Change Our Currency's Denominations? - My Latest Coins Rant.

The quarter cannot go anywhere until at least 2021. I want to finish my ATB set.

I have said before that the discontinued circulating cents and nickels would continue on as NIFC; I suspect the same for a discontinued circulating quarter.

However, since the quarter is the real workhorse, we should just kill the cent, nickel, and dime. Round everything to the nearest quarter dollar. You know I am right.



You forgot to properly describe it... this would be an Eisenhower Five Dollar coin.

I say withdraw all cents from circulation - use those as planchets (giving som einteresting mint errors, I'm sure, with copper and zinc in each year) to strike a new dime.

Withdraw all nickels to restrike as Quarters - no more big ol' quarters.

Replace half dollar planchets with quarter planchets for striking with.

Use dollar coins and restrike the old ones as $5 coin. Bring in a $2 coin (bimetallic, of course).

And strike circulating gold $500 coins for larger transactions.

Okay, so, this is another brief interjection.

I don't see change going anywhere for a LONG time. Altered, maybe (as in the example of getting rid of the cent), but not disappearing. Here are five places I could have used cash and coins and only cash and coins in the last week if I hadn't been working, or actually did use change:

--A Mexican lady's "tamale stand" down near Apollo's, which is actually a cooler filled with those foil hot/cold bags, and a sun umbrella
--A yard sale
--The tip jar at Five Guys (actually, I did do this)
--not applicable to me but very applicable to parents: your kid's allowance
--The Ronald McDonald House box at McDonald's

And a bonus:

--A kid at my work who wanted a doughnut and came up Two Cents short because at six years old he didn't really grok sales tax yet. I fished a couple of pennies out of my pocket and tossed 'em in my coworker's drawer.



"But," I'm sure those of you with iPhones are thinking, "What about Square?" Sure, Square is a great invention, and grandmas with trendy granddaughters willing to give up an afternoon to babysit Grandma's yard sale may make cash obsolete at some yard sales. But do you think the Mexican lady who sells tamales has an iPhone? (let me answer that question for you: I've seen her cell phone. I'm pretty sure it's from the late 1990s.) What about the tip jar at Five Guys? Having worked at a place with a tip jar I can tell you that at the end of each day they get divvied up between all workers, so the cook gets tips as well as the cashier. Trying to use Square or similar software for the tip jar would be a nightmare. What about your kid's allowance? Sure, a teen may have a Green Dot card or something similar, but what about your six-year-old--or, for those of you with adult kids, what about the boy who mows your lawn?


Hundreds of things would die with the death of our coinage. Lemonade stands. Small businesses or initiatives that can't afford a digital hookup*. Tip jars. Local charity jars ("Sarah has been diagnosed with a rare form of cancer, please help her family with your spare change"). The charity "Dollar Dance" at weddings. Flea markets and yard sales--the older folks who always have the most fascinating junk are those least likely to have things like Square hookups, and this would round-robin until people saw no point in going to them anymore. And what about that most common act of courtesy--the man who taps a distraught woman on the shoulder when she discovers she's two dollars short to pay for her kids' treat and it's the end of her paycheque, and says "Ma'am? You dropped this" and hands her $5 so her kids can have their treat and she can have her dignity?

I don't think American society would readily accept all of these changes--not this generation, probably not for another 2-3 lifetimes--long after all those who can remember a world where cash was normal are dead. And even then--can we be sure? I would say we can't count on the death of cash and coins until the day that Little Jimmy can afford his own Square hookup to run his lemonade stand. Too much stands to disappear otherwise.




*e.g., the kid you see on every college campus who offers to edit your term paper for a buck per page. This kid might have an iPhone with Square, but it's equally likely he/she doesn't. I was this kid, and I didn't--I couldn't even think about affording one. This also encompasses teens doing odd jobs for money and offering your neighbor thirty bucks if you can borrow his pickup to move your sofa to your new place.

@ninamason: Africa solved the problem of mobile payments 5 years ago. It is called M-Pesa and allows people to make peer to peer payments using any cell phone capable of sending and receiving text messages. You simply enter the person's phone number, the amount you wish to transfer, and push send.

Steve, you add another brilliant illustration to my point. There are plenty of people who feel this way and not all of them are from before Generation Tech.

I just don't see money going anywhere for a long time.

Given how much resistance there is against eliminating the $1 bill, I wouldn't hold your breath. ;-)

Theres probably little to no chance of money being phased out for several generations. Every generation seems to use cash less and less. There probably is a good chance at some point money will all be electronic but it wont be happening for 100s if not 1000s of years.

Cash is already being phased out and has been for decades. With every new form of payment fewer people use cash and cash transactions are already down to about 50% of transactions. They are an even smaller percentage of the total value of transactions since people tend to use cash for small purchases and cards for larger purchases. The use of cash also correlated to the age of the person. Some of the recent grads at my work don't use cash at all. If a merchant doesn't accept cards they simply don't shop there since they don't carry any cash.

Of course this is only talking about individuals, businesses abandoned cash quite a while ago. I've haven't received a physical paycheck from a company in more than a decade and last year my company stopped even printing statements. I routinely receive requests from utility companies to switch to paperless statements and online payments. Some hotels and car rental companies no longer accept cash or checks and require cards for all payments. These companies have determined that the cost associated with handling cash are not worth the benefits. (Several papers I've read put the cost of printing, transporting, and handling cash at 2-3% of GDP.)

I see the decline of cash continuing until we get to a tipping point. As fewer consumers use cash fewer businesses will accept cash until you reach the point that cash exits the above board economy and cash it really only used for "off the books" transactions. At that point the government may decide to simply stop making cash to force those transactions out of the shadows and into the light.