All ¥500 coins that glitter are not gold
japantimes.co.jp
japantimes.co.jp
Luckily the conbini shops have machines that do take them and allow you to dump a whole handful of change in at once and will give change back in the minimal configuration. So my recommendation in Japan is when you buy something at the conbini, dump all of your loose change into the machine, then pay the rest with a ¥1,000 notes and you will get the minimal number of coins back.
Oh, and you can throw the ¥5 coins into the local shrine for good luck. :-D
[0] 7.8 Too Much Water - IGN
I do regret Japan rolling back their previous requirement to have all prices tax-included, since now many budget places do the US thing of advertising nice round numbers but adding the tax on top.
what was their reasoning?
ICOCA?
Never had too many issues with coins in Japan (I did leave before the new coins though), and I had a tendency to try to spend my coins so never really accumulated enough that they were becoming a pain.
Apparently this has been an issue for a while now, and fairly common, but this is the first time that I can recall running into it.
I believe congress passed a law that prohibits the treasury from redesigning the $1 so it is stuck being mis-matched to the other bills.
Meanwhile everyone seems to have some kind of fit over switching to $1 coins. It never seems to take.
Though as a whole the cost of handling cash is being pushed to users more and more. Coin deposits cost money now, train tickets cost a bit more...
Any machine that can handle the new 500-yen coin has probably been calibrated with lower tolerances to accept each version of the Japanese coin, but not the similarly-sized Korean coin with 1/10 the value. You can't just patch machines to accept a range of weights, because that would defeat one of the main purposes of introducing the new coin.
Meanwhile, you can still use the Korean 100-won coin to unlock any U.S. or Canadian shopping cart that takes a quarter. I don't know why South Korea ended up with coin sizes that are almost exactly the same as heavily-used coins in two of their closest economic partners, but they're probably stuck in the same situation as the Japanese: if they change their coins, they'll need to update a lot of existing machines.
Easy to find coin mechanisms, and it increases the value of their currency, since the coins are useful outside the economy. ;)
I'm not sure which coin the author's brother used. AFAICT, I have no problem using the new (ordinary) 500 yen coins.
Even though cash is king, there are some real oddities. The new 500 yen coin that is hard to use is in machines is one. The other being the 2000 yen note. The normal denominations are 1000, 5000, 10,000. 2000 yen notes are very rare. For some reason, they seem to hand them out almost exclusively to tourists as they enter the country. Imagine if you gave Scottish five pound notes to everyone coming into the UK in Dover?
[edit]
Or a $1 coin for that matter.
Regarding the coin, I wonder if drilling a hole in them would get them to work in the vending machines.
10 years ago was a different story, maybe. Nowadays Japan’s pretty digital when it comes to money.
* They ended up with vaults full of them because domestic banks didn't want them. I understand this was the fate of a fair amount of US 50-cent and $1 coins: they migrated to 'dollarized' economies like Ecuador.
* They figure they're being helpful-- the $20 note is the most common in US cash commerce, and the $50 is very uncommon, so they figured giving people a note worth about $20 is convenient.
When I've ordered notes from the bank, they usually loaded up with the largest notes (lots of CAD100 or GBP50 notes) with just 100 or 200 units divided into smaller notes.
They already introduced new designs of the old denominations that required cash machines to be updated for, so it’s doable.
An example of a side effects of cashless is that 3%-6% of profit from market stalls at a fair go to credit card companies and payment intermediaries. Bit weird that Visa and Square get a cut of me purchasing some local farmers honey directly from the farmer. But they have to use them else they'd miss out on sales.
Bit of a hassle to walk to the ATM sometimes, but it’s worth it.
We can decide to just not allow the cut to be so high. It's possible to set a limit. Visa makes a bunch of money because they don't need 3% to cover infra + fraud.
The farmers market vendors accept payments because consumers expect it, and consumers expect it because it's a great service.
It's weird because it means they have their fingers in the pockets of even tiny local interactions like that. Vendors love having easy payments sure, but I've yet to meet a vendor happy about losing 3%+ of their margins because consumers expect it.
(And yet people say it's a collectivist society.)