Reccomendations For Half And $2 Bill Circulation

To get a coin or note to really, truly circulate, you need four things: people prepared to give them away as money, people prepared to accept them as change, cashiers prepared to accept them as money, and cashiers prepared to give them away as change. You need all four, at the same time, otherwise the circulation ring is broken and the coins get stuck somewhere and don't circulate.

From reading numerous discussion threads on the subject here on the forum, I'd say that training cashiers and tellers to accept and give out unusual denominations is not the largest hurdle to overcome. Training the general public to accept them in change is. Most times when tellers or cashiers have reported trying to give them out as change, they get quizzical looks, skeptical questions or outright refusal. Making their customers mad by expecting them to take unusual, unfamiliar money is not good for business.

One quick way to get millions of half dollars and/or dollar coins into circulation would be to modify the automatic change returns at supermarkets to handle them. Here in the Los Angeles area, our major supermarket chains all use these change returns, where the change comes down a chute and the clerk only passes out bills and never hands coins to the customer. The problem with hesitancy of clerks to pass out new types of coins is eliminated, since a machine is doing the dispensing, and customers might feel less resentful at receiving the coins from a machine, since they don't feel like a particular clerk is dumping the coins on them, and they may be thus more likely to accept them and reuse them.

The only way I can see them coming back is if we eliminate the cent, nickel, quarter, and one dollar note. The half dollar would fill the void between the dime and one dollar coin. The two dollar note would "lighten the pockets" of one dollar coins.

It is a long shot. Getting the cent and one dollar note eliminated is doable, but nixing the nickel and popular quarter is a even tougher sell.

Agreed. Which makes getting rid of the nickel difficult. I am convinced that we cannot get rid of the nickel without losing the quarter.

Fortunately, a material change can help the nickel, unlike the cent.

I was told by those much older than me (thats old) that Half Dollars really were marginalized after WWII. They were bulky and heavy and two quarters were easier to deal with.

"Silver" dollars, including Ikes, same thing. In fact practically no one used these coins. Most were given as gifts. Gold coins were used more than the silver ones, and they were usually used for large commercial transactions --- but even that stopped in the early 20th century, and in the Western US, the only placed they were used to any extent, paper money was accepted as readily as "hard" cash.

As far as replacing bills, as has been stated here ad infinitum, unless the paper denomnation is eliminated it just won't happen. And counterfieting a coin is much easier than a bill, just more expensive.

Some ideas:
1) A smaller coin, along the lines of the old gold $1 might be easier for the public to accept. OK, not THAT small maybe, but something distinct. Using an exotic alloy would help deter counterfeiters. You'd have to duplicate the color and density, not easy.

2) Bring back the Quarter Eagle. This would give a coin alternative to a dollar coin, and less $5 bills would be needed.

Just my 2/100 USD.

Truth.


We already have a viable dollar coin. Getting it accepted only requires what you said above, elimination of the dollar note. If the current baby dollar is the only option, it will get used.

This would be a mistake (see the quarter problems). The best option is a two dollar coin to replace the two dollar note. Worked just fine in Canada.

I'm starting to use dollar coins in my transactions rather than dollar bills, if only for the purely mundane reason that circulated dollar coins are more interesting than circulated dollar bills. But I digress. I'm considering putting a small Sharpie dot on the coins I spend to see if I get them back from the bank of if they come through the tills at work. It's not like they're collectible anyway.

I'm finding that the coins are easier to spend than the bills, especially in machines, but way more cumbersome to carry. I keep losing them in my car out of my work pants pockets. In order for them to be successful, the $2 also needs to be successful. Start ordering them from your bank and use them as you would any other denomination. Don't go and dump $100 on a single purchase, neither with the $2 nor with the $1 coins. They'll likely go right to the bank and be considered annoying. Single $2 bills/$1 coins will be more likely to be handed out as change, even if only so that the cashier won't have to deal with the odd denomination. Once/If people see in your neck of the woods that the $1 coin is more handy for machines than a dirty ol' dollar bill, and the $2 is more convenient than a pair of dollar bills/coins, then they'll be more welcome to the idea. If the public sees these denominations more, they'll be less likely to hoard them rather than spend as usual. It's all we can do. Persuading companies to do this won't work if the public cries about it.

The government also has the power to fix this but we have lobbyists.