“I would really hate for us to become a cashless society,” he said. The group’s education director, Rod Gillis, hopes they never stop circulating. The people saving penniesĬoins will always have defenders in curators and collectors like the 26,000 members of the American Numismatic Association. In Central Florida, Disney Dollars can still get you a soda or fries. In Western Massachusetts, you can exchange federal notes for BerkShares. “Whenever there’s a downturn or a shortage, maybe you just lived somewhere pretty rural, shinplasters filled that void.”Īrguably, isolated versions of shinplasters have re-emerged in recent years, he said. “We think of the sovereign or the state as having a monopoly on investing money with value, but American history has shown repeatedly that’s not the case,” said Joshua Greenberg, a historian and the editor of Commonplace, a journal of early American life. Congress tried to stamp out the practice with an 1862 law outlawing such private currency, but the shinplasters flooded cities from New York to Richmond, Va. In the 1860s, the problem was hoarding - a side effect of the Civil War - so merchants, corporations and local governments tried printing their own money, called shinplasters. Tapscott said that credit cards offer less privacy than cash because they leave “a trail of digital bread crumbs.” Cash can help criminals stay under the radar of the authorities but it also provides anonymity to some vulnerable people, he said, such as a woman who wants to evade an abusive husband or a person in recovery from drug abuse. “If you take a 2 percent cut of every transaction that takes place in the United States, that’s billions of dollars” a year, he added. Hidden fees, such as for failing to keep a minimum balance in an account or on a prepaid card, can be debilitating.“If you can’t keep $10 to $15 on a credit card - that’s a great sum of money for some people,” he said.Īnd for the companies that take a percentage of transactions, it’s a windfall. “The economy is bifurcating, sort of splitting in two parts, and there’s one part that’s taking a beating,” he said.įor many people paying for things digitally is a convenience, but for the growing segment of the population in poverty, “going cashless is quite expensive,” he said. Some laundromat owners had to seek out quarters from carwashes and others, or even ask employees to guard change machines so that passers-by would not use them like banks, said Brian Wallace, the president of the Coin Laundry Association. Major chains like Walmart and CVS asked customers to pay with cards or use exact change, and Chipotle was accused of keeping the change from customers who paid with cash. Mint kicked production into high gear, urging people to put spare change back in the economy. The Federal Reserve started rationing coins, and the U.S. For archaeologists and collectors, it’s bittersweet at best and a tragedy at worst.Īs the coin shortage reached its worst in June, trade groups for grocers, gas stations and convenience stores pleaded for help from the government, calling the coin shortage an emergency that threatened their ability to serve customers and stay in business. For small businesses that rely on coins, it’s a slow-rolling earthquake. For banks, credit card companies and some Bitcoin advocates, the demise of each unit of cash would be welcome news. “As for cash,” he added, “an elegy is in order.” How the coronavirus sidelined coinsĪ funeral for cash has not yet been scheduled, but the pandemic has made it much easier to imagine a world without coins, and already reinvigorated the movement to get rid of pennies. Governments, banks, credit card companies and online communities are among the factions trying to change how people make payments, he said. “There’s a battle for the future of money going on,” said Alex Tapscott, a co-founder of the Blockchain Research Institute, a Canadian firm. Millions of Americans are skipping right over coins by paying with their phones - or shopping on them. Federal Reserve is doing “ research and experimentation.” Facebook has a currency in the works, and Bitcoin’s evangelists are still preaching. By upending normal habits, the pandemic has dropped them out of circulation and accelerated a trend toward cards, apps and other cashless payments that could eventually make coins obsolete.Ĭhina has plans for a digital currency, and the U.S. They sink into fountains and lurk in wells, a fortune in wishes but a nightmare to sort and count.Ĭoins are everywhere until they’re nowhere, and at the moment they’re hard to find. They rattle in coat pockets, music to some ears and a nuisance to others. They gather unloved in jars and under cushions, unearthed only when laundry needs doing.
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