Posted 12/04/2016 9:55 pm
They haven't been around since the 1990s and 1980s, respectively. Most kids who serve you at the checkout won't ever have seen them before and will thus be unlikely to accept them. I had a bag of 1 cent and 2 cent coins no-one would accept; I ended up giving them away to the students at a Conversational English class I volunteer at.
No one "has to" take them, not even banks. Banks usually have a policy in place to accept them on behalf of customers that deposit them, but they certainly won't exchange them for you if you don't have an account with them.
Such items, when deposited, cause extra paperwork and hassle for the bank staff. Some banks may have an informal arrangement with a collector, who comes in regularly to take such items off their hands. It's win-win: the bank doesn't have to deal with the paperwork, and the collector gets a ready source of "weird stuff" they only pay face value for. But once the bank fills in the paperwork, there's nothing they can do - the items must then be sent back to the Mint (or for notes, the Reserve Bank) for destruction.
No one "has to" take them, not even banks. Banks usually have a policy in place to accept them on behalf of customers that deposit them, but they certainly won't exchange them for you if you don't have an account with them.
Such items, when deposited, cause extra paperwork and hassle for the bank staff. Some banks may have an informal arrangement with a collector, who comes in regularly to take such items off their hands. It's win-win: the bank doesn't have to deal with the paperwork, and the collector gets a ready source of "weird stuff" they only pay face value for. But once the bank fills in the paperwork, there's nothing they can do - the items must then be sent back to the Mint (or for notes, the Reserve Bank) for destruction.
Don't say "infinitely" when you mean "very"; otherwise, you'll have no word left when you want to talk about something really infinite. - C. S. Lewis
