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

[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.)