In Phil Kane writes:

On Wed, 28 Dec 2011 10:20:50 +0900, Miles Bader wrote:

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!

The before-1980-inflation Israeli equivalent to a one-cent piece was
about a centimeter in diameter, made of aluminium with large scalloped
edges - very easy to identify. (Un)fortunately, they are all out of
current circulation because they don't buy anything in today's
economy.
--

And then there were the Asimonim used in the gov't owned payphones.....

(not to be confused with the Isaac's)

obtransit: the Israeli buses back then used regular coins, not tokens.

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"Peter T. Daniels" wrote:

And 1c coins, too.

A number of years ago I was in Venezuela for the first time and being not
entirely familiar with the local currency (this was pre-Chavez), I was somewhat
confused when a store checker rounded my change down. It must have been a common
reaction as she handed me a boiled sweet when I looked at her somewhat
quizzically. Later I learned that they had eliminated the "1c" coin for cash
transactions and rounded as a matter of course.

On Dec 27, 7:49*pm, "
wrote:
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.-

The Susie B's were made in a much smaller, but thick and many-sided,
size so as to make them more convenient for the pocket. (It didn't
help.)

On Dec 27, 7:51*pm, "
wrote:
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.-

Have you ever seen one?

Have you ever seen a cash register till with a slot for them?

Has the store cashier ever seen one?

I'm going to the bank tomorrow -- I'll try to remember to ask if they
have any on hand.

(Part of their unpopularity was said to have to do with their
association -- generations ago -- with two-dollar whores and two-
dollar bets at the track, where apparently you were supposed to tear
off a corner for luck, which would have taken them out of circulation
long before what would have been their natural lifespan, about 18
months, if they were in regular usage.)

On Dec 27, 7:57*pm, "
wrote:
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

The Small Business Administration? Oh, you mean the Susie B.

The _faces_ do have sides, though the edges are circular. Maybe
vending machines wouldn't accept an 18- or 20-sided coin. The Sackies
are round but goldish-colored and smooth-edged like a nickel rather
than milled.

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.

NJT buses take cents. (I don't say "pennies" because we're talking to
persons of the British persuasion, and British pence were humungous --
are they still?)

On Dec 27, 8:26*pm, "
wrote:
On 28/12/2011 01:20, Miles Bader wrote:

John *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?

I think that it is indeed the labour.

Neither. He's talking about inflation. A 10c candy bar is now a $1
candy bar.

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

Would require an act of congress, most likely.

There's very little, if any, copper in a cent any more.

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.]

They also had them in Italy and East Germany, when they respectively had
the lira and mark. I think that I even have a 50-pfennig and 1-mark
piece somewhere.

On Dec 27, 7:58*pm, "
wrote:
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.-

UK pence are (these days) about 1.5c (if a GBP is still around $1.50).

On Dec 27, 9:49*pm, wrote:
On Dec 27, 5:09*pm, Bolwerk 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.

Because it's time consuming and a pain in the ass. *Dropping change in
is easy and you can use dollar coins - though I suppose the downside to
dollar coins is about the only place I can readily find them is in
transit vending machines.

You answered your own post. *Dollar coins are not easy to find.
Further, many independent merchants dislike them because they're too
easily confused with quarters. *Chain store clerks gotta take them,
but sometimes they think you gave them a quarter.

Supposedly dollar coins are easy for vision-impaired to tell apart,
but the men who service our vending machines absolutely despise them,
so as a courtesy I don't use them in our machines.

Just read the mint cancelled production of more dollar coins since the
warehouses are jammed.

They're going to still make Presidential Dollars, to complete the set,
but only enough for the collector demand, not the millions of others
that were supposed to be circulating.

Speaking of which, I haven't seen a single National Parks quarter and
they've been coming out for two years now -- whereas the State
quarters showed up in change almost immediately, except for the
Territories of 2009. I finally got a DC but none of the others.

We were about to embark at Dover, when (Denis
McMahon) came up to me and whispered:

When we went decimal in the early 1970s (February 1972 if my
memory serves me correctly),

Feb 1971.

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Peter T. Daniels remarked:

British pence were humungous -- are they still?)

Since decimalisation they'd been small. About the size of a Dime.

The only place I ever got a US dollar coin was in change at a Post
Office.
--
Roland Perry