Don't tell the current administration that there's something so un-American about the currency: they will insist on fixing it, and probably retire Jefferson as well.
Fun fact: While the US spent more than 3 cents for every penny minted and distributed, it spends about 14 cents for every nickel minted and distributed!
When they decided to stop minting pennies I think they should have gotten rid of nickels and (I know this will be controversial) quarters as well!
Keep dimes and ramp up production of half dollars. Then we can just drop the second decimal place and standardize pricing everything in 0.1 dollar increments.
The fact that quarters are still somewhat commonly used in machines (vending machines, parking meters, laundry) is probably the biggest practical obstacle.
This may be the most practical go-forward plan. The Euro's .20 coins are also attractive too. But you're correct that quarters, as the smallest common currency that you can plausibly buy something with just a couple of them, are just everywhere, from laundry to car washes, so the pain in retiring them would be widely felt.
What I've learned from the penny retirement is that people are deeply distrustful of simple high school level statistics! Millions of people have angrily seethed that somehow stores are or will be using the penny retirement to rob them, despite knowing that most transactions have an unknowable amount of different items, and sales tax, so attempting to manipulate prices to gain a statistical advantage out of rounding would be incredibly difficult and would yield a pitiful return. Let alone how the cash transaction share is declining every year.
We need to keep the physical dimensions and material properties of the quarter, but why not change the face value? Demote them to 20 cents, or even better, make them 50 cents because the real half dollar coin is obnoxiously huge and impractical.
What of the economic impact of doubling the value of all quarters? Eh, it'll probably be fine. We'll just write it off as an AI datacenter loan somehow
I have long believed that changing coin value upward would be the #1 way to get 100% of citizens on board with currency reform. Or at least buy them from citizens at above face value.
Unfortunately, I think that vending machines specifically would frustrate this scheme though, because you can bet that most operators of them would, rather than reprogramming the machines which would be expensive (especially given how many old machines must be out there without any manufacturer support available), just leave everything the same physically and double all their prices.
Do you mean in the zinc mining and Coinstar? Pennies have been a bizarre ritual for years, wherein the government made zinc worth less than its pre-minted value, distributed them to banks nationwide, banks in turn to stores, stores using them once to give meaningless amounts of money to customers, customers in turn immediately throwing them on the ground or at best eventually dumping them into a coinstar, and coinstar returned those to banks.
Nothing of value was going on there. I'd rather pay any zinc miners and coinstar drivers who have been displaced to play video games all day while still saving all those resources, fuel, and most of all, time.
I, for one, look forward to the new 5oz "Donald Trump Freedom Nickel". Probably resulting from a deal he did with the Big Trousers lobby groups to wear out coin pockets faster.
(I would have made a gag about a 7g replacement nickel, but you people have already used up the team "quarter" for different denomination. Although the idea of a new 40 cent coin called an "eight ball" amuses me...)
