The soda machine on our floor dispenses Sacagawea dollars in change. Of course, it won’t let you use these coins to buy your soda. Which leads me to suspect that our vending machine company just has a big stack of Sacagaweas they’re trying to get rid of.
It could be worse. I once bought an $8 train ticket with a $20 bill at the station, and the machine gave me my $12 change in $1 coins.
I think this may help explain the Sacagawea’s failure to enter wide circulation. There are plenty of reasons to carry around a bunch of one-dollar bills in your wallet — only a few of them having to do with strippers and g-strings — but who wants to carry around the same number of coins in their pocket?