation.
When I pay a $3 parking tab with a twenty and get a wad of 17 ragged old one-dollar bills, seemingly as thick as a deck of cards, though, I don’t feel like I’m beating inflation. I can’t imagine why.
Whenever we have these discussions and people make this argument, I have to ask: We should make this determination based entirely on the scenario of the customer buying a single item whose price isn’t divisible by five cents? That’s not how people usually buy things anyway. But I’m not saying by any means you should have to sacrifice that extra penny. The post office could make up the difference by giving you a 1c stamp. Of course, what can you do with a 1c stamp? They’re awkward and have no other useful function than to make up the difference when you need to mail a letter and there’s been a recent increase in the postage rate. Or you could let them pile up until you have forty-four of them, take them to the post office, and ask for a real stamp in exchange for them.
This seems strangely familiar…
There are ways to deal with this situation. Someone has to go to the bank on a regular basis, so why can’t you keep on hand a few hundred dollars in fives and twenties, so when the servers cash out, they can trade all those singles in for larger denominations? Then the singles get traded for larger bills the next time someone goes to the bank, and the cycle repeats.
You might be surprised how many people don’t know this, but you can use any combination of stamps that adds up to 44 cents to mail a letter at the current rate. You could for example, save up 4 one cent stamps and paste them on an envelope with two 20 cent stamps. Or you could go to a Post Office with an envelope that had four 1 cent stamps on it and ask the clerk to put a 40 cent PVI label on the envelope. There are many other possibilities.
And, of course, you could buy your stamps in multiples of 5 and avoid the problem altogether.