1/30/2024 0 Comments Copper coins novel updatesPennies put the nuisance in nuisance hoard, and, when they make headlines these days, it’s often for that reason: an angry father dumped eighty thousand of them on his ex-wife’s lawn for his last child-support payment an aggrieved business owner paid his local taxes with five wheelbarrows full of them a disgruntled garage owner upended ninety thousand of them on a former employee’s driveway in lieu of a final paycheck. Even in non-pandemic years, pennies cost more than they are worth, and they also impose a time tax on every transaction: single-cent pricing costs customers and retailers approximately seven hundred and thirty million dollars a year in wages and lost productivity. But they also have what is known in the financial world as a negative seigniorage, meaning that they’re worth less than what they cost to produce: every one-cent coin costs nearly two cents to mint. Pennies have the highest velocity, since eighty per cent of all transactions less than a dollar require at least one of them. Being prepared to make change for any purchase that isn’t rounded to whole dollars requires a minimum of ten coins: one nickel, two dimes, three quarters, and four pennies. This is the basis for the Fed’s insistence that enough coinage exists, if we could just get it moving again.Ĭash transactions are typically coin-intensive. Fewer people were visiting grocery stores at all, much less to exchange their coins, and, in the early days of the pandemic, when the route of coronavirus transmission was less known and cash came to seem like a contagion, consumers went out of their way to avoid using bills and coins. Of course, this year and last year weren’t most years, and what economists call the velocity-the rate at which coins move through the economy-slowed dramatically. Many banks no longer convert change for customers unless it arrives wrapped and counted, but, since 1991, seventeen thousand or so Coinstar kiosks have proliferated in grocery stores around the country, and they now convert some three billion dollars annually, sorting coins from debris for a fee of roughly twelve per cent, spitting out a voucher that customers trade in for cash or gift cards. But we do cash in some of our change, including, on average, forty-one billion coins a year to Coinstar counting machines alone. Collectively they throw away another sixty million dollars’ worth every year, vacuuming them up or dropping them into trash bins with lint and straw wrappers. A professor at the University of Houston, Holt teaches courses on Greek and Roman history, Alexander the Great, and numismatics-the field which he believes is the key to many others.Īccording to Holt, the average American household has around sixty-eight dollars’ worth of coins in their nuisance jars. Holt calls these everyday collections of coins “nuisance hoards,” one of the many delightful things I learned from his new book, “ When Money Talks,” a volume more charming than its mundane subtitle, “A History of Coins and Numismatics,” might suggest. Instead, they’re sitting in jars and hiding under couch cushions, inadvertently hoarded by millions of American households.Ĭoin hoards are nothing new, but the celebrated varieties, the sunken pirate’s treasure chronicled by magazines like Coin World and COINage or the ancient burial mounds documented by outlets like CoinWeek, are a far cry from what most of us keep in our sock drawers. Plenty of coins exist-some forty-eight billion dollars’ worth-they just aren’t moving around the economy the way they should. Coin Task Force to address the crisis.Įven though the Fed was, and still is, rationing coins, the agency insists that the country is facing a circulation problem, not a shortage: like so many Americans over the past year, American coins have simply stayed home. Only a few months into the pandemic, cafés were putting up signs begging customers for change, laundromat owners were crossing state lines to buy quarters, banks were offering rewards for clients who surrendered their coins, and the Federal Reserve formed the U.S. Some coin-based transactions evolved right away: cashless tipping became more common, even more toll booths were converted to pay-by-plate systems, and plenty of places began rounding up or down to simplify payment. Retail and restaurant industries collected less cash from customers, so had fewer coins to deposit with their banks, while limited hours and new safety protocols at mints around the country slowed coin production.
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