Plastic Coins - Are They The Future?

Because there is no reason to have them made of plastic. All of them cost well below face value to manufacture and distribute.

The only plastic in our monetary future is the plastic we have now... electronic payment cards.

Completely wrong. You need to look up the word plastic. There are millions, maybe billions, of variations of Plastic. And too how it's made, where the materials come from and how long a plastic can last. There are some plastics so hard they rival steel. Some so soft they almost can be used for playing with for kids. Some deteriorate fast and some are made to last for thousands of years. The word plastic is almost too broad a term.
And as usual, I can never see why so many even consider different types of coinage. There soon enough will be no use for coins except for collectors. Those things called Credit and Debit cards almost now rule. And soon enough, that is all there will be.
What really shocked me was at a Walmart I saw a Gumball Machine that needed Quarters. Getting old I guess since I thought they were a penny.

Why is it always cents I thought the first post in this thread, and you seconded it in the second post, was to leave the American penny out of it? Yet that is all that is discussed?

I am talking in general, as can be seen the cost to produce most coins is less than to produce them in metal if these prices are real. So SOMEONE can make the plastic cheaply, why cant Uncle Sam? $1 coin that costs 7 cents versus 19 cents to make. Seems like a no-brainer to me. just figure out what security bits to add into the coin like the weird pattern in the mold or something else that is hard to duplicate or would cost more for a counterfeiter to do than it would cost for the coin itself.

They spent $40 million per year for how many years in research on "how to use wood", so they could easily spend research on making plastic coins, and maybe even currency.

When you consider what "money" or a "coin" is, and think that a Putt-Putt token is really just a coin with a value only good at Putt-Putt, then all you have to do is think of plastic coins as tokens for fractional dollars, and maybe even the real dollar coin itself. just think of the savings on shipping costs because plastic for the same volume weighs less than metal which reduces fuel costs. people wont be sticking coins in places they dont belong and getting hurt by it. there will be no more nickel poisoning of zinc poisoning of kids that swallow the coins.which would reduce health care costs....

I mean if you really want to discuss the American penny, then just think of the $120 million loss to make the penny and nickel in 2011 and the fact those plastic nickels were less that 5 cents each and half that loss is already turned into partial profit through seigniorage. Then consider the other coins from that year possibly costing HALF of what it too to make them so even more is made.

Stamping metal is easy, but so is injection molding plastic. There is also less steps as you don't have to have someone make a metal sandwich, you don't have to stamp out blanks, you don't have to anneal them or upset them, you just mold them, one simple step is all the molding process takes. you can mill out molds quicker than you can the dies, and they take less metal also because you could make the molds out of cheaper materials like aluminum.

For vending machines they could still put some type of metal inside with a currency resistance so when a plastic coin rolls into a machine it has contacts and the amount of resistance given off tells the machine what denomination it is by having two contacts exposed on the coin for actual conductivity or even via magnetic induction where there is no metal exposed but maybe just a tiny amount of copper coil inside the coins that create a field for each denomination like those antennae or whatever they are inside credit cards.

When you would have to melt 20 pennies for 1 cent worth of copper, then it would be pointless to worry about people melting them to reclaim the copper when there is more to be found in old fans like from box fans or old computers than could be found in ANY coin.




That bag proves nothing because we have the same MSRP on ALL the bags as the price point that lady wanted to make on them. we have no idea the cost to make any of the coins or bills they sell as their "school money". The only facts known are toys have a high profit margin because every kid wants some kind of toy, so retailers know where to add a little more to pad their profits. We also know that plastic is cheap to make, that is why everything today comes in plastic because it is cheaper than paper or metal, and it last longer and can take more damage and is safer. Thus why so many toys are made of non-toxic plastic.

There are many people that collect plastic doo-dads, and we know the mint pulls certain coins so they don't become collectors items like the washington $1 mule or whatever it is. That would be less cost to pay people to scrutinize them when made of plastic because plastic errors happen, and not many people would collect plastic coins as vigorously because it isn't a precious or base metal.. it wouldnt even be metal!

so plastic could reduce the cost of materials, reduce the cost of production, reduce the cost of personnel, and reduce the cost of distribution. do you have any real argument against them left that deals with anything revolving around costs, or just wants and tradition of metal coins?

That was someone else in this thread looking for the numebrs. I only know about plastic figures and you dont get a pellet count to how many go into a little green army man...so we have to wait for the other guy form this or the other thread on these type things.

Look around you. Notice the many, many machines that take coins. Notice the places like parking meters, coffee machines and on and on and on. I once worked in a building where there was an entire floor of machines for food and drinks. Yes to today many also take currency. BUT just who is going to retrofit all the rest to take plastic?

You realize that the current dollar coin were pretty much dictated by the vending machine company needs and for circulation of the populace they were a flop. So I would say don't let the vendors of coin operated anything dictate how it works. You think the $2 billion a year industry that is the "laundromat" won't just adapt to new coins? Maybe ye olde mechanical kids machine like gumball machines will die off but we aren't losing anything there any way as they have been dwindling for years since technology providers better toys than a plastic spider ring.

You do realize that since the 50 and probably before coin-op have made a variety of acceptors, and for many places they do't even take coins but tokens? Since that is all money is since leaving the gold standard or other precious metal standard and going to fiat currency, it is jsut a token, and the value of the token, is only its face value, ergo the entire disputes around the penny in the first place? They already have so many different devices that they probably already have something that can take plastic "coins". They can take credit cards without swiping a magnetic strip now due to the antennae or RFID inside them, so why not a coin as I mentioned earlier? It would just take a lot less for a coin because you would only need it to give information, not receive it. a coin when passed through a magnetic field changes that field in a certain way. Thus making different size coils inside coins would easily let them tell what the denomination is.

What coin-op device isn't already running off electricity in this digital age that it couldn't function with an electronic coin-op mechanism? Just ye olde gumball machines? If they want to stay in business, then they will have to adapt.

If they don't want to be a general coin-op, then they can revert to making their own tokens as they have done for over 60 years. Putt-Putt tokens, Chuck-E-Cheese tokens, bus token, etc. All those sorts of things found in coin rolls that are not coins, but used as payment.

A plastic coin is no more different than a stamp is since it represents a value, because they are all "token" values. (Now maybe I see why stamps and coins always go together in a sense of collecting.) Do stamps cost 50 cents to make? Are they legal currency? Are Putt-putt tokens? They are not, but still hve a value that can be redeemed with the issuing location/business.

Most coin-op vendors now want to get rid of the coin part anyway since they do accept bills and credit cards, but keep the coin functions for a simple reason. So many people are williung to use coins for it rather than the few who will shove a credit card in to buy an iPod or bottle of wine. They already did the math years ago and learned that if they stopped acepting all coins, they would lose more money than it cost to take coins, thus they jsut started accepting bills and cards as well to offer the chance to gain customers that don't have that many coins.

Not every keeps jars of coins and some spend them as quick as they get them or dump all their coin out for tips when they get them. For others that DO have large piles of coins, Coinstar jumped on the chance to take a % of that coinage in exchange for giving them bills.

You think Coinstar wouldnt jump on a way to accept plastic coins for those who kept them and do the same thing they are doing now and watch the rest of the coin-op world shrivel while they take ALL the extra profits form the extra coins sitting around at 10% per dump?

Think of the situation in Transnistria, a country (well, maybe) that I am trying to steer the discussion back towards because it is the one that is actually adopting plastic.

The highest-value non-plastic coin there is worth about 4 cents. The plastic line-up is replacing the four lowest-value banknotes there. (imagine a plastic $2 coin in America) It's a little bit much to assume that every country enjoys America's density of coin-operated machines - plastic coins will catch on first in the developing world, where these arguments about having to change luxuries are basically irrelevant.

"Introducing new denominations means a super-expensive retrofitting process" - 18 years after the introduction of the toonie, some old vending machines in Canada still don't take the things, and really, who cares? These things don't last forever - the first machines to be retrofitted will have an advantage over their competitors, and eventually they'll all be replaced anyway.