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

[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.