No more new pennies

[english si]

There's more issue with the £50 note existing than the 50p coin.

I assume for the same reasons Nixon killed the notes from $500 on up. Having worked a job that was banking-adjacent enough that the same regulations applied to me I'm of the firm opinion that a lot of AML stuff is just the government sticking its nose where it doesn't really belong. If having a $10,000 bill circulating makes it harder to catch criminals, good.

It's more that it's a big enough amount ($66 currently, though has been worth nearly $100 - still far smaller than proper big notes that other countries have) to be worth making forgeries of. As such, lots of stores refuse to accept them because there used to be a lot of forgeries.

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I thought I told that before .. I had a few transactions of a few thousand to be done in person at home - contractor or sales person. Surely with "how it's better to pay?"question.
One thing they were really scared of is a payment with green bills.

Is that paranoia about being seen to be reputable? Cash-in-hand is often seen as a good way of enabling a fudging of the books and not paying all the correct taxes.

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When was 2 pound coin introduced?

1986, though they were only commemorative issues until 1998, when they minted in great numbers. Quite why there weren't £2 coins or notes before then beats me: the 1-2-5-10-20-50 existed for pence since the beginning (a mere 55 years ago, with a ½p coin existing for the first 13 years) and the pounds were 1- -5-10-20-50 for the first 27 years (regular circulation).

AND coins are not real money.

LOL - coins are the real money* and bills need backing up with collateral as they aren't real money.

Now OK, the US is different to the UK, as we are more explicit that the notes are not real money with "I promise to pay the bearer on demand the sum of x pounds" on them. The US ones say "this note is legal tender for all debts, public and private"**, which they wouldn't need to if there wasn't doubt - ie if it was real money.

Of course, both are money, because money is what people will accept as payment of debt (whether they legally have to or not), but the notes have an intermediate step of backing from a bank to make them such.

*Items of value, normally metal. Hence stuff like coin clipping was a thing back in the day - taking raw value off the coin.
**The UK ones can't say that as, while Bank of England banknotes are legal tender in England and Wales, no bank notes issued by Scottish/Northern Irish banks are legal tender anywhere, nor are any banknotes in Scotland or NI.

[hotdogPi]

My thoughts:

* I believe legal tender laws are the same in the US and UK, specifically that it applies if it's a debt (i.e. receive the item or service, then pay after), but if you have the option to back out, it's not a debt and legal tender laws don't apply. You can also say ahead of time cash isn't accepted, which appears at some parking garages and sit-down restaurants (since those would normally be debts), but you have to know that going in. There is one difference between the two countries, and that is that the UK has restrictions on paying large amounts in small coins but the US does not.

* It would be perfectly fine rounding to the nearest 25¢. Sales tax would be unaffected because it's calculated per transaction before rounding and summed up afterwards.

* If not rounding to the nearest 25¢, we still don't need nickels. Everything other than .05 can be made as a combination of dimes and quarters, and giving 10 cents back in change instead of 5 every once in a while wouldn't be too problematic.

* Yes to $1 and $2 coins. I'm fine with $5 coins, although we would be leading rather than following here; I believe the only countries that have them right now are Switzerland (5 francs, $6), and Japan (500 yen, $3 but was $4.50 before the change in exchange rate), both of which have have appreciated against the US dollar since their introduction (even after considering Japan's recent change in the other direction). That said, Australia, Canada, the UK, and the euro have all had 2-unit coins for long enough that a 5 now would be worth about a 2 when it was introduced.

* If the Crane Company has too much power over getting rid of the $1 bill, make $1 a coin and ramp up production of $2 bills as the "new lowest bill" so they can still produce a whole bunch.

* If we re-introduce a half dollar, it should have the same color as a dollar coin but be smaller, and maybe 9-sided. 9 sides because 20p and 50p have 7 and the loonie has 11, and it should not be thick because that would invite confusion with Australia's $2. A $2 coin would likely be bimetallic, and if there's a $5 coin, it would be bimetallic with switched colors.

* I'm aware that people being paid in cash often don't pay income taxes, but depending on what they're doing it for, they may not need to if their annual total is low enough that their tax burden is $0. I imagine a decent number of these people are undocumented immigrants.

* I'm fine with $200 and $500 bills. I imagine many places would say that they're only accepted if you're spending at least that much, and that's fine. (In the case of debts where they have to accept it, the laws don't require making change, so the recipient will never be forced to give out money they don't have.)

[kalvado]

I thought I told that before .. I had a few transactions of a few thousand to be done in person at home - contractor or sales person. Surely with "how it's better to pay?"question.
One thing they were really scared of is a payment with green bills.

Is that paranoia about being seen to be reputable? Cash-in-hand is often seen as a good way of enabling a fudging of the books and not paying all the correct taxes.

This is not about reputation, this is being in charge of large amounts of money to be lost or stolen.
One guy suggested that if that is the case for me, we can go to company office together to pay there. The other told a story about an installation team calling company owner every 5 minutes as they were driving with cash in hands.
There was a case when someone bought used car for cash, and seller asked to be paid in bank branch to hand money for deposit right  there.

As for coins being real money .. not really, they are not precious metal any more.

[mgk920]

People today are not equipped to use coins as a payment. No more room for coins in wallets, often no assumption that coins are actual money to pay.
Make more resilient bills (that is entirely plausible, look at Canada), and go lower in bills. Maybe down to 50c, maybe 25c.

And people are equipped to use notes?

It's cash as a whole that's disappearing, and the only reason why coins are going before bills is because the bills are higher denominations and still have some value. A half-dollar bill is just as useless as a half-dollar coin. A quarter bill likewise.

We Brits got rid of the £1 note in 1988 (replaced by the £1 coin introduced in 1983) and no one is saying get rid of the coin. We even have nice big £2 coins. There's more issue with the £50 note existing than the 50p coin.

When was 2 pound coin introduced? My impression is that $2 Canadian coin adds to idea of coins being real money (in Canada).
In US 25 cent is biggest one realistically, as 50c barely exists and $1 coin was basically rejected by society.
So reintroducing the  concept of bigger coin  is a double uphill in US, as cash is disappearing AND coins are not real money.

I got a £2 coin from a friend in about 1998.

Mike

[mgk920]

There's more issue with the £50 note existing than the 50p coin.

I assume for the same reasons Nixon killed the notes from $500 on up. Having worked a job that was banking-adjacent enough that the same regulations applied to me I'm of the firm opinion that a lot of AML stuff is just the government sticking its nose where it doesn't really belong. If having a $10,000 bill circulating makes it harder to catch criminals, good.

We now have a coin for that. Bitcoin.

And then a criminal cartel figures out the coding algorithm for it and then the power goes out.

Mike

[Scott5114]

It's more that it's a big enough amount ($66 currently, though has been worth nearly $100 - still far smaller than proper big notes that other countries have) to be worth making forgeries of. As such, lots of stores refuse to accept them because there used to be a lot of forgeries.

Forgery isn't terribly common in the United States; it does happen, but most of the attempts I've caught were laughably bad, so they don't circulate for very long. However, it's poor form to use a large bill like that at a typical store anyhow, as they are usually not equipped to issue the required amount of change. Many US stores refuse $50 and $100 notes for this reason alone. On the other hand, if the typical purchase is large enough that it'll consume most of a large bill, they're often welcome. I frequently use a $100 note to purchase groceries for a household of two, and it's readily accepted. (Caveat here is that the store I go to is employee-owned and the employees are aware of credit card processing fees to the point that they accept debit but not credit cards. So I'd imagine the cashiers are aware that cash customers increase their profit margins and thus the value of the shares they hold.)

Now OK, the US is different to the UK, as we are more explicit that the notes are not real money with "I promise to pay the bearer on demand the sum of x pounds" on them. The US ones say "this note is legal tender for all debts, public and private"**, which they wouldn't need to if there wasn't doubt - ie if it was real money.

The US used to include additional wording similar to the UK on its notes, although it's worded in the third person since the obligation was guaranteed on behalf of the Treasury as an organisation rather than the Treasurer or Secretary on an individual basis:


This wording was hastily removed after Bretton Woods, though, leaving a sentence fragment which is still on the bills to this day:


The legal tender declaration, though it may not have been strictly necessary, was present on notes which at the time were explicitly redeemable in silver. (This was arguably wise since these certificates on rare occasions still circulate, and they remain legal tender, although the government has long since ceased to actually allow them to be redeemed.)


The color coding present on these denotes who was responsible for paying the obligation and with what. Yellow was for gold payable by the Treasury, blue was for silver payable by the Treasury, red was for either payable by the Treasury, green was for either payable by the Federal Reserve System, brown was for either payable by a private bank. Over time this system got winnowed down until the Federal Reserve was responsible for everything (and nothing was actually payable so it didn't really matter whose obligation to pay nothing it was) and thus everything standardized on green seals and serial numbers. However, the law governing the red seals was on the books for decades after this decision was made, and it required a certain dollar amount of red seals to circulate. Amusingly, Treasury decided the cheapest way to satisfy this obligation was to just print the requisite number of $100 notes, put them on a pallet, and ship it from Federal Reserve Bank to Federal Reserve Bank every so often, technically "circulating" them. The only time these notes genuinely circulated was when a rookie clerk would be told "go get such and such amount of hundreds" and grabbed them off the red-seal pallet not knowing any better.

[Scott5114]

And then a criminal cartel figures out the coding algorithm for it and then the power goes out.

Mike

Not actually possible for reasons that aren't interesting and are difficult for someone without a CS degree to understand, but the short version of it is that bitcoin ledgers are public—if I pay you ten dollars of Bitcoin right now, anyone can verify that on April 4, 2026 ten dollars was transferred from account no. 33 to account no. 1145 and thus verify that any account purporting to contain X dollars actually does so. Lots of copies of this ledger are distributed across the system so a Bitcoin payment only clears when a transaction appears in so many copies of the ledger.

What makes Bitcoin a haven for the criminal set is that all of these accounts are just numbers and there is no formal record anywhere as to who any account number belongs to. So people can only see ten dollars flowed from 33 to 1145; nobody has any way of knowing whether account no. 33 belongs to a signmonger in Nevada or Vladimir Putin.

[Rothman]

It's more that it's a big enough amount ($66 currently, though has been worth nearly $100 - still far smaller than proper big notes that other countries have) to be worth making forgeries of. As such, lots of stores refuse to accept them because there used to be a lot of forgeries.

Forgery isn't terribly common in the United States; it does happen, but most of the attempts I've caught were laughably bad, so they don't circulate for very long.

Had a co-worker who spent a night in jail for trying to spend a counterfeit bill.  It wasn't only a fact of the counterfeit being bad, it was that this genius decided to participate in the scheme with a friend of his and tried to spend his counterfeit bill right after his friend used his own, identical counterfeit bill at a CVS (IIRC, that was the store).  Store called the police.

[ModernDayWarrior]

The color coding present on these denotes who was responsible for paying the obligation and with what. Yellow was for gold payable by the Treasury, blue was for silver payable by the Treasury, red was for either payable by the Treasury, green was for either payable by the Federal Reserve System, brown was for either payable by a private bank.

If anyone's curious what a gold certificate looked like, this is another one from my personal collection:

[Scott5114]

Very cool—gold certificates are kind of difficult to get your hands on because there was a period of time where a private citizen possessing them was illegal, so the only ones that make it to the collector's market are those that were held in storage by someone who didn't know or didn't care.

I don't have any yellow (or brown) seals myself. I have a decent number of blue and red seals I've picked up through circulation (mostly gambling addicts raiding Grandma's collection to hit the slots; the machines are only programmed to accept green seals so they'd have to sell the red and blue ones to the cage).

[thenetwork]

Went to the Neighborhood Walmart today to get a few groceries.  The total came to $5.02. 

Paying cash, I first put in a $5 bill,  expecting the total to round down to $5.00.  A few moments pass...No, I STILL need to cover the two cents! 

After digging into my wallet for another Abe, I put in another $5.00 bill.  THEN the self serve checkout rounded down to $5.00 and pretty much gave me my $5.00 bill back.

All that extra brouhaha for naught!

[kphoger]

Went to the Neighborhood Walmart today to get a few groceries.  The total came to $5.02. 

Paying cash, I first put in a $5 bill,  expecting the total to round down to $5.00.  A few moments pass...No, I STILL need to cover the two cents! 

After digging into my wallet for another Abe, I put in another $5.00 bill.  THEN the self serve checkout rounded down to $5.00 and pretty much gave me my $5.00 bill back.

All that extra brouhaha for naught!

This is related to the tax question.  Technically, the prices are still the same, but the amount you get back in change is changing.  So what happened to you makes sense.  It can't give you extra change back until you've first covered the full price.

[mgk920]

Went to the Neighborhood Walmart today to get a few groceries.  The total came to $5.02. 

Paying cash, I first put in a $5 bill,  expecting the total to round down to $5.00.  A few moments pass...No, I STILL need to cover the two cents! 

After digging into my wallet for another Abe, I put in another $5.00 bill.  THEN the self serve checkout rounded down to $5.00 and pretty much gave me my $5.00 bill back.

All that extra brouhaha for naught!

One of the many reasons why I prefer the 'manual' lanes. 

Mike

[bulldog1979]

The staffed registers will work the same and not finalize a transaction until the full amount of the purchase has been covered. Then when calculating the change, that will be rounded at the very end.

Remember too, that although it would make little sense in the given scenario, a customer can pay some cash first and then finish off the transaction with a card (credit, debit, gift). If the last payment is a card, the transaction total is fully paid because there is no change.

[Scott5114]

The staffed registers will work the same and not finalize a transaction until the full amount of the purchase has been covered. Then when calculating the change, that will be rounded at the very end.

I would imagine in the exact situation being discussed here the cashier would see "$0.02" and go ahead and hit the exact change button to finish out the transaction rather than demanding more money from the customer that they immediately hand back.

[mgk920]

The staffed registers will work the same and not finalize a transaction until the full amount of the purchase has been covered. Then when calculating the change, that will be rounded at the very end.

I would imagine in the exact situation being discussed here the cashier would see "$0.02" and go ahead and hit the exact change button to finish out the transaction rather than demanding more money from the customer that they immediately hand back.

The manual lanes at the 'usual' stores in this area do that cash rounding automatically.

Mike

[SSOWorld]

"We're running low on pennies, if you could pay with exact change that would be appreciated."

Yeah, no.  Wake up!

[vdeane]

I think a lot of this rounding weirdness is the result of the fact that this isn't being done out of any coordinated government policy to officially phase out the penny and have retailers round, like other countries did.  While just rounding to the nearest 5 cents for cash transactions would be logical, in practice stores probably want to avoid angry customers if they round up, while still minimizing losses from rounding down.  Plus I can see a decent amount of customers adopting a tendency to pay cash when rounded down and credit for stuff that would be rounded up, which would mean that it wouldn't even out anyways for stores.  Not to mention that a 3% credit card fee would be more than the loss from always rounding down for any transaction over $1.14 (assuming the credit card fee rounds to the nearest cent; $1.29 if it always rounds down).

[kalvado]

I think a lot of this rounding weirdness is the result of the fact that this isn't being done out of any coordinated government policy to officially phase out the penny and have retailers round, like other countries did.  While just rounding to the nearest 5 cents for cash transactions would be logical, in practice stores probably want to avoid angry customers if they round up, while still minimizing losses from rounding down.  Plus I can see a decent amount of customers adopting a tendency to pay cash when rounded down and credit for stuff that would be rounded up, which would mean that it wouldn't even out anyways for stores.  Not to mention that a 3% credit card fee would be more than the loss from always rounding down for any transaction over $1.14 (assuming the credit card fee rounds to the nearest cent; $1.29 if it always rounds down).

Government policy would definitely help.

[formulanone]

I think a lot of this rounding weirdness is the result of the fact that this isn't being done out of any coordinated government policy to officially phase out the penny and have retailers round, like other countries did.  While just rounding to the nearest 5 cents for cash transactions would be logical, in practice stores probably want to avoid angry customers if they round up, while still minimizing losses from rounding down.  Plus I can see a decent amount of customers adopting a tendency to pay cash when rounded down and credit for stuff that would be rounded up, which would mean that it wouldn't even out anyways for stores.  Not to mention that a 3% credit card fee would be more than the loss from always rounding down for any transaction over $1.14 (assuming the credit card fee rounds to the nearest cent; $1.29 if it always rounds down).

Government policy would definitely help.

Government and leadership acting like adults, responding to situations like adults, and talking to the public like adults (and not on the level of a sixth-grade education) would also certainly help.

[kalvado]

I think a lot of this rounding weirdness is the result of the fact that this isn't being done out of any coordinated government policy to officially phase out the penny and have retailers round, like other countries did.  While just rounding to the nearest 5 cents for cash transactions would be logical, in practice stores probably want to avoid angry customers if they round up, while still minimizing losses from rounding down.  Plus I can see a decent amount of customers adopting a tendency to pay cash when rounded down and credit for stuff that would be rounded up, which would mean that it wouldn't even out anyways for stores.  Not to mention that a 3% credit card fee would be more than the loss from always rounding down for any transaction over $1.14 (assuming the credit card fee rounds to the nearest cent; $1.29 if it always rounds down).

Government policy would definitely help.

Government and leadership acting like adults, responding to situations like adults, and talking to the public like adults (and not on the level of a sixth-grade education) would also certainly help.

I also miss 20th century!

[vdeane]

Government and leadership acting like adults, responding to situations like adults, and talking to the public like adults (and not on the level of a sixth-grade education) would also certainly help.

To be fair, that's about the level of literacy that most American adults have.

[kphoger]

Government guidance would be nice but, if I ran a business, then I wouldn't want the government telling me how to give my own customers change at the register.

[kalvado]

Government guidance would be nice but, if I ran a business, then I wouldn't want the government telling me how to give my own customers change at the register.

Fun fact - government already tells you how to do things.

[formulanone]

Government guidance would be nice but, if I ran a business, then I wouldn't want the government telling me how to give my own customers change at the register.

That's part of the deal with using government issued currency.