Paper notes are still far more convenient to carry than coins and the US has far
more vending machines and cash register drawers than most other countries. While
many will accept dollar coins, the ones that do tend to be government owned (ie
Post Office) or located in casinos. The far more ubiqutous soda and candy
vending machines tend to take nickels, dime and quarters, and if you are really
lucky, the have a working receiver for $1 bills.

I think if you tried it, you'd find that most vending machines also
take dollar coins. At the time the government issued the SBA dollars,
the size was chosen in cooperation with the vending industry to make
modifications to machines easy. Then they found that the coins were
hard to tell from quarters, so now they're a different color and have
a smooth edge, but people still don't like them.

I gather the vending industry would be thrilled if we switched to
dollar coins, so they wouldn't need all those fragile bill acceptors.

Everyone in the US seems to think it would be awful if we didn't have
dollar bills, but everywhere else they've switched similar value notes
to coins, it hasn't been a big deal. What they really need to do at
the same time is get rid of pennies and round cash prices to 5c, both
to make room in cash drawers for the dollars, and because pennies are
worthless. We made do with pennies in 1947, and the value of a penny
then is about a dime now.

ObTransit: what coins do Metrocard machines take? They must take
dollar coins, since they return them as change. Do they take
pennies?

R's,
John

On Dec 27, 6:12*pm, Robert Neville wrote:
Jarle H Knudsen wrote:

I'm amazed you still use one dollar bills. Why haven't they been phased
out?

Paper notes are still far more convenient to carry than coins and the US has far
more vending machines and cash register drawers than most other countries.. While
many will accept dollar coins, the ones that do tend to be government owned (ie
Post Office) or located in casinos. The far more ubiqutous soda and candy
vending machines tend to take nickels, dime and quarters, and if you are really
lucky, the have a working receiver for $1 bills. Replacing all those won't be
cheap and the cost would fall on the machine owner while the benefit went to the
government.

Benefit? There's upwards of a billion Presidential Dollar coins
sitting in warehouses, because Congress mandated that vast numbers
more be minted than there was a collectors' market for; they shipped
them to banks, and eventually the banks shipped them back. (I've never
seen one. The last time I used a p.o. vending machine, at least two
years ago, I got both Sackies and Susan B's.) Just the storage is
costly

I've lived in both kinds of countries and used both types of currencies. While
you can make an argument that coins are cheaper over their lifetime, I'm glad
the US is still using paper.

And 1c coins, too.

On Dec 27, 6:21*pm, "
wrote:
On 27/12/2011 22:57, Neil Williams wrote: On Tue, 27 Dec 2011 10:00:55 -0800 (PST), wrote:
SEPTA, unlike NYC, accepts dollar bills on its buses. I don't know
why NYC's fareboxes aren't set up to handle that.

The US could really, really do with $1, $2 and $5 coins for this sort of
purpose. I genuinely do not understand why people are so resistant.

Neil

They do have one-dollar coins and they and TVMs in New York City
regularly dispense them as change.

The interesting thing is that they have minted a few different series to
ease use since the late 1970s, when the Susan B. Anthony dollar replaced
the Eisenhower dollars, which were almost as big as a five-pound coin.

They were the size silver dollars had been for generations.

On Dec 27, 6:21*pm, Miles Bader wrote:
Neil Williams writes:
SEPTA, unlike NYC, accepts dollar bills on its buses. *I don't know
why NYC's fareboxes aren't set up to handle that.

The US could really, really do with $1, $2 and $5 coins for this sort
of purpose. *I genuinely do not understand why people are so
resistant.

"If dollar bills were good enough for Jesus, they're good enough for me!"

It must mean something that the $1 bill was not redesigned with the
giant portrait when all(? I haven't seen a $2 bill since my 1993 visit
to Monticello -- where the admission fee was $8 so that they could
return Jeffersons in change) the other bills in circulation ($5, $10,
$20, $50, $100) were.

p.s. By random luck, I got a ¥100 paper note in a store a while back:
a customer was trying to use it, and the store wouldn't take it
(though they're technically still legal tender), so I bought off her
for a ¥100 coin... :]

I did that with a $2 bill once in eastern Ohio at a gas station
convenience store.

On 27/12/2011 23:49, Peter T. Daniels wrote:
On Dec 27, 6:21 pm,
wrote:
On 27/12/2011 22:57, Neil Williams wrote: On Tue, 27 Dec 2011 10:00:55 -0800 (PST), wrote:
SEPTA, unlike NYC, accepts dollar bills on its buses. I don't know
why NYC's fareboxes aren't set up to handle that.

The US could really, really do with $1, $2 and $5 coins for this sort of
purpose. I genuinely do not understand why people are so resistant.

Neil

They do have one-dollar coins and they and TVMs in New York City
regularly dispense them as change.

The interesting thing is that they have minted a few different series to
ease use since the late 1970s, when the Susan B. Anthony dollar replaced
the Eisenhower dollars, which were almost as big as a five-pound coin.

They were the size silver dollars had been for generations.

I didn't quite understand you.

On 27/12/2011 23:52, Peter T. Daniels wrote:
On Dec 27, 6:21 pm, Miles wrote:
Neil writes:
SEPTA, unlike NYC, accepts dollar bills on its buses. I don't know
why NYC's fareboxes aren't set up to handle that.

The US could really, really do with $1, $2 and $5 coins for this sort
of purpose. I genuinely do not understand why people are so
resistant.

"If dollar bills were good enough for Jesus, they're good enough for me!"

It must mean something that the $1 bill was not redesigned with the
giant portrait when all(? I haven't seen a $2 bill since my 1993 visit
to Monticello -- where the admission fee was $8 so that they could
return Jeffersons in change) the other bills in circulation ($5, $10,
$20, $50, $100) were.

p.s. By random luck, I got a ¥100 paper note in a store a while back:
a customer was trying to use it, and the store wouldn't take it
(though they're technically still legal tender), so I bought off her
for a ¥100 coin... :]

I did that with a $2 bill once in eastern Ohio at a gas station
convenience store.

I think that two-dollar bills would be easy enough to come by as they
are in general circulation. Just go to a bank and ask for a few.

On 27/12/2011 23:40, John Levine wrote:
Paper notes are still far more convenient to carry than coins and the US has far
more vending machines and cash register drawers than most other countries. While
many will accept dollar coins, the ones that do tend to be government owned (ie
Post Office) or located in casinos. The far more ubiqutous soda and candy
vending machines tend to take nickels, dime and quarters, and if you are really
lucky, the have a working receiver for $1 bills.

I think if you tried it, you'd find that most vending machines also
take dollar coins. At the time the government issued the SBA dollars,
the size was chosen in cooperation with the vending industry to make
modifications to machines easy. Then they found that the coins were
hard to tell from quarters, so now they're a different color and have
a smooth edge, but people still don't like them.

I always thought that the SBA might have survived if they made sides out
of the coin, rather than make it round, similar to what they have done
in other nations. It would have helped the visually impaired and it
would have made it obvious to the casual observer what it was. I wonder
why they never did that.

Everyone in the US seems to think it would be awful if we didn't have
dollar bills, but everywhere else they've switched similar value notes
to coins, it hasn't been a big deal.

Psychological factors play a role, me thinks.

What they really need to do at
the same time is get rid of pennies and round cash prices to 5c, both
to make room in cash drawers for the dollars, and because pennies are
worthless. We made do with pennies in 1947, and the value of a penny
then is about a dime now.

I don't think that will happen in the United States, unfortunately.
Finland got rid of its one-cent coins, however.

ObTransit: what coins do Metrocard machines take? They must take
dollar coins, since they return them as change.

I believe that they take everything from 5 cents upward to dollar coins.

Do they take
pennies?

No, but I know that the vending machines at US post offices do take them.

On 27/12/2011 23:46, Peter T. Daniels wrote:
On Dec 27, 6:12 pm, Robert wrote:
Jarle H wrote:

I'm amazed you still use one dollar bills. Why haven't they been phased
out?

Paper notes are still far more convenient to carry than coins and the US has far
more vending machines and cash register drawers than most other countries. While
many will accept dollar coins, the ones that do tend to be government owned (ie
Post Office) or located in casinos. The far more ubiqutous soda and candy
vending machines tend to take nickels, dime and quarters, and if you are really
lucky, the have a working receiver for $1 bills. Replacing all those won't be
cheap and the cost would fall on the machine owner while the benefit went to the
government.

Benefit? There's upwards of a billion Presidential Dollar coins
sitting in warehouses, because Congress mandated that vast numbers
more be minted than there was a collectors' market for; they shipped
them to banks, and eventually the banks shipped them back. (I've never
seen one. The last time I used a p.o. vending machine, at least two
years ago, I got both Sackies and Susan B's.) Just the storage is
costly

I've lived in both kinds of countries and used both types of currencies. While
you can make an argument that coins are cheaper over their lifetime, I'm glad
the US is still using paper.

And 1c coins, too.


The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland as well as
Canada each use their respective penny coins.

John Levine writes:
the value of a penny then is about a dime now.

Is the value in the material or the labor/etc for making them?

If the former, and they don't want to get rid of pennies, maybe they
could make a new money using cheaper material.

Japanese yen coins are made of aluminum, which is about 1/3 the cost
of copper per unit weight, and 1/4 the weight per unit volume, so
you'd get a factor of 12 drop in material cost per coin -- and then
you could even make the coin smaller!

I don't know the somewhat softer metal would have any significant
effect on durability in normal use, but I haven't noticed any obvious
difference from other Japanese coins in terms of wear or average age.

[I like these small aluminum coins because they're very easy on the
pockets and very easy to identify by touch.]

-miles

--
Faith, n. Belief without evidence in what is told by one who speaks without
knowledge, of things without parallel.

On Tue, 27 Dec 2011 23:40:55 +0000, John Levine wrote:

We made do with pennies in 1947, and the value of a penny
then is about a dime now.

In 1947 UK, we had the farthing, this was 1/4d (a quarter penny) and was
last minted in the 1950s.

When we went decimal in the early 1970s (February 1972 if my memory
serves me correctly), the pound stayed the pound, but the smaller
denominations were changed such that there were 5 new pence to 12d or an
old shilling. The smallest decimal coin was 1/2 a new pence, worth
roughly 1.2 old pence or just under 5 old farthings, although I can't
remember if we were still using farthings then (we were certainly using
ha'penny's shortly before decimalization, I remember spending them in the
sweet shop on the way to school in the early 1970s).

Since then we've dropped the 1/2 pence coin, so our smallest coin now is
the decimal penny, worth 2.4 old pence or about 10 times the value of the
smallest denomination coin we were using in 1947.

The smallest note in general circulation now is the GBP 5.00 note, back
in 1947 I think it was the 10/- or 10 shilling note, which at
decimalization was equivalent to the 50p coin, so I guess you could say
that in the UK, now, both the smallest denomination coin and the smallest
denomination note in general circulation are fiscally worth 10 times more
than the smallest denomination coin and the smallest denomination note in
general circulation in 1947.

Rgds

Denis McMahon