Here's a video produced by the Bank of Korea urging citizens not to keep coins in jars, drawers and piggy banks. It seems that this has become a serious campaign by the Bank of Korea, with several videos along the same lines having been produced. South Korea is supposedly going "coinless" in 2020. In this video, a traditional Korean ceramic food pot, which can be used to make bean paste, stews, or rice liquor... can also be "misused" as a coin dish! The text says: "Because of the demand for coins, yearly coin production costs are OVER fifty billion won" ($44 million USD). USE your coins!
Well I can speak myself, when I got a crap-ton of 10, 50, and 100 won coins in change, I had to keep them all in a change jar since I rarely had enough to spend on something worthwhile. I threw all my coins in a jar and then once I had about 1500 won, went to the CU Mart across the street and bought a bottle of soju. Still came back from Korea with a ton of coins.
I have quite a few won coins from a foreign currency lot I purchased a while. Unfortunately I'll never get to use them in Korea, though!
Yeah, I think you kind of elucidated the reason why people hoard South Korean coins rather than spend them: The coins' relatively low value compared to the pricey economy in which they operate. It takes a while to gather up enough to have enough value to actually buy something! Unless you wash and dry your clothes at a laundromat, or you are always buying drinks and food from a vending machine, you probably just aren't using coins. Hey, isn't that the same problem in the USA? The Bank of Korea is aware that their coins have low value, but just won't do anything like make higher-value coins because the country is supposed to go "coinless" in 2020. THAT will solve that problem, right? Well, I will wait and see. I'm not exactly sure that plan will come to fruition. Other Korean government plans were to have a robot in every home(!) and an tablet for every school student (these were actual government plans). Yeah, well, those never happened either.
Yes, we don't have those huge mintages because the economy has grown so much we actually need that many more. We need most of them to replace the ones we made last year which are now just sitting in change hoards because they didn't represent enough value to be worth carrying and spending.
Not always the case. My wife hates counting out change whenever she buys anything and even worse, she doesn't like counting out $1 bills. As a result, about twice a week she'll dump several dollars worth of coins on my desk along with about $15 in one dollar bills. It's up to me to get this "chicken feed" back into circulation, she'll tell me. So, there I am at the Walmart self check out, feeding in several dollars in coins followed by a boatload of singles to make my purchase. I do have a friend, though, who tells cashiers that he does not want the change, and in years past there was, literally, thousands of coins strewn across the floor of his apartment. When I asked him about this he said that he hated the bulge in his pockets that the coins made.
Sounds like me. At my place there are coins all over the floor in the bedroom, the kitchen, the living room, here at the office, I even have coins on the floor in the shed where I keep my motorcycle. I used to come home and just stretch out on the bed and nap without getting out of my clothes. Change would fall out of my pockets and I just left it there. Eventually I'm sleeping curled up on a couple hundred dollars worth. Smaug the dragon style. I even have ten to fifteen dollars in change that has accumulated in the tub of my washing machine from coins that I missed in my pockets doing laundry. It's been accumulating there for years.
I'd love to do that! How do you keep the coins from interfering with your vacuuming and cleaning up the floor? ...oh, wait....I think I get it now.
