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.
