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

[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.)