I put "failed" in quotes, because all it requires is for the government to do it. Take the one-dollar bills out of circulation, no discussion, done. At this point, take the two-dollar bills (no one will notice) and the penny as well.
> I put "failed" in quotes, because all it requires is for the government to do it. Take the one-dollar bills out of circulation, no discussion, done. At this point, take the two-dollar bills (no one will notice) and the penny as well.
The US electorate is no stranger to single issue voting. If one party spearheads the elimination of the dollar bill, expect them to lose the next several rounds of elections and the other party to reinstate dollar bills. If it's bipartisan, expect a dollar bill party to surface and reinstate dollar bills.
Also, I don't think the $2 bill has anything to do with trying to get rid of the $1 bill? They've been produced most years since 1862, just a 10 year hiatus between 1966 and 1976.
It turns out that democratically elected officials are compelled to be responsive to the voters, and don't want to anger them unnecessarily or waste time and political capital on low-value issues.
I'd much rather have £1/£2 notes instead
Specifically, it says "we haven't redenominated our currency in a while".
I'd rather have ten coins. They'll easily fit in the bottom of my pocket, and when I pull out change there's likely to be a useful amount of money in it.
Do you get yours from selling drugs? Mine are usually fine, very rarely in 'terrible' condition.
The fed has calculated that the seignorage vs. printing costs of switching to coins about balance out for dollars.
Pennies however: we keep them just for nostalgia.
[0] The $1 notes also go through a lot more use in their life so they degrade much quicker iirc and a bit over 40% of the bills in circulation are $1 bills too so switching over to a coin that lasts decades instead of 6-7 years (https://www.federalreserve.gov/faqs/how-long-is-the-life-spa...) would really cut down on printing costs.
Give it 15-40 years and we'll think about it again!
Of course, by then, so much of commerce will be electronic that I don't think anyone will care about what notes still circulate, other than the $100, which is used more outside the US than inside.
1. Switching costs. There are a ton of vending machines and other automated stuff that takes dollar bills but not coins. You can say “oh they’d switch”, and maybe, but they don’t want to because it’s expense and complexity for little/no benefit.
2. Critical mass. Similar problem: nobody will invest in supporting dollar coins as long as their customers don’t use dollar coins. Customers won’t use them because they won’t accept them from banks and stores. And they won’t accept them because they know lots of infra doesn’t support them.
3. US psychology sees coins as “change”, not money. If you see someone buying lunch with change, the assumption is they’re homeless or something. It’s irrational, but so what? And it would change… if we ever got over the hump.
Don’t think of the problem like a technocrat, where any 5% improvement is obviously worth it. Think of it like a marketer, where you have to change customer behavior, and that needs a 10x value prop.
Or I guess we can think like autocrats: we know what’s good for ‘em and they’ll just have to accept it.
If modernising things is so scary you better not do it, other people will force the change on you, for better or worse, but you’re out of the loop.
Sure, someone may force the change to dollar coins on those who oppose it because it costs them money and offers them no benefit.
They're already switching because it allows them to charge higher prices with less friction. You'll likely grumble a bit while you're feeding the 4th dollar bill into the machine but a card swipe or tap is the same level of customer effort regardless of cost.
Vending machines will continue to move towards electronic payment as the preferred and eventually only widely available option, and will no longer have relevance to what a physical dollar looks like.
That's a very different thing in terms of switching costs than an immediate switch that demands replacement all at one time.
> "Customers have told me firsthand how thrilled they are to receive bills as change instead of dollar coins," said Mike Gallagher, service manager for Coca-Cola Bottling Co. "Sales on those machines have increased, and the technology has been extremely reliable." [2]
[1] I did see one coin mech in the wild that took Anthony dollars; but it was a spendy arcade game and had a dispenser next to it to get the dollar coins you needed from bills or quarters. And there were big signs about it, at the Disneyland StarCade in the 90s.
[2] https://www.vendingmarketwatch.com/technology/article/102518...
Yes I know about regressive states and tracking women who might be pregnant to “protect the unborn”.
Is Big Corp really going out of its way to “disenfranchise” consumers to make it harder to give them money?
But the longer term disenfranchisement trend I see is making the numeric value of money itself ever more depreciated in favor of fine grained price discrimination. So it's not that it will be "harder to give them money", but rather that you will be paying twice as much (ie not receiving coupons/vouchers to obtain the real competitive price) based on them knowing that you personally will still buy.
JCPenney has been doing that for decades. When Ron Johnson - the former CEO of Apple retail - came in as CEO and tried to get rid of the constant coupons and “sales” and implement everyday low prices, consumers rebelled and he was rapidly fired.
Even with cash, stores have loyalty programs that consumers gladly sign up for. In the mid 90s, I worked at Radio Shack which was infamous for tracking how often employees asked for names and addresses just to buy batteries
Credit cards vs cash is the least of your problems and on a meta level, users have been willing to give their information to retailers and been doing couponimg for decades.
This happens all the time for various reasons.
The tired trope of capitalism ensuring that all customers will be served needs to die. Businesses always evaluate any additional revenue against the cost of getting that revenue.
There are a multitude of ways in which the cost can exceed the revenue. The mundane example is that it's more expensive for Google to maintain non automated support for 'non core' services. A more harmful example is the practice of 'redlining' after the great depression where largely due to non financial reasons, the 'cost' of providing mortgages to non whites was deemed larger than the expected revenue from those mortgages.
nit: this is still coming from the vein where businesses are taken to be super-computational agents/oracles. whereas really there is a lack of evaluation of the possible revenue being left on the table, and the focus is on what has already been found to be profitable.