Dollar Bill v. Coin Star

Give me a hand (Courtesy of Mike)

New coins will depict dead former presidents

WASHINGTON -- New dollar coins featuring all 37 of the nation's deceased presidents will be produced by the US Mint in 2007 under a bill Congress is sending to President Bush.

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I was just thinking the other day about why dollar coins never caught on. It’s because Americans don’t like to touch each other. Even the most un-intrusive contact is seen as intimate in our culture, especially hand-to-hand contact. The dollar bill is easily passed from hand to hand with minimal risk of those hands touching. Coins, however, must be placed in the palm. The only other alternatives are to slide the coins across the counter, or to drop them in the recipients palm and risk dropping them on the floor.

If you need evidence, just look at how many CoinStar machines have appeared in recent years. People don’t like to spend change and they end up accumulating it. CoinStar is just enabling our fear of intimacy with our fellow humans.

(end Mike)

The problem with coins is that they are an inherently disorganized way to keep money at hand. If you keep your money in a pocket or coin purse, it's doubtful that you separate them by denomination. Paper bills, on the other hand, are easy to stack, fold, count, and organize.

As a customer, I usually don't use coinage because it takes too long to dig out proper change. Bills are folded in half in my wallet, and if I have time, organized from biggest to smallest. Even if they aren't, it's easy to flip through them to find the proper amount.

As a former food service person, I'd also say that bills are much easier to count on a larger scale. Most bills are organized by denomination, stacked into standard increments (usually $100), then bundled with a rubber band. Coins are separated by bins (in a register), then usually counted by machine (think Coinstar). Coined are bundled and wrapped, but by size more than denomination ($.50 for pennies, $2 for nickels, $5 for dimes, and $10 for quarters).

Even beyond all this, it's always easier to give a larger denomination and get change than it is to add together smaller denominations. Even if the same number of coins have to change hands, the cashier has their sorted into bins in front of them.

You're right that there's a human element to this, and I agree that people in our society tend to avoid human-to-human contact. But I think this issue has more to do with a desire for speed and ease.