After a trip to the US last year it was easy to see the US currency is awful. Coming from Aus where we have polymer banknotes, the paper was just terrible, and I wondered why they hadn't changed it yet.
And don't get me started on having $1 notes and 1c coins. Immediately found them (the coins at least) entirely pointless and just ignored them.
Other currency just feels... cheap. No offense.
Agreed on pennies though. They had their place back when they were useful, but they are almost pointless now.
This from Wikipedia also explains my dislike for $1:
Approximately 42% of all U.S. currency produced in 2009 were one-dollar bills.I still can't understand the preference for one dollar notes. Whenever I use a washing or vending machine I need to flatten out and align a dollar bill or insert dozens of quarters. Every few weeks I have to buy a couple of rolls of quarters from the bank. I paid a cashier with dollar coins yesterday and she did a double take and inspected each coin.
Edit: specifically, I learned about this from Gordon Legge[1], the chair of the psychology department at the University of Minnesota when I took a graduate level course on human-machine interaction from him back in 2002 or 2003. I lucked out and had a very forward-thinking advisor in the Computer Science department who let me apply Professor Legge's class to my Senior year electives ;)
[1] see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gordon_Legge and http://vision.psych.umn.edu/users/legge/ for more on him.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_currency_tactile_featu...
Hopefully the new bills will retain this feature.
As for the good ol' American green-back. Americans are excessively conservative when it comes to their currency. Just look at how long it took them to add colors other than green! At least we no longer have to put up with Americans mocking our currencies for being multi-colored monopoly bills. If americans are skeptical of polymer bills I can only take that as a good sign for these new Canadian bills.
You do realize your wallets are just smaller, right? Canadians don't go walking around with bills splayed out of our wallets, our wallets are just big enough to hold them.
Not sure which countries you're talking about in regards to the paper feel. I certainly noticed that in South America. Bolivia's currency, in particular, tended to be both in varying stages of decomposition and incredibly dirty. OTOH, the portrait on the 10 Boliviano note [1] was awesome enough to make up for any lack in paper quality.
[1]http://cdn2.iofferphoto.com/img/item/581/572/71/f7ce_1_b.JPG
(I would imagine Braille costs a fair bit to print, but banknotes are somewhat expensive to make - compared to most pieces of printed paper, I mean - so perhaps that wouldn't be an issue.)
Those pennies really don't add up. See if you can find a store that won't add in the extra pennies to round you up, seriously - they certainly don't care.
The tax man only cares about aggregates, unless they are in audit mode.
Um, you know that sales tax results in prices with fractional pennies? And that stores simply round the prices?
> Or they would keep the item prices the same, at which point customers might not like they are being charged, at the maximum, 4 cents more than they should.
You mean like how gas stations add on 9/10 of a cent to every gallon?
New Zealand has already taken it one step further and has abolished 5-cent coins as well, rounding everything to the nearest 10. There's talk of doing that in Australia as well.
Keep in mind that the Aussie dollar is worth more than a US one, and Kiwi dollar is worth only 20% less, so we're talking similar amounts of value being rounded up/down.
Now, if only Australia hadn't compensated the abolishment of 1 and 2 cent coins with the GIANT 50 cent coins, my wallet would be very happy.
No more pockets with a clump of metal in the bottom. No more fooling around trying to make a purchase come out even. Certainly no more counting them.
Its an amazing, liberating feeling! And it costs me far less than the time and effort I win back.
Imagine if you ordered a credit card from a bank and instead of receiving a shiny plastic card you got a low quality bit of printed cardboard. You'd think that was pretty low class, right? Well that's how I feel comparing the US and Aussie money in my wallet. The production quality on the American banknotes just does not match my expectations for a modern country in 2011.
Nothing against America of course, but I don't get the country's weird resistance to progress in certain areas, no matter how much of a no-brainer improvement that progress is. "Protect the greenback" - this is nothing but resistance to change, any change, no matter how beneficial. It's baffling how it can seemingly win the day, again and again. For me it is analogous to not upgrading to OSX 10.7 because you have nostalgic feelings about 10.6. I just cannot fathom how people get themselves into this state of mind.
OK, going rather off on a tangent there .. anyway other currencies do not look cheap : ) except the japanese yen, which IMO is the only major banknote series even worse than America's.
Check out the AUS 10, see how folded it looks? Now check out the $5 Military Payment certificate from around 1951. Just an observation.
That's why it's illegal to melt them down, and the US restricts exporting them.
1982-present US pennies, which weigh 2.5 grams, are 97.5% zinc and 2.5% copper (coated over the zinc) by weight and have a metallurgical value of 64.376% of the face value
So, while the production costs are more than 1 cent, the actual value of the metal inside is still below 1 cent.
Although, we've botched up the dollar coin (by not removing the paper buck) so many times, it'll probably never happen.
Only one mill in the world is allowed to produce the "paper" for US currency. Paper mills in general have equipment that works well for wood pulp paper, not the specialized equipment required to prepare and process the cotton based paper used in US dollars.
Because of the mandatory security costs involved and the fact they have to buy additional secret materials other than cotton and linen from the government, the profit margins on currency paper are razor thin. The only real benefit they get is a huge reference customer for their other secure paper business.
http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/asection/la-oe-stei...
"Kolbe and many other coin supporters said politics has also been a major obstacle. Prominent Massachusetts Democrats such as Financial Services ranking member Barney Frank and the late Sen. Edward Kennedy have been ardent defenders of Crane & Co., which manufactures the cotton-based paper used in U.S. currency."
"One-dollar bills represent nearly half of Crane’s currency business, and replacing the $1 note altogether would mean the loss of hundreds of jobs, the company said."
"Clearly they had an interest in maintaining the use of the paper,” Kolbe said. [Pay big attention here>>>] “Crane was the only company that could qualify as the producer.”
http://www.rollcall.com/news/Dollar-Bill-Coin-Coalition-Lobb...
And just to add to how much a paper dollar costs compared to a coin: A dollar bill costs $0.04 and is remade every 18 months. A dollar coin costs $0.08 and lasts 30 years.
Crane & Co. has yearly revenues of about 300 million (revenues mind you, not profits). Less than a quarter of that is US currency paper. A 75 million dollar a year business is hardly worth it to invest in bribery or lobbying.
One doesn't need an op-ed to know that Congressmen lean to help companies in their districts that also make campaign contributions. Crane may be a small fish in the global paper mill business, but how much did they contribute to Kennedy's campaign fund over the last 5 decades?
Every other country on the planet has managed to smoothly eliminate the paper dollar/deutschmark/pound/etc when introducing an equivalent coin. All the claims of "oh, the people want to keep the dollar" are bullshit. Where's the documented public protest over keeping the paper dollar, other than the astroturfed group Save The Greenback?
"In 2006, then-Rep. Jim Kolbe (R) of Arizona, the country’s largest supplier of copper, introduced a bill that would have done away with the dollar, but it lay dormant in a Financial Services subcommittee. Kolbe, who introduced similar legislation AT LEAST FIVE TIMES throughout his career..."
The facts remain. Any legislative movement to eliminate the paper dollar has either been stalled in committee or never even mentioned in dollar coin legislation. Why is that?
If my beliefs are off base, let's hear your theory.