stop by my farmers market booth in Palm Desert, Big Bear Lake, or Redlands to buy some of the dates we grow. If you have $0.50 change coming, you will get a fifty cent piece. It will be a 1971-2001 clad. It will also be a nice clean one, no rolling machine marks, counter punches, bent, damaged, CRH marks, grunge, gunk, or goo. A nice, lightly circulated Kennedy half dollar. In an average week I give out $80 worth in change. Most folks think they are pretty cool. I do have one customer who asks for quarters. She wants them for the laundry machine.
A chicken or the egg question: Did vending machines help kill half dollars, or did the lack of use of half dollars lead to vending machines that didn't take them?
