I’ve heard that you can get them as change from the stamp machine in your local post office.
They need to stop printing one dollar bills if they want the coin to be a success. There may be political problems with doing that. There is a political lobby (zinc producers) that has opposed all efforts to kill the penny.
Right, and then you’ll take them to a store and use them. At the end of the day, the store will deposit them to the bank (because we don’t want them), which will then send them to the Post Office when they order change. And the Circle of Life is complete.
The experiences of Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the UK bear this out. All have successful one dollar/pound coins, and two dollar/pound coins, which replaced notes. They were successful because the government stopped printing the notes, and distributed enough coins to replace them. How many dollar notes are there in circulation in the US? I’d guess at least 500 million. Have they minted 500 million one dollar coins? I doubt it.
I’m sure they much prefer pictures of Tom Jefferson, with Monticello on the back, or pictures of Abe Lincoln, with the Lincoln Memorial on the back. Indeed, so would I.
They’re out there. But first of all, coins last a long time, so it takes a while for them to be replaced. It’s not too remarkable to find a coin in one’s change that was minted in the sixties or earlier, and occasionally even the forties, so with all of those decades worth of non-buffalo nickels, the new ones will tend to be lost in the shuffle. And secondly, a nickel is a small enough demonination that most folks don’t notice them, so even if you do get a few bisonickels, you’re likely to not realize it. The first time I ever saw the new design was while I was spending one, and I had obviously recieved it before then.
I must’ve been lucky, since I spent less than two months in your humble land and ended up with some.
I was in holiday in Disney World around the time when they launched the new dollar, and went to buy a soda from a machine in the carpark at Universal Studios. I only had a note, but that didn’t seem to be a problem since you guys apparently have vending machines that take them. Nonetheless, I was owed a lot of change which was duly given in the form of eight or nine Sacagawea dollars. I’m guessing they’d just stocked this thing up with newly minted coins. I had no idea that a dollar coin was remarkable, but kept at least two because they were shiny. At any rate, it’s cool to get loads of pristine gold coins falling out a machine… makes me feel like a modern day pirate.
My aunt voted for feeling like we’d won the lottery when we bought tickets for the train (Metro North) to New York City with cash and got change in the form of “loads of pristine gold coins falling out a machine”.
They had to make the Sackies the same size and weight as the Suzies because all of America’s vending machines were already programmed to accept the Suzie. Thus they had to distinguish them from the quarter some other way, so they made it a different color.