Have this same thing happen when I got to Canada. I also ended up finding a lot of change in my pocket because I wasn’t used to looking to my change pocket for a couple dollar purchase. Therefore every $1-$4 purchase I paid with a $5-$10, got a ton of coins back and ended up with about $15 in change at the end of the day. Same thing happened when I went to London this summer. After getting used to it, it only confirmed my favor of the US going to a $1 and $2 coin. Penny is never going away though.
I’m with begbert2. I hate a pocketful of coins. Loathe it. Despise it. My bills are always sorted in my right front pocket. Despite only grabbing 2 quarters for the paper on my way out the door, I often finish the day with much more jingling change than I started with. I hate sounding like I’m wearing spurs in a bad western. I don’t like the weight in my pocket.
Now, if my government would take the $500mm in savings and do something good with it, like UHC or reducing our debt, I’d be fine. Instead, I expect it to find its way to more pork spending. So I vote to retain the pork spending I like, paper money.
And for the record, I spend 2.5 years in England (1991 to 1993) and did the pocketfuls of change. On my two trips to Scotland, I loaded up on pound notes. I can adapt, but I prefer paper and will always choose it over coins.
After Obama solves health care, the economy, and two wars he should go after this issue. The time… for change… has come!
I say dump the dollar bill, two dollar bill, and the penny. Round everything to the nearest nickel. Take Jackson off the twenty and put Washington on it. George deserves a spot on a note, Andy doesn’t. Make dollar coins and five dollar coins. Eventually dump the five dollar bill.
I’d argue that Jackson is the only president that deserves to be on money. He managed to pay off the national debt. Additionally, he destroyed the Second Bank of the United States. Okay, so destroying the SBOTUS did create the Panic of 1937, but he still removed the power of a handful of bankers from control the US economy.
A question for our Canadian friends:
How do generous, public spirited people such as myself help pay young ladies to go through law school or medical school without single dollar bills being available? Does the standard donation increase to $5, or are $1 and $2 coins donated up onto the stage?
I’ve heard that in England, clubs keep a stock of US dollar bills and you can exchange your pounds for dollars at the door, and then the girls after dancing can exchange them back for pounds. Not that I would know the truth of that, of course. I only help out American girls looking to pursue further education.
(No Canadian… but the smallest Israeli bill is worth around $4).
Based on the one time I visited a Tel Aviv strip club: lap dances. Lots and lots of lap dances. The actual dancing on stage was basically a no-touch performance.
But who wants to carry five coins in their pocket instead of safely in their wallet.
I tried a bit back to order dollar coins from the US Mint for a promo I was running when I had my own business and I never could get them. They’d always put my order on “back order” then it never came, it was always bumped back. I had to get them from a bank at a premium.
So the US Mint has little interest or ability to supply coins even when they are wanted.
I find that when I travel to a country that uses coins in place of small denomination bills, after a few days of adjustment I typically have fewer coins in my pocket than I do in the US. At home, my typical procedure for paying in cash is to open my wallet, hand over the appropriate bills, and dump the change (coins) in my pocket. Repeat enough times per day, and by dinner time I’ve got a pocketful of coins. Before bed I dump them in the designated storage place. Eventually I accumulate enough coins that I take them somewhere and exchange them for paper.
In Europe, since I know that there are valuable coins in my pocket, I’m much more likely to pull out coins to pay for small-ish purchases. Since I’m getting out 1 and 2 (insert currency here) coins anyway, I might as well use some of the others and pay the exact amount, thereby removing even more coins from my pocket than I would otherwise.
Hope that made sense. I, personally, would be just fine moving to $1 and $2 coins.
Ordering directly from the US Mint is for collecting more than spending. If you want $1 coins to spend, you are better off asking your bank to order them for you.
Coins are heavy, noisy, and inconvenient to carry in large quantities. That’s why I’d abhor switching from higher-denomination paper currency to coins.
In chucking the small change you are describing what amounts to a complete government-enforced change in pricing for businesses nationwide. Other countries have managed this, but we can’t even switch to the metric system; it’s simply not gonna happen here. We’re far too used to the ‘crouching penny hidden dollar’ scheme of $0.99s and 9.99s, and while I can maybe see us losing the penny (in about fifty years when copper is scarce and more valuable than gold), we’re never losing that nickel.
Which is a shame, because I’m also bugged by the fact that we have a coin that isn’t an even multiple of the next coin down. (You can’t break a quarter into dimes.) This bugs my esthetics and personally I suspect it’s a factor in why the $2 bill never took off here; it complicates the math, not much, but a little.
But anyway, you asked if in a fantasyland America were to completely redo its under $10 monetary system, would that be an acceptible scenario, I would say I suspect it would be. But I don’t think there’s any way to get to there from here, not in this country. (Remember metric.)
The whole “I hate a bunch of little coins in my pocket” thing is the stupidest argument against the proposal I’ve ever heard!!! Sorry, begbert2, but it is!!!
Does your wallet collect a huge amount of $1 bills at the end of the day, and what you do with them is pile them on top of your dresser and then forget them until you dump them in Billstar® to collect the accumulated value of your impatience with them? Of course not!! You USE the little bills. You go to the market and hand over a $10, and get a $5 and a couple $1s, then you use the $1s to buy something else, and get back some coins. The only reason that you collect the coins is that you have a ready supply of relatively unimportant $1 bills ready to use instead.
So if you replaced the $1 and $5 bills with coins, you’d get them as change, and then you’d use them to pay for things. Your accumulation of change wouldn’t be appreciably greater; indeed, it might be less because you’d be more likely to utilize the quarters in your pocket since you’ve already dragged out the dollar and $5 coins! Meanwhile, you can eschew that bulky wallet thing you’ve been dragging around in your back pocket and use a simple card carrier for your credit and ATM cards, which slides neatly into a front pocket. Hell, the back pocket might actually get removed from American pants entirely!
Now, me, I’m an old fart (well, 49 is kinda old!). I remember when a quarter had some value. So did a dime. And you know what? Back then, people used to actually USE their change!! Men would carry it around in what was called a coin purse (banks loved giving them out; made of some form of rubberized plastic that you squeeze to open, and play endless games with as a kid!). Change didn’t just lie around loose in the bottom of the pocket or purse. You put it away, since it had some value. You’d do that again, if you had $1 and $5 coins, since you would actually, you know, attach some value to them.
One of these days, our government will start doing the things it should to make life better (such as eliminating pennies and eliminating dollar bills), instead of doing things that do nothing to make life better at all, but which sound very impressive (yes, No Child Left Behind, I’m looking at YOU). :rolleyes:
Actually, I do the total opposite. At the end of the day, I put my quarters in a quarters jar, the loose change in the change jar, and all $1 and $5 bills into the sock drawer. Every so often I transfer this to my savings account. It also helps me to buy less frivolous small things, knowing I have to break a $20 for it.
This came to $7,000 last time I cashed it in which went to the downpayment on my new car…
I disagree. Every currency restructuring plan I’ve ever seen calls for non-cash transactions to continue to be calculated to the penny. Cash transactions constitute only about 33% of consumer transactions,* and the remaining 67% (including debit, credit, and check) would continue to be calculated to the cent.
And even with the remaining cash transactions, no restructuring is necessary. You want to sell your product at 87 cents? Go for it. You only lose money if a customer buys an odd number with cash, and the most you’ll lose is 12 cents. And if you price another product at 88 cents, you gain 11 cents on half your cash transactions. It’s essentially a wash in the end. No one would restructure prices.
*Cite from 2001. I’d wager the number is even lower now.
I’d like to see the reaction if you went to a strip club and started rolling out the Sackies.
Suspenders might look good on you. But I want to look fashionable hip!
One local NZ establishment (of which I of course have no knowledge) 
prints their own funny money / monopoly-style money which they give as change when buying drinks or paying the cover charge so as to facilitate public spirit and generosity. Any remaining scrip can be changed back to real money at full face value at any time.
NZ has indeed dropped 1, 2, and 5 cent pieces, and at the same time redesigned the remaining sub-$1 coins to be smaller – our old 50 cent pieces in particular were huge! The 2006 change reduced the weight of a 50 cent piece from 13.6g (about 1/2 oz) to only 5g.
(current NZ coins)
A couple of other differences when compared to the US however may make more coins and less notes more usable here.
My knowledge of electronic debit transactions in the US is a bit out of date, but here at least “eft-pos” (electronic funds transfer at point of sale) is really, really, common. Buying fast food or coffee, 2/3rds - 3/4ths of the customers will probably be paying electronically – swipe your card, punch the PIN, and done. I’ve seen arguments here on the Dope that this takes longer to process than cash – not so in my experience, but perhaps the systems in use are a little different. (At a McDonalds for example, the eft-pos terminals are facing the customer, when you place you order and state how you will pay the server starts preparing your order while you swipe, punch, etc. If anything it is quicker than cash as the payment and the food getting become asynchronous). At supermarkets it is even less common to see people paying by cash – eft-pos or credit cards are far more common. Bank charges for eft-pos have changed too – my account has unlimited eft-pos included, but charges if I have to use a real live teller).
Prices include sales tax (with a few very rare exceptions). If the sign says “Latte $3.50” then the latte is $3.50… including the 12.5% gods and services tax. Without wanting to be all NZ-centric I cannot fathom why a system of adding the tax afterward to the sticker price is better. (I got a shock once in Canada while trying to figure the end price when the ice cream parlour manager confirmed that the sticker price was the price. We had a chat about inclusive vs. exclusive GST and PST and he also professed confusion why Canada had generally chosen an exclusive option).
Tipping is uncommon here. (Different pay systems for servers exist, pizza delivery includes charges, etc). So again, the advertised price and the final effective price tend to be the same. $4 for the beer is $4 including everything.
The end result being that prices can be tailored / rounded and not end up as loose cents. In supermarkets, etc there will be plenty of $6.83 and the like, but as mentioned above, once you get to the checkout and the overall total is calculated then if you are paying by cash the final few cents will get rounded (note that’s on the total not the individual items). Paying by non-cash the exact amount is paid.
I’m not trying to say this system is better (except around tipping) 
but rather just that these differences may make some things more or less viable in the US.
This whole post is the stupidest counterargument to my argument I’ve ever seen. Sorry, DSYoungEsq, but it is.
Firstly, you strawman up an invalid comparison of the use of flat, sortable, compact-storing bills with that of chunky, self-scrambling coins in an attempt to make my position look absurd. It backfired.
Secondly, you utterly ignored everything I said about the problems the smaller coins introduce into the mix, which does effect coin use. If I only had quarters, I would spend them (especially since they’d self-sort as the only coin); but with all the penny-ante pennies and nickel-and-dimeing nickels and dimes cluttering up my pocket, it’s not worth the hassle to sort through it. In failing to address this, you fail to address my argument at all.
Thirdly, the wallet will not go away. Some of us have heard of the ten dollar bill, and one common way of getting cash at all is the standard $20 cash back at time of purchase. They don’t usually give it in ones. So no savings there - bad argument.
Fourthly, in your creaky suspender-wearing nostolgia, you forgot that those valuable copper pennies of the bygone day? They’re no longer worth the zinc they’re printed on. And they’re still gumming up the works, making all coin usage an increased hassle around here. Times do change, don’t they?
And Fifthly, I totally blame No Child Left Behind for the hassle that spending coins has become. Totally.
That is all. I will now get off your lawn.
“You don’t pay the precise total value of your purchase” is a complete government-enforced change in pricing for businesses nationwide.
Nope. My wallet holds a lot more than money. It has to, because there is very little money in it.
Driver’s license
credit cards
debit card
insurance card
AAA card
several grocery store cards
several book store cards
Bevmo card
business cards
picture of my wife
various other membership cards
$84
Coins are noisy, heavy, cumbersome, and a pain in the pocket. This country will go entirely EFT before it embraces dollar coins.
My wallet has a swiss army card in it. Most useful thing ever.
And if you think that $84 isn’t much money, can I have it?