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These aren’t rare or unseen. All legal US money
These aren’t rare in the sense that everybody has one they keep as a collectible. If I went down to 7/11 and tried to buy something with it they’d give me a funny look.
no they wouldnt. its money. i work at a gas station we get these all the time
I have a friend who works at a bank, and when he was a teller there was a guy who would come in every friday and exchange 500 in dollar coins of varying types, the little brass colored ones here, the silver looking ones, and also 50 cent pieces.
They didn't carry that much at any time because nobody really brings them in so they had to start special ordering them for this one guy. Every week.
No idea what he uses them for, but either he's got a shitload of them, or he makes it hail at strip clubs.
No idea what he uses them for,
Let's say you want to buy a computer. You could, like a boring person, go to Best Buy and purchase a computer for 800 bucks on a credit card. Or you could dress up like a pirate with 800 gold doubloons in a sack, and slam that shit on the counter during checkout.
At today's gold prices, 800 US dollars is just one single small gold coin. A classic 1 oz Krugerrand coin is currently worth more than 2,000 US dollars.
He was referring to using the sack of dollar coins as if they were gold doubloons, not actual gold coins.
Likely owns a vending machine business. They're easier to return than a handful of quarters if someone uses a 5 dollar bill to buy something for a buck and change.
My guess is that he runs something that needs to give automated change. Vending machines, car washes, arcades, etc… Basically, if someone puts a $20 into the car wash but only wants a $10 wash, it’s easy to just dispense ten $1 coins as change.
Coin handlers are mechanically very easy. Coins don’t vary in size and shape, so it’s easy to automatically detect which coins have been inserted, dispense change, and reject coins that don’t match. Paper money sorters are much more complicated, and more prone to failure.
50 cent coins contained silver for a few years longer than dimes and quarters. So you have a slightly better chance of finding a silver coin worth a few dollars in a roll of halves. It's free gambling for numismatists.
Source: I ask for the occasional roll of halves.
The vending machine at my job gives change in dollar coins, and the Ohio turnpike does the same. They are fairly common, just people dont like to handle change is all.
Thank you; I didn’t know that. You do have a rather big country and I still sort of wonder if it is universally recognized. Again, just going by never having seen them in movies. Maybe United Statesians aren’t just fictional characters in movies. We’ll never know.
yeah we still mostly use dollar bills but we do have dollar coins and have had dollar coins in circulation for a long while predating these versions even.
So that's where they all went. I haven't seen those in circulation since I bought stamps from a vending machine.
Yep, there’s a pneumatic tube attached to that vending machine that goes all the way to Ecuador. Simple physics, really.
Best way to get dollar coins is vending machines and banks
These are legal U.S. tender, minted in the U.S. Not common in the U.S. but still valid.
Pay attention to your other coins though. Ecuador does mint its own coins that match the American ones identically (1, 5, 10, 25 and 50 centavos) and also has some older 1 sucre coins that match these 1 dollar coins. Those would not be legal tender in the U.S., I'm pretty sure.
I have these supposed $6 left over. If they turn out to be fake, I will shed a tear and move on. But thank you.
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.
Interestingly they do mint their own coins, with Ecuadorian half dollar, quarters, dimes, nickels and pennies. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecuadorian_centavo_coins
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.
We should've discontinued the dollar bill so that these coins would get used in the US, too.
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.
Awesome job on killing the penny up there! Wish we could do that in the US.
We need to kill the nickel too.
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.
Similar with Montenegro, they dont have official currency but they use euro as de facto currency
I don’t live in the US. I have only ever seen the dollar bills in movies. Maybe these coins are actually normal to y’all but I found it fascinating.
They're common in vending machines, libraries, ticket machines for bus/train, etc. as change because they're easier to distribute than single dollar bills by a machine
They are normal at Renaissance faires for people who like to carry a sack of "gold".
I work with handling money on the daily. I'd rate them as uncommon but not rare. We will see a handful of them at least every other day.
Nope, I haven't seen one since the early 2000s, when they rolled out Sacajawea dollars and then stopped a few years later because boomers were afraid they'd confuse them with quarters.
They didn’t stop these still around.
They were also hoping vending machine companies would use them but few did.
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.
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.
A bit like the Channel Islands - they use British Pounds but if you try to use them on the mainland they'll not be accepted. Other way round is fine.
