What If After America The Beautiful Quarters Came...

I don't see much practical use as a teaching aid of a "tool" that takes 10 years to teach you about 50 places. When I was in the third grade we didn't have State Quarters and we learned the 50 states AND their capitals in three weeks, not ten years.

I look at all these State Quarters and president dollars and NA dollars and I remember back in the 80's when the official position of the Treasury dept was that designs should not change and that having more than one design in circulation would lead to confusion in the market place because no one would be sure what was a real coin and what wasn't. And that it would be a boon for counterfeiters because people would just think the fakes was just another design. That attitude caused them to fight design change every step of the way. Talk about doing a 180.

I just think it's ludicrous. These days when I open a roll of quarters for my drawer it's like looking at a bag of chocolate coins. The designs are beautiful, yes, but most people don't care. Usually the only time I can get a gape out of even a kid is by handing over a Sac or Prez, because people are so unused to golden currency.

And Conder, this is an excellent point. The other night at work I had a guy come in who I think probably immigrated here in the last ten years (he had an accent, but it was very slight and his English was very good), and he handed me two tens for gas: a 1996 and a 2008. As soon as he saw me spread them out to count (the tens came with a small stack of ones), he gasped and tried to take the 1996 back, apologising for handing me a counterfeit. I had to explain to him that no, US currency designs have changed twice since I was born and the colored bill he's more used to has actually been in circulation for less than ten years, and that the black and white bill he wanted back was the design from when I was in grade school. I showed him that the watermarks matched and the magic pen worked (which doesn't actually mean anything, but it's a nice tool for situations like this which have, in fact, happened before), and only then would he let me take the bill. If that's what happens with a bill design that was ten years old when it was changed, how much are we confusing people by changing our coinage five times a year?


ETA: Also, Conder, excellent point on the whole "ten years" thing. I remember doing the states in two weeks in fourth grade, learning them in bundles of five by singing Fifty Nifty United States (which is still how I come up with states I can't remember, shush). We did the state capitols in a week in fifth, which is probably why I only remember half of them, but once upon a time I could have recited them all and didn't need a quarter to do it.