Coins are easier to count than bills. They are thick enough that you never confuse two coins for one, even when they are stuck together. And they are also more convenient in your pocket, because you don't have to fold or otherwise organize them.
Dollar bills are usually in terrible condition. Folded corners, creases, dirt. Ten singles take up more space in my wallet than just about anything else I'd put in there.
I'd rather have ten coins. They'll easily fit in the bottom of my pocket, and when I pull out change there's likely to be a useful amount of money in it.
Unfortunately, yes. Drugs are well-known to be the only product for which cash is an acceptable form of payment. The utility of hard currency really took a hit when all the hookers moved to Venmo.
Coins last much longer in circulation than bills, a coin can last decades while a bill only lasts a few years so some estimates put the yearly savings at 500-700 million a year in printing, paper, etc costs saved. It's worked just fine in other places they just had the courage to phase out printing of paper bills to force the issue. People would adapt quickly given no option but the soft handed approach basically guarantees people won't encounter the new coins regularly.
That was the savings estimates at the time from sources in the government iirc so I think they would have included the relative durability of the cotton bank note in the calculations. [0] Of course that's just the savings not the costs but a lot of those are one time as different coin op mechanisms get updated to accept dollar coins.
[0] The $1 notes also go through a lot more use in their life so they degrade much quicker iirc and a bit over 40% of the bills in circulation are $1 bills too so switching over to a coin that lasts decades instead of 6-7 years (https://www.federalreserve.gov/faqs/how-long-is-the-life-spa...) would really cut down on printing costs.
Printing is just not very expensive, relative to the size of the US economy. People like the $1 note. I just don't think it's going to happen for another 2x-4x reduction in the value of the note.
Give it 15-40 years and we'll think about it again!
Of course, by then, so much of commerce will be electronic that I don't think anyone will care about what notes still circulate, other than the $100, which is used more outside the US than inside.
It's not _just_ printing though it's transport, storage and distribution then at the end of it's life span collection and destruction. In 2023 the US printed 2,397,104,000 in $1 bills alone. Doing anything at that scale is not cheap no matter how inexpensive a single unit of production is.
Well, about 25 years ago the EU issued 1 and 2 Euro coins (no bills for those denominations) and as far as I know still do. So it's working for them. When I lived over there (2005ish) I didn't care much for carrying a coin purse in addition to my wallet, but I think that's just a cultural/personal preference. Likely same as you.
1. Switching costs. There are a ton of vending machines and other automated stuff that takes dollar bills but not coins. You can say “oh they’d switch”, and maybe, but they don’t want to because it’s expense and complexity for little/no benefit.
2. Critical mass. Similar problem: nobody will invest in supporting dollar coins as long as their customers don’t use dollar coins. Customers won’t use them because they won’t accept them from banks and stores. And they won’t accept them because they know lots of infra doesn’t support them.
3. US psychology sees coins as “change”, not money. If you see someone buying lunch with change, the assumption is they’re homeless or something. It’s irrational, but so what? And it would change… if we ever got over the hump.
Don’t think of the problem like a technocrat, where any 5% improvement is obviously worth it. Think of it like a marketer, where you have to change customer behavior, and that needs a 10x value prop.
Or I guess we can think like autocrats: we know what’s good for ‘em and they’ll just have to accept it.
For many classes of vending machines, dollar bill support is going away without government intervention. For a while it's been very common in the US to see vending machines that have bill, maybe coin, and card options. It's increasingly common to find machines that only have card options, no cash. Products are more expensive and people use less cash generally...how many customers actually carry enough $1 bills to buy themselves a $3.75 bottle of soda?
They're already switching because it allows them to charge higher prices with less friction. You'll likely grumble a bit while you're feeding the 4th dollar bill into the machine but a card swipe or tap is the same level of customer effort regardless of cost.
Vending machines will continue to move towards electronic payment as the preferred and eventually only widely available option, and will no longer have relevance to what a physical dollar looks like.
All the novelty $1 coins since the Sacagawea offer the potential for a gradual shift too. Modern multi-denomination coin mechs are likely to accept them, unlike the Susan B Anthony's that were too close to quarters [1]. Some of them even have a sticker near the coin slot advertising the feature. So if someone has given you a dollar coin in change (probably a government cashier or machine), you might be able to use it in a machine. I couldn't find a well reported number on dollar coin acceptance --- just an undated claim of 30% of machines accepting them according to Vending Market Watch but no link to an article or anything. I did see an article on VMW from 2011 about cash recyclers that allow a machine to take a larger bill and issue change with smaller bills rather than only coins, that featured a quote that resonates with me:
> "Customers have told me firsthand how thrilled they are to receive bills as change instead of dollar coins," said Mike Gallagher, service manager for Coca-Cola Bottling Co. "Sales on those machines have increased, and the technology has been extremely reliable." [2]
[1] I did see one coin mech in the wild that took Anthony dollars; but it was a spendy arcade game and had a dispenser next to it to get the dollar coins you needed from bills or quarters. And there were big signs about it, at the Disneyland StarCade in the 90s.
There was always a potential, but without a plurality of momentum, they're not going to replace their predecessors. The early 00s was the best chance for this, in the wake of the Susan B Anthony reissuance and the new Sacagawea dollar, when there was a decent amount of public interest, but as it turns out, anything less than 100% acceptance is just not as good as the 100% acceptance of quarters in coin machines, or dollar bills in bill readers. People won't use them if they aren't accepted, and retailers won't accept them if they aren't used.
Do you have any experience in countries with large denomination coins? Anything smaller than a quarter is super annoying, even the quarter is borderline. It says something when a countries largest coin is too small to be useful. A 500 Yen (~$4) coin OTOH, is super nice.
That’s more of an issue with the US financial infrastructure. There are plenty of poorer countries where mobile payments are more the norm than in the US.
Yes, I’m really worried about what exactly? The places where cash are feasible to be used - in person transactions - aren’t the places where I would worry about government funding out what I’m doing.
Yes I know about regressive states and tracking women who might be pregnant to “protect the unborn”.
Denial is a common coping mechanism about the ever growing corporate surveillance state and all the ways its power may (and thus eventually will) be wielded to further economically disenfranchise most people.
First, yes companies make it directly harder for customers to give them money all the time with repeating high-discount sales, bespoke proprietary web/mobile store apps, captchas, loyalty/sunk cost programs, etc. These all frustrate market efficiency, so the company can then capture some of the surplus value accumulating due to friction. "Creating a moat" (aka market inefficiency) is like business school 101.
But the longer term disenfranchisement trend I see is making the numeric value of money itself ever more depreciated in favor of fine grained price discrimination. So it's not that it will be "harder to give them money", but rather that you will be paying twice as much (ie not receiving coupons/vouchers to obtain the real competitive price) based on them knowing that you personally will still buy.
> it's not that it will be "harder to give them money", but rather that you will be paying twice as much (ie not receiving coupons/vouchers to obtain the real competitive price) based on them knowing that you personally will still buy.
JCPenney has been doing that for decades. When Ron Johnson - the former CEO of Apple retail - came in as CEO and tried to get rid of the constant coupons and “sales” and implement everyday low prices, consumers rebelled and he was rapidly fired.
Even with cash, stores have loyalty programs that consumers gladly sign up for. In the mid 90s, I worked at Radio Shack which was infamous for tracking how often employees asked for names and addresses just to buy batteries
I don't see how that addresses what I said. Sure, similar dynamics have existed for a while. And sure, many consumers are happy with simulated achievement. That doesn't mean they aren't getting taken advantage of, or that the dynamic won't continue to get ever worse as the corporate surveillance machine gains more capabilities.
How much “worse” can they get? Radio Shack for instance has your information about your sales patterns since the 1990s even when using cash.
Credit cards vs cash is the least of your problems and on a meta level, users have been willing to give their information to retailers and been doing couponimg for decades.
I'm still trying to work out whether you don't realize that Radio Shack closed like ten years back, or if you really think there is no difference between the information systems of now and thirty years ago.
Do yourself a favour and search HN for people's stories about their BigCo accounts for paid services being closed for no apparent reason. Most of the time these are accompanied (by design) with no way to getting beyond automated denial bots.
The tired trope of capitalism ensuring that all customers will be served needs to die. Businesses always evaluate any additional revenue against the cost of getting that revenue.
There are a multitude of ways in which the cost can exceed the revenue. The mundane example is that it's more expensive for Google to maintain non automated support for 'non core' services. A more harmful example is the practice of 'redlining' after the great depression where largely due to non financial reasons, the 'cost' of providing mortgages to non whites was deemed larger than the expected revenue from those mortgages.
> Businesses always evaluate any additional revenue against the cost of getting that revenue
nit: this is still coming from the vein where businesses are taken to be super-computational agents/oracles. whereas really there is a lack of evaluation of the possible revenue being left on the table, and the focus is on what has already been found to be profitable.
