Getting rid of the dollar bill

[xiphias]

Congress is once again considering getting rid of the one-dollar bill, and it's about time. Our coinage is ridiculous at this point. We really ought to get rid of the dollar bill, the penny, and the nickel.

When we came up with our currency, the penny was the smallest coin we chose to have. And its buying power was about what a quarter is today. So, originally, we thought that the smallest amount of money that it was worth considering was a quarter. We'd do fine getting rid of everything below the quarter. This is what the cafeteria at Lis's work does; this is what the restaurant I used to work at did. And we did fine. There is no reason to deal with pennies, nickels, or even dimes.

(Why do we still have pennies? Because of the zinc lobby. Seriously. Pennies are mostly zinc, and the zinc lobby doesn't want to give up their major market.)

Now, down to dollar coins. Let's discuss video games.

The first video game shipped to bars and so forth was "Pong", in 1972 which cost 25 cents a play. That was the price point of pinball games at that point, too. The buying power of a quarter in 1972 was about $1.38 in today's money.

So, if coin-operated video games (which DO still exist, to an extent) cost a dollar a play, it'd still be a deal. And, for that, we'd need dollar coins.

The only argument I've ever heard in favor of dollar bills is that you can stuff them into strippers' garter belts. However, the dollar being stuffed into a strippers' garter belt was already a thing by the early Seventies -- and the buying power of a dollar then was similar to the buying power of a five today, which means that it is high time that strippers started getting paid in fives instead of singles. Just sayin'.

Comments

[pierceheart.livejournal.com]

I use deuces.

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

You're still underpaying strippers. And they're hard to find.

[pierceheart.livejournal.com]

I didn't say how many deuces, and they're easy to find - go into a bank, especially if you are a customer at that bank, and let them (if you are a customer) you'd like to make a withdrawal in $2s, they will usually tell you they don't normally get them, but that they will in their next cash order, and in about a week you come back, make the withdrawal in a strap of 100 $2.

No problem for me at Bank of America, but now that I am no longer a customer, I will carefully try again, as a cash exchange with them.

[browngirl.livejournal.com]

Word. If I ever get to go to a strip club I wouldn't bring anything less than fives -- they work hard!

(Also, I agree with the rest.)

[jazzfish]

One of the awesome things about Canada is the $1 and $2 coins. Unlike certain countries with their Susan B Anthony dollars, we did it right: the loonie (so named for the bird on the back) is a little bigger than a quarter and sort of a dull brass color, and the toonie (by extension from "loonie" although they missed a trick not calling it a "doubloon") is slightly larger than that and two-tone, so they're easily distinguishable from a) existing coins and b) each other.

Also we just now got rid of the penny, too. I'll let you know how that goes.

[embryomystic.livejournal.com]

...(by extension from "loonie" although they missed a trick not calling it a "doubloon")...

Who's they? It's not called a 'toonie' in any official context, and when it first came out, there were all kinds of people wanting to call it a 'doubloon(ie)'. But 'toonie' (sometimes spelled 'twoonie', though not as much these days) won out.

Hell, 'penny', 'nickel', 'dime', and 'quarter' aren't official names either. I imagine they're loans from American English.

[jazzfish]

"They" being "Canadians in general." As a recent immigrant I tend to switch between 'we' and 'they' with little rhyme or reason.

[embryomystic.livejournal.com]

Oh, I getcha. I did realise, got from the rest of your comment that you were a Canadian, and wondered if you thought that the names were somehow mandated by the government.

I don't know if you're recent enough for this to be meaningful, but welcome to Canada. :)

[jazzfish]

Been a little over a year, but still, thanks! :)

[redbird]

How much time have you spent in Canada in the last few years? I'm torn between liking the $1 and $2 coins, and the irritation at how fast my pocket gets heavy if I don't pay a lot more attention to how I'm paying for stuff than I'm used to. But that might be avoided by keeping $2 bills and encouraging their use: with no singles, there'd be an available space in most cash drawers.

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

I frequently accumulate more than a few one dollar bills in my wallet. Coins would add a lot of bulk and weight.

I'd assumed that pennies, at least, were retained because of sales taxes.

[lillibet.livejournal.com]

Americans fear change.

[undauntra.livejournal.com]

[groan]

[filkerdave.livejournal.com]

:D

[felis-sidus.livejournal.com]

I'm all for getting rid of the penny, but not so sure about the dimes and the dollar bill. Many vending machines take dollar bills but not dollar coins. To change them all over to coins only could be quite expensive, and result in the vending machine companies raising prices. Not everyone can afford to pay more. Some people who buy food from vending machines are buying the only food they get. Not only that, but I've had a handfull of dollar coins to drag around, and the weight is not negligible. The damage they do to pockets is really annoying.

If we eliminate the nickel and the penny at the same time, you can bet that prices will be rounded up to the nearest dime. That might not be a problem for many people, but there are plenty of folks for whom a difference of ten cents could be the difference between affording a needed item and not being able to afford it. The same goes for dollar bills. I doubt that many business are simply going to start handling a lot of dollar coins. They're much more likely to round everything up to the next five dollars.

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

The dollar coin could be the size of a quarter or smaller. I don't know whether the government would be that sensible.

[felis-sidus.livejournal.com]

We already have dollar coins, and they are, indeed, about the size of a quarter, which is how I know how heavy they'd be. They're also easy to confuse with quarters when paying with a handful of change.

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

But they're BRIGHT GOLD colored.

[felis-sidus.livejournal.com]

Either we're thinking of different coins, or we perceive colors differently. The coins I'm thinking of are the ones you get when you're unfortunate enough to buy a stamp from the automated stamp machines at the post office, and all you have are twenty dollar bills. You end up with nineteen dollar coins. They're slightly yellower in color than the quarters, but only on the edges or when held at an angle in certain lights.

It can't be just me because cashiers have accidentally given them to me in change, and have thought I'd handed them a dollar in quarters when I gave them four dollars in dollar coins.

Also, not everyone can see the color, bright gold, slightly gold tinged, or whatever. and the tiny bit of angling around the edges quickly wears down, so discerning that the difference between them and quarters by touch isn't all that easy, either.

To me, it's telling that although the dollar coins have been around for years, the only place which I've known to use them regularly is the post office. And a lot of stores won't take them in payment, regardless of the fact that the law says they must.

[goljerp]

If we're getting rid of the penny, nickel, and dime, I see no reason why we can't resize the quarter and dollar coins so that they're different sizes / shapes /etc.

It really is crazy that we're still using pennies.

[felis-sidus.livejournal.com]

I'm with you all the way when it comes to pennies!

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

I'm talking about these:



I've never had a problem buying things with them, myself. When did you have problems?

[felis-sidus.livejournal.com]

Ah! Definitely talking about different coins. I've never even seen one of those in use. The coin I was talking about is the Susan B. Anthony dollar. I've had trouble using them in Target and at various convenience stores. It's been a while since I got stuck with them because I now go out of my way to avoid buying stamps from post office machines, which is where I usually get saddled with them.

[cellio]

I hate SBAs. To this vision-challenged person, they are too similar to quarters. The Sacajaewas are just fine.

I don't currently carry change for any great length of time, though, and with dollar coins that might have to change. My smartphone doesn't want to share a pocket with a coin purse, and loose coins are a pain with other pocket contents (keys, pen, magnifying glass, etc). So I don't know where to carry coins any more, and in practice they end up in a bowl until I remember to grab just a few before going shopping. (Well, quarters go to the car for parking meters.) I would not miss pennies, and in fact tend to leave them behind if there's a receptacle for them at the cash register.

[pekmez.livejournal.com]

> If we eliminate the nickel and the penny at the same time, you can bet that prices will be rounded up to the nearest dime.

Yes, this. I probably buy 40-60 items at the supermarket in a standard trip. I make that grocery trip once a week.
So if the supermarket adjusts all prices to be a multiple of 10c, they'll probably be rounding up by 5c on each item - which would be $130/year in extra grocery costs alone.

[goljerp]

I'm not sure that will really happen. I mean, there's still tax, and people paying by credit card/debit card/check, and the urge to price things at $0.99 instead of $1, or having 3 boxes of pasta for 1.50, or the fact that the cheese is $8/lb but you got 1/3 of a pound or whatever, which will result in odd numbers. So I don't think stores will bother adjusting the prices on the shelf. Maybe they'd adjust the total price you'd pay at the register -- but then, what a customer service nightmare to always be rounding up the total to the nearest dime (but only if paying by cash).

Case in point: when I was living in Israel 12 years ago, they'd recently gotten rid of the agora coin[1], so the smallest denomination was 5 agorot. Prices were listed as 4.23 or whatever, but at the register they'd round off. I don't remember being always upset at the rounding, so I think it was fair, but it's true that I don't remember it clearly.

So, while I understand the worry, I don't think that it would actually happen in practice.

[1] 100 agorot to 1 shekel; Wikipedia in their Israeli_new_shekel article says the 1 agora coin was withdrawn 19 years ago, but I seem to recall getting one in change on occasion, but most people didn't want to deal with them (and probably didn't have to from a legal standpoint).

[linenoise.livejournal.com]

It's interesting to note the difference from when I was in Italy a couple years ago. Most places *did* round most of their shelf prices, and pre-figured the VAT to keep them even. Bars, coffee, cigarettes, most of the little shops. The only place I ever really used anything smaller that e0.10 was at the big supermarket. Everyone else just dropped the least-significant-digit. (e0.10 coins were the smallest "gold" coins, 1, 2 and 5 cent coins were copper. Pretty much everyone just threw all the copper in a jar and ignored it.)

It was a strange experience living in a place where a single coin could buy a shot at the bar. e1 and e2 coins made up the bulk of my money-handling, and would only go for paper bills when I *didn't* have coin. I actually found it to be easier, overall than doing everything with paper and having the coin be mostly worthless. (Back in the states, I do almost everything with plastic, which makes currency discussions somewhat academic.)

[zachkessin.livejournal.com]

actually there used to be a half cent coin, but it went away sometime in the 19th century.

Here in Israel the smallest bill we have is the 20Shekel (about $4) it seems to work out mostly ok. Planet money did some reporting on this and it seems that getting rid of the dollar bill wouldn't really save much if any money.

[autographedcat.livejournal.com]

When I got to the strip club (don't judge me) I cash out my bills into a stack of fives. I never give less than five, and I usually give ten at a time.

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

Well, I DO judge people for going to strip clubs. I judge on how well-mannered they are, and how good tippers they are. I'm sure you come out fine.

[wildcard9.livejournal.com]

All of the work vending machines where I work were changed to only accept dollar bills about 6-9 months ago. All prices where changed to $1 for everything. You can not use coins in those vending machines anymore, only $1 bills. I've seen this change in other places as well: vending machines switched to accept paper money only and no coins, and prices raised to the nearest dollar amount. I have a bad feeling eliminating the $1 bill and going to a $1 coin is going to backfire.

[goljerp]

Well, it's not like $1 bills would be illegal or anything; there could be a transition period when vending machine companies (and others) could transition. But I don't really think the vending machine industry should be allowed to have a veto on a proposal which otherwise would save the US a lot of money (it costs more than $0.01 to produce a penny, and coins are far more durable and last longer than paper money) and make a lot of sense.

[pekmez.livejournal.com]

I care about 5 and 10 cent differentials in price, while I and I pay for things using nickels and dimes to make exact change frequently. Whether or not the penny is rounding error doesn't matter to me,
but I don't want to round the price of everything up to the nearest quarter even if there's nothing I can buy by itself for 5 cents anymore. And I'm pretty sure I've bought things for 10 cents in recent memory.

Dollar bill and penny, sure. But please don't make the minimum price resolution of anything a quarter.

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

But that's what the minimum price resolution was when we started this whole "coins" thing.

[pekmez.livejournal.com]

No. Your numbers say that a *nickel* today is roughly what a penny was then. A factor of 5 is not the same thing as a factor of 25.

So if we get rid of the penny, and have the nickel be the next largest price resolution, we're down to the same level of price resolution they had.

However, If we also get rid of the nickel and dime, and make the *quarter* the only price resolution, then that is changing the minimum price resolution by an amount that I claim is still significant. Even if nothing, as it happens, actually costs a nickel, we can still care that our coffee costs 2.05 and not 2.2. And if every item on my grocery bill wound up rounded up by 15 or 20c I'd *totally* notice.

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

1 cent, in the early part of the 20th century, had the buying power of 23 cents today. That's a factor of 23. And that was after some inflation during the switch to the bimetallic standard in 1881. The half-penny coin was discontinued in 1857 when its buying power dropped to approximately 12 cents today. So, on the whole, historically, what dimes are worth today is below the typical historical "this isn't worth it" point, and quarters are at or above it.

1972 to today is a factor of five. 1910 to today is a factor of twenty-five or so.

[bill_sheehan.livejournal.com]

I just parked at a metered spot in Somerville this evening. I slid my credit card in and paid two bucks for two hours.

My point is that we're rapidly running out of places that don't accept plastic. We can easily kill off every coin under the dime, and the $1 and $2 bill; I'll hardly notice.

Remind me to trade in my buckets of loose change first...

[rymrytr.livejournal.com]

I'm with Bill. I don't carry cash if I can help it. And I've rejected carrying coins for years. I either give them to the kids or toss them in a plastic jar. Plastic works everywhere I go (which may be limited, compared to some of you). Coffee; groceries; gasoline; Walmart; Lowes; Fast Food; Black Angus, etc.; just swipe your card.

I do carry some coins now however, the "gold" coins because I like to give them away to kids. I'm 68 and the smiles are worth the buck. I always talk to the parents first and 9 time out of 10, they are not aware that the U.S. Gov has the Presidential, First Spouse, and Sacajawea series. I have to explain that they are not real gold; that they are not worth saving because there are millions out there; let the kid spend it! :o)

I recently heard that the Mint is considering dropping these series, as people are not using them.

If you put twenty five dollars worth in your pocket, it is a load, by weight.

As for the "gold" color, once a coin has been in human hands, it turns dull, somewhat like a penny; that brownish, copperish color.

So, for me (for what that's worth), I could get buy on credits in place of actual cash. Plastic is almost like that anyway. Write a check and hand it to the cashier at walmart. They scan it and hand it back to you. "Paper" is on it's way out. How long it will take is unpredictable. As for coins, even parking meters in some cities, now take plastic...

[felis-sidus.livejournal.com]

Three things strike me about this discussion in general. One is that the argument that debit cards are taking over anyway has value only to those who have enough money to maintain a bank account. The second is that the impact on those who are living close to the bone has nothing to do with what the buying power of a dollar or dime was when the nation was founded and everything to do with the effect on their cost of living in the present. The third is that the one thing we all seem to agree upon is that it's time for the penny to go. Common ground!

[rymrytr.livejournal.com]

enough money to maintain a bank account

That's true. I have to keep a minimum balance of $25 to keep it open.

I guess I was looking into the future, perhaps beyond my lifetime, at "credits". Another way of keeping track of people. Cashless society. You must have your identity papers to get your credits...