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.
Humans love their shiny metal circles.
I’m pretty sure I remember reading a study that showed that handling coins actually makes the brain generate the good chemicals. So you’re not wrong.
Wait, can’t yall just… go to the bank? I walked into a local bank a year or so ago and asked if I could exchange for them, they asked how many and just exchanged them like anything else.
I’m sure if I wanted thousands that would be a problem, but I’d be surprised if they didn’t have at least a handful.
The tooth fairy put one of these under my kid’s pillow tonight. The thought is that he’s going to enjoy it more because it’s rare. It will end up in his piggy bank, out of circulation for who knows how long.
That actually makes a lot of cents.
I don’t get it
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The person made a very very very bad pun. I replied with sarcasm so obvious that it didn’t need an /s tag.
That said, I admire your desire to be helpful.
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if it don’t make dollars, it don’t make sense
I gotta say I’m not used to seeing any dollars
Movies, TV Shows, and Youtube videos use US dollars a lot.
Local bar is still cash only. I use change for pool tables quite often or if I ever take the bus. Maybe I am just getting older but cash seems like it is still around everywhere.
I assumed the person was non-American
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.
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.
Well lookie who we have here… Mr Moneybags.
Yeah, me and my 100 $1 coins that I collected over ten years, sitting so pretty.
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.
Ah, the $0.50 coin
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 use a wallet phone case, there is no good way for a coin pouch for that.
Your pants pockets.
That’s less convenient than one place, sorry
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.
Just put those coins into your adorable coin purse.
Nothing like clicking on the large X to close an ad video on the web page, but it doesn’t close, even after pressing the X multiple times. :/
They are few alternatives to fandom but nothing that comes close to fandom’s popularity.
Unfortunately the web has become a place where you need to download ublock origin and learn to block specific elements.
Unfortunately the web has become a place where you need to download ublock origin
The irony is that I do have it installed/using it. It’s just the video player puts an X there but ignores when you click on the X.
This has been studied. The US uses a higher quality paper that lasts an average of 7 years. So it is actually cheaper than minting coins. In other countries that switched to coins, singles only lasted a year or two.
There is nothing stopping people from using coins now. People just don’t like them.
They’re also heavy in your pocket and don’t fit in a standard cashier’s drawer. There aren’t enough slots.
The real good idea would be getting rid of pennies and nickels. Those are only useful for giving stores a few extra cents in profit. They set prices at $4.99 instead of $5 so you buy more. Without pennies, they’d have to set the price at $4.90 and lose 9 cents.
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.
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.
My grandfather used to do this with nickels, dimes, quarters, and dollar pieces. When he passed I got the “random coins” that were literally all years prior to the change in materials.
No idea how much it’s all worth but it’s in the back of a closet somewhere.
I guess this didn’t occur to me because the guy also got the regular brass ones, which don’t have any value above face value to my knowledge. They didn’t contain actual gold at any point.
I would have thought people would have collected/sold the silver ones out of circulation by now.
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.
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.
I’d put money on it being one of those “Twice the Ice” vending machines, all of my dollar coins come from either that or the ticket thing at the train station.
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.
I recall in NYC for a while, dollar coins were known as metrocard change from when they first started installing the Metrocard Vending Machines.
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.
United Statesians
You can just say American.
America includes hundrets of nation States, most of which do not use the US Dollar.
No offense intended. I have been to a lot of countries in the Americas and the US (despite being rather big) is not really a place I go to. So when I specify like that, it is from my own experience (and—you know—actual geography and stuff) and I am a little bit sorry to have apparently offended.
Edit: that sounded sarcastic because it was a bit, but really, I didn’t intend to offend. Sorry, let’s be friends.
Strong agree. For some reason theres a lot of weird US Americans want to claim the word America for their country only. Its silly, ignorant, and rude.
The ship has sailed. The word already refers to the US
In English, not in general. The continent is called America in lots of languages, but the country is most often referred to as the USA. Because that’s the title the country has chosen for itself.
Yes, we agree that:
- The continent is called America
- The country is called the USA
What I’m stating is that:
- The adjective for a USA citizen is “American”
- It is not USAsian or whatever got said above
Honestly, I’m indifferent about it. I’m not a nationalist. Call yourselves whatever you want.
Its not about Nationalism. Its about geography.
When you say somethin like “America had had more than one mass shooting on average last year”, you annoy most Americans, who dont have these problems that are specific to the US.
Most people are able to infer—by context—that someone saying “America” means US if the topic is the US. They are—to some extent—colloquially interchange, given context. I just didn’t say it myself because it isn’t normal nor natural here. Again, sorry to everyone hung up on my phrasing because it’s a non-issue as far as I’m concerned. Call yourselves and think of yourselves as whatever you want. You have my blessing and approval.
Because it’s been used that way in English to refer to people living in a specific region (now the US) since the 17th century. Now non-native English speakers are trying to force a change and (rather hilariously) have started taking offense to it. Really must be a blessed life if that’s something worth bitching about.
The first Europeans landed in Canada. The first Spanish landed in Cuba. Neither was what is modern day US
And none of that has anything to do with the origin of the term “Americans” and its usage in the 17th century to refer to British colonists located in what is now the eastern US.
The $0.50 coin is definitely not legal in the US
Cite your source.
Source is me living in Ecuador lol. Ecuador is allowed to make their own coins <$1. So some of the coins here are made by the US. The ones made in Ecuador say so, and they’re not legal tender in the US.
We have different 50¢ pieces.
It’s not legal to murder someone with a half-dollar coin, but it’s certainly legal to buy something with it.
Sure, when you hand the cashier some US dollar coins, nobody bats an eye, but when I hand the cashier a stack of Australian $1 notes, everybody loses their minds!
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.
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.
Yeah, like Cambodia. The ATMs near my hotel spat out dollars, but deep in the city it was local currency. Everyone accepted dollars but they did charge a bit higher if you were a dollar spender if you calculated the local currency conversion on that. From my country it was easier to get dollars too before I flew out, vs Riels which were harder to find and had a pretty bad exchange rate.
At least it’s not all green
They used to use the Sucre. When it crashed a lot of people lost a lot of money. I wish I knew more about that, and why they decided to bend over and use the world’s biggest terrorist organization’s currency.
- Historical fact
- Edgelord horseshit
Always a fun combination.
Argentina is toying with the idea of doing the same thing. tl;dr - Decades of out of control inflation. Currently the worst inflation in the world. The belief is that pinning their economy to the USD would stop that
Yeah Argentina is slipping back into a fascist dictatorship
