US Coin

[baavgai]

When I was still going to college, I spent a week in London on my own. I crashed in a cousin's flat and basically found my way to anywhere the Underground would take me. While there, I happily soaked in all the minor cultural differences. One of which was coin.

In England, there are no one pound notes (any more), just heavy little quid coins. ( Saying "quid" is like saying "buck" for a US dollar, it amuses me. ) I found having coins of real value quite useful. A pocket full of unruly bills is a mystery, but coins of distinct sizes can be readily produced from pocket for any trivial transaction. I left the UK determined to make better use of the US minted dollar, the SueB at the time.

In an historical quirk, they stopped making Susan B. Anthony dollars as soon as I returned home. Nearly twenty years later, the Sacajawea "golden dollar" was introduced. I have about 50 Sac bucks to hand. I used to give them to people as change and sometimes offer them to bewildered merchants. I'd take any spares the bank had, which were paltry at best. My personal dollar coin campaign, obviously, failed miserably.

This week a new US dollar coin is introduced, cunningly coinciding with President's day. This is new US currency, it should be readily available... Well, no, the banks haven't "ordered" any. They feel there's no demand. Indeed, with the whole multi president thing, it does feel more like a Franklin mint than a US mint offering.

I want dollar coins, but can't get them. If things carry on as they normally do, there is no doubt these coins will also fail. So, how to get America to use a dollar coin?

No one asked me if I wanted a face lift on all my other US currency, an option was not offered. Yet, all the dead patriots on my bills now look like bobble heads. The US, once the international hold out for monochrome money has started to shade it, well, whatever color that is. We don't get a vote on nature of legal tender, we just hope the Euro doesn't keep kicking it's ass.

The US would save money using coins compared to dollar bills. So... stop making the bills. You want to whine about all the machines and systems that currently take bills? Stop making new bills and sit back in wonder at how fast those machines will start taking coin.

Comments

[beckishadow.livejournal.com]

Let's all start going into banks and asking for them. :) I wanna whole mess of them to take to war. (Clinking money, and all that.)

[moirla.livejournal.com]

*snrk* bobbleheads

As a woman, coins can be irritating because, for some stupid reason, women's clothing is entirely ill-equipped in the pocket department. I think there is a wee bit of collusion in the fashion industry to force women to buy handbags. And the only thing I can ever find in my handbag would be my wallet. And coins simply don't fit in a wallet...

Perhaps if a sack of coins was proferred as a form of crime deterrent... Imagine all the women on the subway fondling sacks of coin instead of cans of mace? "It's a sap, it's your lunch money. Support the US Mint and whack some would-be vagabonds today!"

Seriously, though. If we move to coins, would the US Dollar have an actual verifiable value again beyond, I'm not even sure what the word for it would be, the suggestion of value that it currently has since it stopped being backed by real gold? It absolutely baffles me that the entire US economy is actually based on trust, for lack of another word. If the US government were to be dissolved for any reason, our little pieces of paper and all the zero's at the end of our collective networths wouldn't mean much, and that's a little scary. I'm surprised foreign countries trade in US dollars at all.

[baavgai.livejournal.com]

All paper money is a function of government trust. In a "fixed currency system", a government promises to redeem a slip of certified paper for something of intrinsic value, like gold or silver. Of course, the value of gold or silver is still an agreed upon an abstraction. You can't eat them, after all. If gold were common, aluminum might have it's value.

In the now more common floating currency system, everyone agrees that the confetti is worth something and goes from there. Like the stock market, as long as everyone plays along, the facade that is money works.

The modern world makes floating currency seem almost stable, as wealth becomes just numbers passed around by computers. More US dollars exist in bank databases than actually exist physically. Not a comforting thought, is it?

[moirla.livejournal.com]

oh yeah, I forgot. I have better luck getting sacs from the Stamp vending machines than anywhere else. I like them because we have a jar that we toss all our change in. Sacs add up a lot faster than nickels...

[kandy-elizabet.livejournal.com]

Golden Squirrel will be doing it's part at all future merchanting events -- I will be trading in my stock bank of dollar bills for Sacs.

Hm, maybe I'll make and sell coin pounches too :)

[handymonkey]

There are new dollar coins coming out soon. http://www.usmint.gov/mint_programs/$1coin/index.cfm

[beckishadow.livejournal.com]

CNN didn't have a single article on them on their site. Pathetic.

[baavgai.livejournal.com]

Ack, without rewriting post, my math is buggered. I was in England in 1990, SueBs were officially halted in 1980.

I ain't that old. :p

[suba-al-hadid.livejournal.com]

I go to the bank and get $1 coins regularly, both for use as change from our merchant booth and for spending at Pennsic. I've had vending machines and parking meters accept them (not always, but often enough to make them handy to carry). If you give the bank a week's notice they can order them for you. My bank just stocks $2 bills and $1 coins regularly now.