I don’t see the relevance. Of course I wouldn’t want $100 in nickels, just like I wouldn’t want someone to pay me $5000 in 10 dollar bills. It doesn’t mean that I hate 10 dollar bills; just that most people prefer the smallest number of bills/coins that is required.
That’s why the girls have coin slots.
I thought that was where you swiped the credit card.
People think coins as a class are worthless because they are all low-denomination. They would not continue to think so when some of those coins are worth $2.
Similarly, people accumulate pockets-full of coins because they know that coins, being of low value, are not worth pulling out to make a purchase.
Here in Canada, this is still a problem - with pennies and nickels. I regularly go through my pockets and toss all pennies, nickels and dimes into my change jar (for later turning into money when I’m bored). Quarters, loonies and twoonies go back in the pocket, and their weight isn’t a significant factor - they get spent.
Well, if you were being paid five thousand dollars in cash you would most likely be planning to pay it to somebody else, or invest it, or whatever. But if for some strange reason you were going to just keep it around the house and spend it on your day-to-day needs, then ten dollar bills would actually not be a bad way to have it. Ten dollars is an amount that still has general relevance in day-to-day commerce. Haircut, sandwich, taxi, parking the car downtown–these are all things you can do with ten or twenty dollars. You wouldn’t want higher denominations than twenty dollars, because some merchants don’t accept hundreds.
You can’t say that about $101 in nickels. Strictly speaking they are worth more than five $20 bills, but in practical terms they are all but worthless until you trade them for bills.
I’m surprised by this. My time in Germany was in the pre-Euro era, and they still had pfennigs, tiny little coppers that were worth about half a cent in U.S. money. Because I was generally using coins more than bills, it was no trouble to pull out a couple of pfennigs if the price of something was 5,42DM, since all the money was in the same place. So in general the lowest value coins didn’t accumulate.
I used to smoke in those days; cigarettes were 3DM/pack–a one mark coin and a two-mark coin. Imagine that, buying a pack of cigarettes with two coins.
I find that I am more likely to receive pennies in change than to carefully count out pennies when buying stuff. The sales clerk has no choice but to give exact change, whereas I always have the choice as to handing over a dollar and asking for change. The net result is an influx of pennies.
Part of the problem might be people thinking “withdraw from circulation” must necessarily mean “refuse to honor”. That isn’t true at all. A central bank can withdraw 1[unit] and 2[unit] notes just by refusing to fill commercial banks’ orders for them. The ones still in circulation will wear out and virtually disappear over a couple of years. At the same time, any of the discontinued notes still held by individuals and businesses need not be devalued; if the person decides to buy something with them four years later they still can.
Yes, but sales tax is calculated on the entire purchase. How often does anyone go into a store and buy something for 39c? Probably never, because nothing in the world is that cheap anymore. But people still talk as if amounts like 39c and 17c and 7 percent sales tax on those amounts matter in themselves, and that if they can’t see and hold each individual penny, they’re going to be ripped off. Actually it’s not that 39c doesn’t matter, it’s just that it matters in a different way from how it used to. Sums of money less than a dollar are meaningful only in an incremental way; you add them to bills when you pay for something, to avoid getting more change back. Or if you dump an average of 39c in the change jar every day for a year, you will have more than $100 after a year. But you’re certainly not going to head to the store and buy one item costing thirty-nine cents.