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xthreadThe US Treasury would dearly love to get out of the business of printing one dollar bills.
Paper bills don't last very long in circulation, and are relatively expensive to produce.
By contrast, coins last about thirty years in circulation, longer out. No other first world industrialized economy still has a paper bill at the one dollar purchasing point. But getting a practical one dollar coin into circulation has been a real challenge in the US, largely because of the efforts of the american coin operated machine owner's lobby (machine makers would be delighted to sell revamped machines, but machine buyers have been largely unthrilled by the prospect of replacing their existing coin-op machines with new machines that could handle dollar coins). However, that knot was finally cut, by and large, a few years back when the USPS and major US city transit systems started deploying machines that had dollar coin accepters, and the Mint is now in the third year of a ten year program to release four new dollar coins each year with a different US president on the coin. I buy a couple of rolls a month, and mostly use them for tips on small purchases and the like.
But it's been kind of a hassle - my neighborhood banks pretty reliably don't order as many dollar coins as I'd like to buy from them, and I have to go through every so often and figure out which presidential coins I haven't seen that are in circulation.
But now the Mint has come to my rescue! They have a program to ship you boxes of coins, at face value, with free shipping, in quantities of $250, $500, and $1,000 boxes. This has led to frequent-flyer mile-collectors to come up with a lovely hack: Buy large numbers of coins from the Mint, charge them to credit cards that have frequent-flyer mile rewards, then pay the credit card bill immediately... with the coins that the Mint has just mailed them.
This is not precisely what the Mint had in mind. However, I'll bet that it does actually get more of the coins into circulation, between the fact that I'm sure a fair number of people hold onto a few coins from the shipment and actually use them, and it means that more banks have the coins on hand to give out.
But it is a lovely hack.
Paper bills don't last very long in circulation, and are relatively expensive to produce.
By contrast, coins last about thirty years in circulation, longer out. No other first world industrialized economy still has a paper bill at the one dollar purchasing point. But getting a practical one dollar coin into circulation has been a real challenge in the US, largely because of the efforts of the american coin operated machine owner's lobby (machine makers would be delighted to sell revamped machines, but machine buyers have been largely unthrilled by the prospect of replacing their existing coin-op machines with new machines that could handle dollar coins). However, that knot was finally cut, by and large, a few years back when the USPS and major US city transit systems started deploying machines that had dollar coin accepters, and the Mint is now in the third year of a ten year program to release four new dollar coins each year with a different US president on the coin. I buy a couple of rolls a month, and mostly use them for tips on small purchases and the like.
But it's been kind of a hassle - my neighborhood banks pretty reliably don't order as many dollar coins as I'd like to buy from them, and I have to go through every so often and figure out which presidential coins I haven't seen that are in circulation.
But now the Mint has come to my rescue! They have a program to ship you boxes of coins, at face value, with free shipping, in quantities of $250, $500, and $1,000 boxes. This has led to frequent-flyer mile-collectors to come up with a lovely hack: Buy large numbers of coins from the Mint, charge them to credit cards that have frequent-flyer mile rewards, then pay the credit card bill immediately... with the coins that the Mint has just mailed them.
This is not precisely what the Mint had in mind. However, I'll bet that it does actually get more of the coins into circulation, between the fact that I'm sure a fair number of people hold onto a few coins from the shipment and actually use them, and it means that more banks have the coins on hand to give out.
But it is a lovely hack.
