Wow. From stodgy to escapist. 
I like the Viking bunny. He’s a killer rabbit, you know.
Regarding the dollar coins (or loonies, as they’re more properly known): your government asks your opinions way too much. They should just give you dollar coins, and you’ll like it, like ours did.
Was this an American person referring to US Dollars, who just happened to be in London, or was it a local?
I ask because One Pound notes (now defunct except in Scotland) used to be green and, whilst aware of the American usage, I have also heard the term ‘greenbacks’ used as slang for pounds and this persisted beyond the time when the pound note was removed from circulation.
So when can I get my Thomas Kincade $20 bills?
It was a local, a guy in a ticket booth at Victoria Station.
When will we get the puking smiley?
I got a new $10 from the ATM a couple of days ago. Damn, that’s one ugly bill. I got rid of it as soon as possible. The combination of unattractive design and faded-looking color with the crispness that marks a new bill hurt my brain.
Obviously, the goal was to make a bill so ugly that counterfieters give up their plans to make a million copies of it simply because the combined ugly of that many new tens in one place is more than they can bear.
On the other hand, if they’re so hideous, no one will care to examine them very closely, which will play right into their hands.
Thanks for the reminder–time to pop my Ray Charles CD back in the car CD player when I go home tonight.
That’s what I always tell them, but they never listen!
We didn’t vote for the money we’ve got; I don’t see why the notion of reforming the system should cause my compatriots to scream bloody murder. But that’s how it is; it would be political suicide. The conservatives don’t want to make a change because they are, well, conservative. And the liberals don’t want to touch it either, because it’s so unpopular an idea.
Perhaps it’s a strategy intended to make the money change hands as frequently and rapidly as possible, thus boosting the economy. OK, Larry Niven thought of it before me.
OK, I realize this is a bit of a hijack but how can anyone argue that dollar coins are easier to carry than bills. They weigh 20 times as much as a paper bills and are unstable and unstackable. A paper dollar neatly folds into a wallet or money clip. 20 one dollar bills takes up much less space than 20 dollar coins and weighs dramatically less. It’s also convenient to have all your money homogeneous and stored together, as opposed to digging into your wallet to count the paper bills then going to your pocket to find the single dollars. 75% of transactions require both fives and ones, so digging out both coins and bills is slower and clumsier.
The only logical argument for dollar coins is that they are cheaper to maintain due to durability and possibly more functional in vending type machines. The latter is a technology issue that would be more easily handled by improving bill scanners and/or including a magnetic strip in the paper bill than by eradicating all paper ones.
And to make this post not totally a hijack, the new orange 10s are ugly as all shit. I don’t mind a little color on the bills for anti-counterfeiting and easy identification but I want them to remain on a green base.
If anyone tries to make my money different shapes I’m moving to Wyoming and stocking up on fertilizer and ammo. The experience of having oddly shaped bills that only partially fit in my wallet while in Europe is one I cannot stomach within my own borders.
I might be misunderstanding, but as far as I can tell, the argument for dollar coins is not that they are more convenient to carry than paper dollars, but that they are more convenient to carry than, say, four quarters, and more convenient to use than paper bills, in some situations.
If so then it’s an even dumber argument than I figured. If you’ve somehow got 4 quarters in your pocket I’m at a loss to see how having dollar coins in circulation would have prevented that in some way in which paper dollars wouldn’t.
There are situations where coins are easier to use, there are situations where paper is easier to use. Examples of the latter, in any register transaction where a variety of denominations are needed and in any vending transaction where a coin slot is not present (most parking lots here). For the former? Those occasions where you’re feeding a meter, buying a Coke or a pack of gum. Methinks the case is pretty thin in favor of coins, aside from them being cheaper for the mint in the long term.
One last point, coins are much easier to lose. So that’s a major strike against them too.
And I suspect this is more a question of what you’re accustomed to than anything else; both at home in the UK (where we have One Pound coins) and abroad in Europe (where they have one Euro coins), I don’t find it particularly inconvenient to pay with a mixture of notes and coins; in fact there’s no real difference between paying for something that is, say, £5.79 with a mixture, or paying for something that is £7.49 with a mixture (that now happens to contain two whole pounds in coins.
You need coins anyway and arguably, the inconvenience of having to make up mixtures of coins and notes for some transactions isprobably balanced by the convenience of being able to simply reach into your trouser pocket and pull out sufficient funds for other transactions - even if the next denomination up is a five, you still might be carrying more than five ones, so you might not need to touch your wallet at all.
I’m not convinced that coins are easier to lose.
I’m not interested in promoting one or the other, and I genuinely don’t mean any offense by this, but I think your clear passion over the issue is introducing bias into your comparisons of the benefits and drawbacks and preventing you from taking a proper objective stance.
Maybe I’m just reading you wrong, but what comes across overwhelmingly from yours and some of the other posts here is simple resistance to change(no pun intended).
I’m sure it has a lot to do with what you’re accustomed to. The grating part is the seeming universal presumption that paper dollars are inherently outdated and inconvenient. That it’s plain ole American stubbornness allowing them to remain in their iconic state. Fact is, that’s not true.
To use your example: For that £7.49 purchase, you’ll likely reach into your wallet to grab a 5 pound note, put away your wallet and then grab 3 pound coins. 3 motions.
The typical American would pay for something that cost $7.49 by reaching into their wallet and pulling out a 5 dollar bill and 3 one dollar bills. 1 motion.
Adding dollar coins would be seen as a nuisance to us. If you’re accustomed to it, great for you, but don’t act like we’re going about things the hard way out of stubbornness when it’s far from clear that coins are advantageous.
In many cases, I might have enough coins in my pocket to pay for a £7.49 transaction without the wallet (because the coins in my pocket can be worth more when they are bigger denmoninations, so it could still be 1 motion.
But anyway, so what? It’s not as if you have to climb naked across razor wire to do it either way; even the most inconvenient scenario you can concoct is still trivial and laughably disproportional to the amount of fuss and complaint made about it.
I’d need a pretty strong argument to convince me they aren’t. “The change between the cushions of the couch” is a pretty universal adage. Coins bounce and roll. Coins are hard to see from a distance. Things fall out of front pockets when you sit, very few things fall out of a billfold. The only time bills are lost is when you pull too many out of the wallet by accident and drop it, the same can be said of rooting for a handful of change.
I’m using a bit of dramatic license here. I’m not overly passionate about it, but I do think I’m right and in the spirit of the SDMB I’ll debate it to death. 
As it applies to the color of bills, I tend to agree. It’s largely resistance to change and a certain fondness for the iconography the green American dollar holds. I’m not convinced there’s a rash of people, tourists aside, having trouble distinguishing bills for lack of color contrast.
As it applies to coins and oddly shaped money, not so much. I think it’s a pretty well founded argument to resist those.