House Bill To Replace 5¢ Nickel With Half-Dime

Not sure what they do in Canada but a friend of mine has a small vending machine buisness. Canadian coins jam up his machines. He tells me numerous vending machines can not take magnetabal materials. The old 1943 Steel cents were made of standard, low grade steels and coated with Zinc to prevent the rusting. Today Steels could be made of Stainless Steels that are non magnetic. There are numerous SAE grades of Stainless Steels from the 100's to the 600's. Many are non magnetic and could be used in coins without any problems with our vending machines.

What about nickelplated aluminum?

Indeed, the 2000-present Dollar Coins were designed to be as 'vending-machine compatible' with the Susan B. Anthony dollars as possible. (ie: size and metal 'signature')

So, it's either choose a new size (half-dime) or a new composition and weight (steel-planchet 'nickel'), either of which will require substantial changes made to vending machines.

or if Washington would wake up, they could tell the vending machine people that coinage will not be decided based solely on their convenience.

Yeah, like the Susan B. and the Golden Dollars?!

I still encounter some vending machines that won't take those! And then there's the Denver Light Rail automated ticket dispensers, which give back all dollar change increments as Dollar Coins (very randomly, you could get Susan B.'s, Sac's and/or the latest new Presidential dollars, all on one day of Light Rail riding).
For example: Buy a $1.75 ticket with a $20 bill, and you'll get 18 dollar coins and a quarter as your change.

I do find circulated 2000 Sac.'s to be very useful at the car wash. Loading two Sac.'s is much less hassle than loading eight quarters!
Even though the car wash takes Dollar coins, their bill changers don't dispense them (I'd rather have a few Dollar coins that I can spend anywhere, instead of car-wash-only tokens or a handful of Quarters!).


They did just that with the 1913 Indian Head ('Buffalo') Nickel, after some fighting with the vending machine industry over the design!

Ironically, government entities run a lot of vending machines, and theirs are mandated to dispense Dollar coins instead of bills (ex: the Denver Light Rail system)

Not with the vending machine INDUSTRY, just with a single machine developer who didn't even have any machines out in the market. Just an order for some from a government agency. The coins worked fine in machines from other manufactures and after several attempts at trying to satisfy Mr Clarence Hobbs requests they finally told him he would have to adjust his machine to work with the coins as issued. They had the same problem with him all over again three years later during development of the Mercury dime. Once again they wasted time on him for awhile before finally telling him he would have to adapt his machines. (Part of the reason they did't waste as much time the second time around was because by then he did have machines in the marketplace but they were not being well received because they had a very high failure rate.)

the government has been working hard recently to solve this problem. failing businesses and the wall street issues has caused consumers to spend less, forcing industries to slow production and buy less base metal supplies. this makes the price of copper and nickel to fall, and as a result, the base metal cost of a nickel is now only 2.8 cents. woohoo go government! next up..how to make people have more money....umm lets print more and hand it out! oh yeah, did that already =\