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?

6 thoughts on “”

  1. Up here in the North, we have coins for $1 and $2.

    At first it’s a little weird, having $5 be the smallest bill, but there are a lot of upsides.

    Vending machines are actually a big plus–imagine never again having to feed bill into the damn acceptor seven times before it finally admits you have a dollar.

    You know how a pocket full of change is essentially useless? Not any more–that pocket full of change can easily be more than $20.

    And that jar on your dresser where you throw the pocket change every night? When you get around to cleaning that thing out, instead of being delighted to find that there’s $10 worth of change, you are SHOCKED to find that there’s a couple of hundred dollars in there.

  2. I had to snicker about the coin problem…a coworker just got back from vacation in the US and whipped out a $1 bill to show us. Paper! $1! Unbelievable!!

    The coins are pretty darn handy, actually. It just takes some getting used to. Though I’m not sure that I’d want a $5 coin.

  3. True, the coins are too cold and stippers can’t fit that many in their g-strings. What I don’t like is the enormous head of Jefferson creeping into the frame of the new nickles.

  4. It’s not so much that I don’t like the Sacagawea dollar coins. It’s that a lot of places, including the machines that dispensed them, won’t accept them as payment.

    Although, frankly, if for some reason I had $20 in singles, I’d rather be carrying that around in bills that fit in my wallet than in twenty coins I have to keep in my pocket (or the change purse I don’t have or want).

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