It was even easier since they tarnished and looked black. I once collected them, but then gave them away to a cousin who was collecting coins.
In Canada, when they made the loonie, they stopped printing $1 bills. When they made the loonie, they stopped printing $2 bills (which, unlike in the US, were generally circulated). That’s how you get people to use them. On the other hand, I have seen Canadian half dollars only when touring the mint. I also saw a $1,000,000 coin. It was .99999 pure gold and weighed, I think, 10 kg. I tried lifting it (it was securely chained down) and it was heavy.
In addition to saving the mint (i.e. the Government) a good sum of money, I thought that one of the main reasons Canada introduced the ‘loonie’ and the ‘twonie’ was because of pressure from vending machine operators.
You’d think that such a small and obviously self-interested group would be a minor player but I seem to recall that their constant importuning for the introduction of the one and two dollar coins was a significant factor (how ‘significant’ is measured, no clue).
All of this is to suggest that if you really want a dollar or two dollar coin in the US, you should start lobbying the vending machine people to lobby the feds.
The “sandwich” dime and quarter never had any silver. Beats me why the 1/2 dollar did, unless it was a Kennedy thing. Ben Franklin was on the 1/2 dollar until 1963; when Kennedy was assassinated, there was a rush to put him on a coin, and then so soon after, reducing the value of the coin may have looked odd.
Until, IIRC, 1864, there were no nickel 5 cent pieces, there was a silver coin called a half-dime. It was tiny, but not as tiny as the silver 3-cent piece minted in, again, IIRC, 1862. Stamps were 3 cents, so people wanted a small 3-cent coin, instead of lugging around a penny and a 2-cent piece, or 3 pennies. The coin was too small, though, so the 3-cent nickel came along, and was pretty popular. It about the size of a dime, but had a smooth edge. Then postage went up again, and the coin was dropped.
Quite. I think this was the first time that the Philadelphia mint used a P.
I hardly ever have cash anymore. I buy even things that are just a couple of dollars on my debit card. This is normal now, and no one questions it.
I guess it would have to do with not wanting to mess around with bill acceptors anymore. as I said before, most vending machines I’ve encountered recently will accept any dollar coin from the Susan B. to the most recent Dead White Guy series (full disclosure, two weeks ago I encountered one which rejected them.) But the number of times I’ve run into a vending machine with a non-functioning bill acceptor is quite high. I can see how a bill acceptor would be a rather more fragile and expensive thing.
They apparently reside at the bank that I work at. We have a quirky customer whose retirement investment plan involves having part of his paycheck given to him in half-dollar coins. Not at all sure how he arranged this - seems like a pain in the ass - but he brings the “left-overs” into my bank on a monthly basis. He usually brings in about four or five boxes of half-dollars in official-looking wrappers and boxes. We just store them in the vault, and then sell them to the armored truck people.
Five cent coins went from being a silver “half dime” to being a “nickel” in 1866.
People didn’t “want” a three cent coin to buy a stamp, the government wisely thought that since they weren’t making enough small coins for change, making a three cent coin was smart. Postage didn’t go up. It remained the same until the 1960’s.
One thing that really hurts the half dollar is a lot of vending machines will not take them. Which brings up the obvious questions: were the coins always this big, and why didn’t the Mint redesign the half dollar coin so it would be more readily accepted?
They tried that with the ‘silver’ dollar when they came out with the Sackie. The good news is that it would work in vending machines. The bad news is that nobody liked them, and people often confused them for quarters. It’s been years since I’ve received a Sackie in my change. The alternative would have been to redesign vending machines to accept ‘silver’ dollars, but vendors aren’t going to do that.
Personally I’d like to see old-style dollar coins and half-dollar coins. But I almost never use vending machines. When I do, I’m likely to use a credit card. Nowadays, I’ll bet there are machines with which people can use their smart phones (which I don’t have).
That’s the direction that we are going which will make the whole thing with dollar bills versus coins moot. People will use NFC enabled credit cards or smart phone aps with vending machines in short order and they won’t even take bills and coins anymore. Smartphones will also increasingly be used for person to person transactions. I rarely use cash these days and when I do it’s generally for things where we don’t want the transaction to be recorded.
This confuses me. They’re substantially larger and heavier, they’re a different color, and they have a plain or inscribed edge. Are there a lot of people who don’t know whether something is a penny or a dime, or a nickel or a quarter?
But I also read once that when the UK introduced the 50p coin a few years before the switch to decimal money, there was a period where it was confused with the existing Florin despite being a completely different shape, so maybe people just aren’t good at dealing with new things.
Actually, all the different US bill denominations are different colors. Admittedly, they aren’t big bold in-your-face colors. They’re more subtle, but they are different. The only two denominations with the same color are the $1 and $2, because neither has been significantly redesigned in something like 90 years or so. But as this thread shows, the $2 doesn’t circulate enough to make that an issue. The new $100 is strikingly different due to that very visible purplish security ribbon on it.
As for size, a few years ago, the Bureau of Engraving/Treasury Dept. lost a court case about bills not being distinguishable by blind people. So they’re under court order to do something about that. Making them different sizes would do it, but since various money processing devices (e.g. bill acceptors, the devices that take bills at vending machines) all want a single size bill, that may not happen. They will probably come up with something else. So far that only new bill that’s been redesigned since that court order is the $100, but that was already so far in progress that they probably couldn’t do anything about it.
The “that” refered to is changing the size of the dollar coin. Just a nitpick, but the size changed with the Susan B Anthony dollar, not the Sackie. The Susan B has a milled edge, making it easy to confuse with the quarter when you were just feeling it in your pocket rather than seeing it. The Sackie has a smooth edge because of the complaints about that. But the Sackie is the same size as the Susan B.
When I worked at a fast food place, I had a customer who wanted to pay for a $3.00 order with 12 Susan B. Anthony dollar coins. He had them confused with quarters, so in his mind he had 12 times 0.25 coins for $3.00. No, I didn’t take them all and keep them for myself. I explained to him he was trying to give me 12 dollars and I only needed to take three of them for his order. But I did replace them with three one dollar bills out of my pocket.
Well, I never had any problem telling the difference when I could see them. I expect most people were the same, but there’s always a few people with, shall we say, less on the ball than the norm.
I guess I’m going against the tide here, but I vastly prefer bills to coins. I never liked walking around with a pocket full of loonies and toonies in Canada (or Drachma in Greece in pre-EU days), as it was uncomfortable and looked goofy. And it wore my pockets out.
But I always suspecte the real reason they did it was to get people to regard the one and two dollar denominations (or 100 Dr) as “small change” and thus spend more if for no other reason than to get rid of the weighty coins.
If I had a Kennedy half dollar, I’d try to combine it with anotherhalf dollars’ worth of other coins and change it for a dolar bill, or spend it ASAP.
As an aside, I nominate the bronze 100 Drachma coin from 1992 (the “Megas Alexandros”) as one of the coolest looking coins ever. Whereas some of the Canadian loonies --the ones without the loon— are the epitome of insipidness.
But having said all that, the one thing that REALLY bugs me about US coins is that unlike the coins from just about everywhere in the whole damn world, they have no numerals on them to indicate their value. Why is this?
When the US money was originally set up every 10x increase was a new unit name. We had mills (almost never used except in taxes), cents, dismes (original spelling), dollars, and eagles. Coins were labeled as such: the double eagle ($20), the quarter dollar (25 cents), the half disme (5 cents). etc. To this day, the dime is still only labeled “one dime.” I think the first exception was the two cent piece in 1864. It said “2 cents.” The three cent piece was issued a bit earlier and had the Roman numeral III on it.
That doesn’t mean all this was a good idea of course. It’s just history.
