Harriet Tubman

Me, as long as self-checkout machines will consume them. It avoids CoinStar fees and the labor of rolling up for the bank.

 

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I take a few "Gold Dollars" with me in my pocket when I go to the golf course. I give them as tips at the refreshment stand. The young ladies seem to appreciate them.

 

We'll never be cashless. Digital payments and Visa/MC/Amex have grown as e-commerce has grown.

 

Cash, what,s that ? even though i still carry a couple dollars in my wallet
I use my AMEX for just about everything, have a Rose Gold AMEX where
i get 4X points and a platinum where i get 5x points, this has added up
To allot of free hotel stays and vacations
so why use cash when you getting nothing for it.

 

Well I might be repeating myself but if they STOPPED trying to get rid of Andrew Jackson and playing woke politics with this crap and INSTEAD proposed a commemorative $2 note with various figures it'd be FAR better received than jacking with our money and picking a fight for no good reason.

 

I slam tons of quarters in the Wal Mart self serve. Now that they
have improved the acceptors it goes much faster.

 

Good idea

 

Saw a report online where Japan is about 20% cashless transactions compared to 96% for S. Korea and 66% for China.

 

That’s a good idea. Numerous historical figures could be honored with such.

 

Exactly. Frankly, my first ones (again, likely reposting from somewhere, but...) would be:

Frederick Douglass
Thomas Edison
Amelia Earhart
Nathaniel Greene

 

This will almost certainly never happen. You can do this sort of thing with coins without impairing their usefulness in circulation: there may be upward of 100 different designs of quarters circulating now, but a vending machine can accept them all with no problem. That wouldn't work with currency designs, since machines scan the design itself to validate the note. Commemorative banknotes wouldn't work in vending machines, self-checkouts, or (more importantly) banks' currency counters or the Fed's currency-processing equipment. They'd require special manual handling at every step. No way the cost would be worth it.

 

So, in other words, if you start putting a bunch of alternate designs on paper currency, it effectively can't circulate.

Of course, this may not be an issue for $2 bills, which vending machines and self-checkouts already reject.

 

I guess the BEP could come up with a design that has a "panel" for the subject-du-jour, but a constant design around it, and tell the machine programmers "just ignore anything inside this area". Any change to bill designs will require that kind of adjustment; perhaps they could just make sure that the scanners only look at the unchanging features.

 

Commemorative banknotes have been issued by several countries, but (much like collector coins) they are not meant to be for general circulation. Legal tender yes, but I don't know whether machines that accept bills would take them. Here are some examples from Poland. The latest one, issued about a month ago, has a face value of 19 zł.

Christian

 

The $2 bill has never been accepted by vending machines. Self checkouts I don’t know about. They still can be used in general transactions.

 

Americans are very slow to accept change. We would rather deal with hard currency and change rather than deal with the change. I know. I'm one of them.

 

Which, as Santini noted, is why I chose the $2 bill.... it is already a low circ note that is not used in vending machines.

And, so we're all well aware, small size currency has undergone not one but TWO major renovations of late, in 1996 and again in 2004. So, not only can it be done, there are very few hurdles to it being done, especially on the deuce (which is again why I chose it).

 

Some vending machines and self-checkouts *do* accept $2's. They rarely advertise the fact, but if you just try to insert a $2, it works surprisingly often. But currency-handling equipment at banks and the Fed certainly has to recognize $2's, and that's where a proliferation of commemorative designs would be likely to cause trouble. One redesign of the $2 could be done without too much trouble, just like the redesigns of the other denominations; but you were suggesting a whole series of commemorative designs, which could get more complex since it'd put a large number of designs in circulation simultaneously.

Most machines can obviously be updated to handle new designs, but there's a limit; the chip in the machine only has so much memory. Many vending machines no longer accept the old "small-head" currency, because they don't have enough memory to deal with three design generations at once. (And there are still a fair number of older machines that only recognize $1's and can't be reprogrammed; that's why the vending industry has been so opposed to redesigning the $1 bill in particular.)

I'm not entirely sure how other nations handle commemorative banknotes, but I notice that the nations that issue them tend to have much smaller amounts of currency outstanding than does the USA, so that their central banks' currency processing is probably a lot less automated than ours to begin with.

 

We just changed the complete Euro series here in Europe - not a real problem for the vending industry - only at the beginning when the EUR 5,-- note was introduced some machines had problems acepting them.

But many of these machines got new readers or an update therefore they are able to check also the new 10,--, 20,-- 50,-- 100,-- and 200,-- notes - not only the old series...

 

As long as currency changes are tied to acts of congress in the US, change will remain either slow or nonexistent. Canada doesn't have this problem, so they eliminated the cent and the dollar bill with relatively little effort.

I am now to the point of pretty much never using cash, coin or currency. I don't need it. All of the vending machines near me take plastic, every store I shop in takes plastic. Buying online doesn't even have a cash option. I never have cash in my wallet or coins in my pocket. The only time I have had cash in my wallet in the past 2 - 3 years was after I sold a bunch of books to a used bookstore and they paid me in cash. I put it all in the bank and ended up using it via plastic.

Others are probably in different situations, but I have basically had a cashless life for the past 3 - 4 years. I didn't mean to, it just happened. One day I just noticed the change. An actual physically circulating coin is a novelty for me now - I often gaze into the cent bins that sit by cash registers. Once in a great while someone else will have change and I'll want to see it, but I don't want to be creepy and leer at someone's change over their shoulder.

I am unintendedly and unexpectedly cashless.