Sure, when you hand the cashier some US dollar coins, nobody bats an eye, but when I hand the cashier a stack of Australian $1 notes, everybody loses their minds!
I have a lot of those “gold” dollar coins. For a long time after they came out, I’d ask the cashiers at stores and banks to trade me paper dollars for whatever gold coins they had available. Many times I had to dig into my stash to get by, so it’s not like I’m sitting on a massive horde of them or anything, but I have about a hundred of them.
There’s a few countries that use US currency as the premium currency. Its very bizarre to be halfway around the world and see US dollars, but its a strong and reliable currency in countries where the local currency is too volitile to use.
Yeah, like Cambodia. The ATMs near my hotel spat out dollars, but deep in the city it was local currency. Everyone accepted dollars but they did charge a bit higher if you were a dollar spender if you calculated the local currency conversion on that. From my country it was easier to get dollars too before I flew out, vs Riels which were harder to find and had a pretty bad exchange rate.
Ecuadorians are very touchy about the condition of their paper bills. I tried to pay for a Panama hat with some cash that included a slightly torn but fully in tact $10, and the shop owner refused. As such, more durable dollar coins, which were minted by the US but never really caught on, are quite popular.
I like the Sacagawea and “Innovation” dollar coins. The problem with 'em, though, is people horde and collect them so they’re not as available as the regular paper bills even though they are currently still in production. They come across so rarely, I also tend to think “oooh I should hold onto this!” Whenever I get one back as change.
The only downside to using them I’ve run into is having to show the clerk it’s a dollar and not a quarter.
Wait, can’t yall just… go to the bank? I walked into a local bank a year or so ago and asked if I could exchange for them, they asked how many and just exchanged them like anything else.
I’m sure if I wanted thousands that would be a problem, but I’d be surprised if they didn’t have at least a handful.
The tooth fairy put one of these under my kid’s pillow tonight. The thought is that he’s going to enjoy it more because it’s rare. It will end up in his piggy bank, out of circulation for who knows how long.
Countries will sometimes value their currency vs the US Dollar vs trading it on the more open market. Often it provides some stability, particularly when trading abroad
So basically, I say one Triganic Pu is worth 1 US dollar and 1 Ningi is 12.5 US Cents so at least the value of the currency is less of an inflation factor
They used to use the Sucre. When it crashed a lot of people lost a lot of money. I wish I knew more about that, and why they decided to bend over and use the world’s biggest terrorist organization’s currency.
Argentina is toying with the idea of doing the same thing. tl;dr - Decades of out of control inflation. Currently the worst inflation in the world. The belief is that pinning their economy to the USD would stop that
Local bar is still cash only. I use change for pool tables quite often or if I ever take the bus. Maybe I am just getting older but cash seems like it is still around everywhere.
This has been studied. The US uses a higher quality paper that lasts an average of 7 years. So it is actually cheaper than minting coins. In other countries that switched to coins, singles only lasted a year or two.
There is nothing stopping people from using coins now. People just don’t like them.
They’re also heavy in your pocket and don’t fit in a standard cashier’s drawer. There aren’t enough slots.
The real good idea would be getting rid of pennies and nickels. Those are only useful for giving stores a few extra cents in profit. They set prices at $4.99 instead of $5 so you buy more. Without pennies, they’d have to set the price at $4.90 and lose 9 cents.
I disagree. I hate carrying any coins, while dollars of any denomination fit nicely in my wallet.
I have a hunch that if we were to swap to these instead of paper dollars for $1, prices would go up simply because retailers would you d everything up to the nearest $5 increment.
Canadian here, between electronic payments and coins being more durable than paper or polymer money, retailers don’t have any incentive to charge a less competitive price.
Isn’t the wallet thing kinda backwards though? Like, it’s not as if we all had wallets perfectly sized to carry this kind of paper money before the paper dollar was introduced.
I figure that if coins had been the predominant form of currency for at least the past century, we’d have a great way to carry coins other than a pouch, and paper money would be inconvenient.
I lived in Ecuador for a bit and it’s pretty terrible when you pay for a $5 item with a twenty dollar bill and the cashier hands you back fifteen of these coins, which has happened to me on multiple occasions.
It does get too complicated for my tastes. Sometimes you have to right click elements and block them manually. Sometimes you have to create a filter or you lose scrolling like on this site:
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