The US seems to have entered a stasis of coinage (and bill) denomination since before I was born (a long time ago). Besides getting rid of the penny, pretty much every attempt to introduce new currency (like $1 coins) have failed. And I wouldn't count on being able to use anything bigger than a $20 bill at a random location.
And, at this point, cash use is in sufficient decline that I can't imagine any serious effort to make changes.
I never understood this. They start printing $1 coins and complain that nobody uses them. Then they stop printing them.
Of course nobody uses them. Their wallets are filled with bills. That they keep printing. Then they announce a coin that will surely be cancelled in a few months, and collectors jump on it.
Americans would use a $1 coin if the deployment strategy wasn't garbage, condemning them to collector status almost immediately.
That's because American coins aren't worth anything. I'd like to see $5 and $20 coins, and the elimination of the penny and nickel, which would mean I don't have to carry around paper money any more.
Traveling to Europe I found the euro coins to be much more convenient.
I don’t understand why the US seems so incapable of simple action that displaces a very minor special interest.
In Australia we got rid of the one and two cent coins 30 years ago because the buying power of the ten cent piece then was less than one cent piece originally when introduced in the 1960s.
There was no big debate or opposition and no lobbying by coin producers or those who produced the metals. It just happened and basically everyone was happy not to deal with more pointless small change. And people still largely paid with cash too so electronic payment wasn’t as significant as it is today.
Which seems a bit unusual to us outsiders, seeing as a lot of other major currencies with value roughly comparable to USD do just fine with coins for 1 and 2 denominations (EUR, GBP, AUD, CAD, NZD).
That sounds like a reasonable long-term solution (I never understood why the US mints coins with fake denominations anyway), but it wouldn't apply to this case.
The article already accounts for a difference between Canadian and US currency -- the US has no $2 coins and nearly nonexistent $1 coins, and the smallest bill in Canadian currency is $5.
They suggest "optimizing" Canadian change with an 83-cent piece... which of course makes no sense once the penny is eliminated, so now there must be a different optimal coin.
I didn't read the "failure to introduce" as meaning no coin was created, but more as "failure to launch" in that it was just never picked up by the population. My largest concern with the dollar coins where they were too similar to quarters in size and were often used in error as a quarter. it is the primary reason I've heard to explain the lack of acceptance.
My experience in trying to use $1 coins has convinced me that the US probably won't change soon. None of the cash drawers have a space for them. I witnessed more than a little consternation on the part of tellers who couldn't figure out what to do with the money I had just given them. More than that, it means that $1 coins aren't necessarily being given back out as change; easier for the store to just send it back to the bank.
As an American, the part of the story where a single coin is valuable enough to bother with is very interesting to me. Our failure over years to introduce a working dollar coin (much less a toonie) is frustrating.
If a group wants to peg a coin to the dollar, why don't they just issue coins for $1, put that directly into a savings account, and allow redemption of any coin for $1?
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