Is there anything more useless than a dollar coin?

Debit cards have their ups and downs, but there’s one rather simple reason why I nearly always opt for using plastic instead of paying cash whenever possible: I don’t want to get stuck walking around with a pocketful of loose change. You all know the drill by now. One front pocket is occupied by your iPhone or iPod while the other contains your car keys and whatever other items you feel compelled to carry to get you through the day. Stop and buy lunch for $5.26 and you’ll end up with no less than eight coins of varying sizes rattling around in your pocket, either clanging annoyingly loudly against your car keys or floating dangerously closely to your iPhone’s screen. No thanks if I can help it. For this reason alone, I try to do business with places which will allow me to use my debit card for bite-sized purchases with no hassle.

So as I was preparing to take my first-ever subway ride here in Los Angeles this evening (don’t feel bad, I didn’t know LA had a subway either), I came face to face with an automated machine which wanted $1.25 and for some reason wasn’t in a mood to accept debit cards. Glancing in my wallet I found that I had nothing smaller than a ten dollar bill, and as I slipped it into the machine I dreaded what I knew was coming next: I hit the jackpot. Eleven large coins came flying out the bottom chute of the machine, no different of an experience than hitting the jackpot on a slot machine in Vegas, except that it came with none of the euphoria and instead merely invited frustration.

Unwilling to let me pay with my debit card, and unable to supply change in the form of dollar bills, the machine had spit out $8.75 in the form of three quarters and eight one-dollar coins. That’s right, those annoyingly useless, rarely recognized, and virtually unspendable dollar coins are now being used to torture us by someone other than the stamp machines at the post office.

And it’s not just that the machine threw eight dollar coins at me. As if to rub it in, the mixture of dollar coins it chucked out its chute represented more of a jalopy than the hardware inside a Windows PC. At present I’m looking at several golden Sacagawea dollar coins from the year 2000, a number of silver Susan B. Anthony dollar coins including one from the year 1999 (I had previously been under the impression that they were only produced in 1979 and briefly in 1980), and for good measure, a golden John Adams dollar coin which features no year at all, and I’m fairly well convinced isn’t even legal tender. Seriously, the thing looks like a Chuck E. Cheese token. And as if these various dollar coins weren’t confusing enough, I can’t begin to imagine the artistry required to make Sacagawea and John Adams look virtually indistinguishable from each other when viewed from more than a foot and a half away. For good measure, a bit of research reveals that the face on the Sacagawea coin isn’t even Sacagawea.

As if it to rub it in, one of the “quarters” the machine threw at me wasn’t so much an actual quarter as whatever the @#!$& this thing is, featuring the tattered ghost of George Washington on the front and, somehow fittingly, Rhode Island on the back:

What’s really odd is that after going through all these trials and tribulations to buy a subway ticket, no one, not man nor machine, ever so much as asked to take a look at the ticket I’d bought as I boarded, rode, or disembarked the train. Are they all on strike? I’ll have to check the local newspaper I guess. And of course, after realizing that no one was even checking for tickets, like an idiot I stopped and bought another subway ticket for my ride home, and once again, no one ever asked to see it.

But I was smart though, this time paying for the ticket not with cash but instead with the coins littering my pocket. Faced with the prospect of offloading one dollar coin and one quarter, I instead plopped two dollar coins into the machine. When it comes down to it I’d rather go home with three extra quarters in my pocket than one extra dollar coin. At least quarters can be spent without eliciting strange looks, giggles, and some teenage cashier running off to the manager to ask if it’s indeed real money.

If you manage your cash correctly, you should never have to end up with more than four one-dollar bills in your wallet at any given time, which effectively takes up no room at all. Why anyone would think it’s a good a idea to try to replace the dollar bill with an oversized dollar coin is beyond me. And yet for some reason we keep trying. It didn’t work in 1979, it didn’t work in 2000, it didn’t work whenever the John Adams experiment was floated (if indeed that was a real coin), and it won’t work the next time we try it. I’ll leave other readers to comment on whether dollar coins are as much of a practical hindrance to for someone who carries a purse as they are for someone who carries a back-pocket wallet. But here in a day and age where my pockets are so full of other essentials that I actively try to avoid getting stuck with spare change of any kind, the last thing I want to see flying out of the bottom of a government-issue vending machine is a dollar coin…no less eight of them in one sitting.

Don’t get me wrong. There were any number of Susan B. Anthony dollars in my rare coin collection growing up, along with half-dollars, those giant silver dollar coins from before the Depression, silver pennies, and all the other coins which have outlived their relevance. So I don’t mind seeing the occasional dollar coin now and then. I just don’t want to get stuck with the embarrassment of having to try to spend them. And the sooner we can figure out how to eliminate coins of all kinds from our daily lives, the better.

Epilogue: more research reveals that not only is the John Adams dollar coin indeed real, it’s one of a series of newly minted dollar coins which will apparently feature all U.S. Presidents who have been deceased for two years or more (hint: that’s most of them). Because this wasn’t confusing enough, we’re now going to put thirty-something different dollar coins into circulation over the next decade, including one featuring a depiction of George Washington which can’t possibly be the same person depicted on the quarter. In fact, this version of George Washington looks less like George Washington and more like one of the busts from the Haunted Mansion. I can just see the slogan now: “Ride the subway, collect them all!”