I personally would use the $1 coin if retailers would give them to me. I'm not going to the bank to make a special purchase of coins, but if they come back in change I'm happy to take them.
I hate coins. Does't matter the currency. I don't have a change purse, no coin slot in my wallet. They rattle around in my pocket and are unnecessarily heavy.
I'm not sure if 1 eur notes would be really any better than the coins we have now. I personally find small currencies difficult anyways, as I have grown up using plastic as payment.
I hate having a huge stack of $1 bills even more, especially given the state of US paper bills now (hello wear and tear) and that they are identical in size and feel to all the other bills. When I was vacationing in Europe, I absolutely loved the euro and pound coins for their convenience of not having to dig through bills in my wallet (and the 1/2 euro coins especially, for the way they were executed). Nevermind that the bills too are a lot nicer than what the US has today, and we're barely catching up with this whole color thing.
I love the idea of $1 coins too, but I think they were badly executed in the US for a long time where the $1 coin was not much different in look and feel from a quarter. Nowadays it's really only that whole thing about retailers not wanting to accept it/customers not wanting to use it.
I think the US should make a huge push towards getting rid of the $1 and $2 bills in favor of coins. There's so many positives to this I can't even begin to imagine (for one, not having to carry around $10 worth of quarters to feed parking meters for a single hour where I don't necessarily feel like swiping my credit card...).
Pound notes are also still printed and in use in the channel islands, although they aren't legal tender for the UK from there, but then the coins aren't either (despite being virtually identical).
As the article points out this would take "an act of Congress." There is an excellent reason that "act of Congress" is a figure of speech meaning ~Herculean feat of struck-by-lightening probability~
These days there isn't really need to keep using traditional currency anymore. Since I don't get charged for using them, I use cards even for <5€ payments now and I hardly carry real money with me anymore. It's also much easier to monitor your expenses this way. There are still an enormous amount of shops/businesses that only accept physical money, but I think the world will be ready for electronic-only currency in 10-30 years time.
I would love to agree with you, but using cards for every transaction makes it quite simple for the card companies / banks to monitor spending habits and selling them to interested parties (or the government).
But still, not having to carry Euro coins would be great. They are awfully heavy.
That cost is factored into your purchase somehow, and if it isn't and it's a problem to the retailer paying the fees, it will be eventually. Transaction fees seem insignificantly small, but they'll easily chew into any profit margin and more for a payment as small as €5 (as small as, not less than). This is why at least in the US, lots of retailers try to enforce minimum purchases, tack on surcharges, and have differing prices for card and cash payments even if it's against the terms of their merchant agreement.
There's also that whole aspect of dealing strictly in cash being convenient for tax fraud and purchases that can't easily be traced. Those two are possibly the biggest stumbling blocks for an all electronic currency. Case in point: I love the idea of going that way because it makes my finances easier to manage, but I hate that my CC company already tracks what I buy with my card to determine my credit-worthiness and more that has nothing to do with fraud monitoring, and it's frankly none of anyone's business what I buy with my own damn money if I have had no trouble paying my bills in full on time for years on end.
There's so many pros and cons here, I really don't know which way to go.
Of course there's always some cost in handling payments. Cash also has costs for the merchant---somebody has to bring all that cash to the bank for example.
Debit card payments (in Germany at least) are as free as it gets for the merchant, and they get their money immediately (not several days later like with credit cards).
There's ups and downs to all payment methods. Cash can be reused to provide change to other customers, and to make smaller payments. Just like credit card transactions can be used to pay for larger payments to providers. Just like CC processing fees can be a huge pain in the butt for microtransactions, but taking cash and lots of it to the bank is a mindfuck and you decide to call one of those armored courier services instead.
That being said, speaking from personal experience owning and running retail stores, credit cards are a pain to accept because of the transaction fee vs. microtransaction issue when people decide to pull their credit cards out for all of a $2 purchase, but more customers spend more money usually because they didn't have any cash on them. What can you do....heh.
Right now I'm using Costco's partnership with Elavon for credit card processing that also includes debit cards, and it's been a while so I don't think there's anything terribly different about accepting them. It's the same old industry that wants to charge you those transaction fees (that's at least kind of reasonable, you know?..) on top of $185972398742134 in monthly fees for everything from renting equipment to account fees and minimum charges and what have you. I think I went this way because it was cheaper than an Authorize.net+whatever mess (for brick and mortar, mind you) and better than the fees others wanted, on top of my spotting the brochure while shopping at Costco.
> ...update from the real world.
All things considered, I don't think there's anything fundamentally different about physical purchases vs. online purchases made with a credit card. The only big one is that micropayment systems and fees aren't really in place for brick and mortar retailers that might struggle just to accept cards in the first place, whereas it's becoming more and more common online because people are buying 99 cent songs and apps all over the place. It needs to happen for the former because people make 99 cent purchases everyday anyway (usually combined with something else, or else they're paying with cash...hopefully), but that's a problem that hasn't even been sufficiently solved in an all-digital world that loves the idea but can't easily do it because of all the damn fees.
Credit card is a percentage of the purchase price. Mastercard/Visa charge roughly 2%, and IIRC roughly 1.7% on their debit cards. I know here in Canada debit charges through the Interac system are a flat fee between $0.05 and $0.25 and can be charged as a surcharge by stores (however as far as I can tell they're charged full service fees if they surcharge it, like many convenience stores).
However, because of the Interac system's flat fee some businesses will give you a 2% credit for using a debit card over a credit card.
Here in Canada we have a $1 and $2 coin and I find it saves a lot of hassle, I can pay for a lot of things by just grabbing my change. I don't like taking my wallet out in a crowded area when I've got a couple 100 dollars in there.
That ultimately depends on the merchant agreement. Regardless, it's a percentage and/or a flat fee (and usually the flat fee that makes no sense for micropayments), and varies depending on other factors (which creditor, what kind of card, etc). But that's not what I'm talking about. Typically in the US the merchant is responsible for paying all fees and is not allowed to explicitly charge the customer for it in any extra way except through methods like "cash discounts". So the customer will pay for this some other way (like raising the price of the product). I guess that's the difference I'm nitpicking about here...just as ridiculous as it is ok to provide cash discounts but not credit card surcharges, it's ridiculous to claim you're not paying anything for those additional fees, because retailers that have to deal with the possibility of micropayments aren't exactly oblivious to the fact that a percentage+flat fee just killed their profit on a $2 purchase.
There is a lot more to the cost of accepting credit cards than just the transaction fee, just as there are costs of accepting cash. It's just that the benefits of accepting cash (i.e. tax fraud as I mentioned above) is a lot more appealing than accepting card payments to many businesses. But I digress...
They are factored in, alright: cash users subsidize credit card users. And because of the income profile of cash vs credit card users, it amounts to a subsidy of the wealthy by the poor.
I think the opposite: credit card users subsidize the use of cash. I hardly believe the former can be more expensive than the latter – if you take into account all the physical effort required to replace / collect / move around the pieces of paper / metal.
To continue addressing it, credit card processing does not end at a card swipe. Unlike for internet retailers, brick and mortar can have more steps to take to complete a transaction, and routine things like tip adjustments takes just as much time as collecting and moving pieces of paper and metal.
Other fees collected in the process of accepting credit cards can be just as ridiculous as the fees for hiring an armored service to take care of the cash, or the time/effort required to go to the bank. Or employees stealing cash.
It's ultimately difficult to determine if credit cards are in fact cheaper than cash in a broad sense, although that's something you usually can figure out on a per-business basis.
Seems to me that joe the plumber dosen't really care that much about privacy nowadays. I don't really see how it could be that harmful, if not for a bit of more targeted advertising. I have the feeling that people would give up a bit of their privacy in exchange of a more comfortable shopping experience, or maybe I'm completely wrong, only time will tell.
Maybe the government will go crazy and you will start plotting a revolution, so you want to purchase stuff without being traced. Checks and balances and all that.
You are just using the "I have nothing to hide" fallacy.
How about your health insurance company charging you more because of your purchase profile? Or your credit score being affected by which brand of alcohol you prefer?
Or one of the latest bits of news from here in the UK - credit ratings firms checking benefit claimant spending looking for fraud:
It's already been used to decline credit to people based on the likes of their shopping preferences. Not necessarily how much they spent and how much they paid off of that, but where they shopped. Whether or not it was justified, I can't tell you. And I am fully aware that tracking history is a vital part of fraud monitoring and determining creditworthiness. But the possibility of abuse beyond the horror of targeted ads is still there, and people can imagine them and they don't like it. I don't like it. I have nothing to hide, but that doesn't mean I should condone the excessive information collecting and profiling either.
tl;dr off the top of my head: Congress/POTUS passed a law last year that included commissioning a report on whether or not creditors were actively profiling, and how far it went. The FRB eventually found that most of the creditors in the US applied this kind of profiling to the majority of CC holders, but only a tiny fraction of a percentage were directly affected by it. It was also pointed out that the use of this information to track things like fraudulent transactions probably outweighed many negatives of tracking this information for other uses as well, so limiting the profiling would probably be a Bad Thing. But they didn't have enough information to determine if this was overall a negative enough to justify restricting it. And that's kinda...scary. They may not do it now, but what's to stop them from doing it in the future without you fully aware of what's going on?
I remember the first time I was issued a corporate credit card, it was actually a HSBC MasterCard "under the hood" but branded. The way it worked was, you would pay your expenses on it, then reclaim them from the accounts department, and pay off the card yourself. They would send a copy of the statement to me, and a copy to accounts. The incentive for me to play along with this scheme was zero; I just used my own card so I could collect the airmiles.
Eventually I found out why they did this; so people had no credit history could get a card for work.
As an American living in Europe I can say that I love having 1 and 2 Euro coins. Yes, they sometimes can get heavy and they do jingle. But that's more than offset by the convenience. Quarters seem very puny in comparison now.
As a side benefit, a pocket full of coins can mean you're carrying around 10+ EUR. No wallet needed at all!
It's the same here in Canada with the $1 and $2 coins. I always like to keep a minimum of $10 on me regardless of my cards and what not. But it's such a convenience just to have the change in my pocket rather than my wallet (which is so stuffed full of cards and paper that it's heavier than a pocket full of change as-is) when I'm just visiting a friends house down the street.
And I find all of the copper-coloured coins (1, 2, 5) a hassle.
Switzerland seems to have this figured out as the smallest coin is 5 centimes. To the average American who doesn't like dollar coins, imagine their reaction when they find out that Switzerland has a 5 CHF coin. Their smallest bill is 10 CHF.
Some Euro zone countries (definitely Finland, IIRC also the Netherlands) have abolished the 1 and 2 cent coins; purchase totals are rounded to the nearest .05 value.
"Spend a penny" is British slang for urinate. It started with coin-operated toilets and continues precisely because pennies are no longer spent individually on anything.
There needs to be some plan to phase out pennies. Perhaps have retailers round prices after tax to the nearest multiple of 5 or nearest quarter and phase out nickels and dimes as well.
We should get rid of at least pennies and nickels (both of which cost more to make than they are worth.) The last time the US phased out a denomination -- the half-cent piece in 1857 -- it had more purchasing power than a dime does today.
Besides, if we got rid of the penny and nickel, the size of the dime would finally actually make sense.
Dollar coins are in wide use. Just not in the USA.
Head down to Ecuador and pay for something with a five dollar bill. (Ecuador, El Salvador, and a few other places use the US dollar as their official currency). You'll get dollar coins in change.
It works great. Coins have value. Especially since nobody uses pennies down there. Everything costs a multiple of five cents. Hopefully this little bit of 3rd world efficiency will trickle up the the 1st world.
As has been pointed out, coins were "accepted" elsewhere once notes were withdrawn.
Looking at the title provides clue to human behavior: then there is no need to ask "why do people resist accepting what they hate."
Simple principles of shaping behavior suggest one simple principle: reinforcement: offer discount for using coins (i.e., $1.01 of merchandise for a $1 coin) or transaction penalty for paying with notes.
Several years ago I vacationed in Bali (my employer was paying -- woohoo!). At the time, the exchange rate was 10,000:1. So I'd walk into a bank with $100US, and walk out as a "millionaire" in Indonesian Rupiah.
When you buy something in a store there, they pretty much ignore the two least significant digits. They make up the rounding error for you by giving you a handful of mints.
OT, the Treasury has a program of selling dollar coins with free shipping, to encourage dollar coin usage. And they accept credit card payment. People have been using credit cards to buy the coins and deposit them to the banks. It's a good way to earn credit card cashback.
I wonder how many of us it would take to start affecting change (no pun intended) among our local retailers by getting dollar coins this way and proceeding to use them around town on a consistent basis.
From what I heard the Treasury doesn't lose money with the direct-ship program, at least with accounting on paper. It's kind of weird. They create the money out of the thin air using some metal. We bought them at face value using our money. The cost of the coins would be the metal, the minting process, plus the shipping cost, which is less than the face value of the coins. It defies intuition when it comes to the fiat money creation process. Of course coins out-last paper money many times and have long term cost saving result for the Treasury.
Article headline should be "The US loses money as Congress appears unable to phase out $1 bills". There's really not a 'hate' issue here, and people will use the coins, but it's so painfully obvious that there won't be a change until the bill is phased out. It amazes me that the coin was even allowed into production without a plan to get rid of the bill - I can't believe that the hope was to have "a greater variety of currency media for circulation", which seems to be the only real effect of the coins' introduction so far.
In England there are some Scottish notes in circulation, which as far as I know are legal tender*, but many people still don't want anything to do with them.
A friend worked in a pub where they had always had a Scottish £5 note in the till to give as change. More often than not the customer would just put it straight in the tip jar.
I think 'legal tender' doesn't mean what people think it means; I heard some lawyer talking about this on the radio the other day: I don't remember exactly, but the gist was that the term legal tender is just to do with money that can't be refused as payment for a debt imposed by the courts.
For example in the UK no coins are 'legal tender' as they can be refused as payment for a debt, but still all shops will accept them as they have a fixed value relative to legal tender.
Alternatively my watch is not legal tender, but if I offered it to a shop keeper in exchange for a newspaper, there is nothing stopping the shop keeper from accepting it.
As a Canadian in the US, I miss my Loonie (1$ CAD Coin). I now open my wallet and say, "oh I`m good for cash, no need to stop at the bank" only to realize when I go pay for something that I have 10 x $1 bills. The ability to determine value of a bill based on colour, in Canada, is useful too.
The US seems to have the worst currency setup of anywhere I've been. You have to put in a lot of effort to not end up with a wallet thick with one dollar bills and pockets full of pennies. The UK seems pretty bad as well since the the coin size doesn't seem to have much correlation to how much it's going to be worth.
The EU is better, but I find Switzerland the best so far. No bill smaller than 10, all notes are different sizes so you never accidentally pay with a 100 instead of a 10. A nice big 5cf coin (it's cool to be able to buy a new DVD with 3 coins or less) and no pennies. There is a .05 coin but it's rare, most prices are to the nearest 0.1. Every time I go back home I remember how painful the US system is by comparison.
I'm surprised nobody's mentioned vending machines and tollbooths. In an age where every transaction more than about $10 is going on my credit card and I can't buy much of anything for less than $3, my primary use for coins and dollar bills is automated machines, all of which would need to be re-configured to take dollar coins.
These coins have the same size and weight as the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sacagawea_dollar that debuted ten years ago. Are there vending machines out there that still don't take those, or that only take bills?
yes, there are plenty of vending machines that date the dollar coins and are unable to accept them. my local car wash and every parking meter i have seen in my county included.
I was at the MN State Fair last year with a buddy and he tried to pay for some milk with a Sacajawea $1 coin and the teenaged girl lamented that they didn't take foreign currency. After we told her it was American money she had to confirm it with a superior. Needless to say she looked pretty embarrassed, but I don't blame her, nobody seems to use these dollar coins.
When I was traveling in Europe I really liked having change that was actually worth something. I especially liked the English Pounds because of their heft and the sound they made when clinked together in the hand.
Agreed. Unfortunately there's a group of lobbyists that have successfully prevented efforts to eliminate the penny (these groups primarily being "Save the Greenback" and the cotton industry).
Sometimes I think we'd be better off eliminating congress...
I tend to have them only if I've received them in change from a vending machine at the post office. I can't say that I have a preference one way or the other.
Back 30 years ago I longed for the Washington Metro Farecard machines to accept them--in those days you about had to send your bills had to be all but starched and ironed before the machines would accept them. The technology improved tremendously, but as far as I know the machines still don't accept dollar coins.
It's actually a good thing that Americans refuse to accept dollar coins. The printing costs to make paper $1 bills are really the only check & balance that the people have against the devaluing of our currency through excessive printing of money.
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 141 ms ] threadI love the idea of $1 coins too, but I think they were badly executed in the US for a long time where the $1 coin was not much different in look and feel from a quarter. Nowadays it's really only that whole thing about retailers not wanting to accept it/customers not wanting to use it.
I think the US should make a huge push towards getting rid of the $1 and $2 bills in favor of coins. There's so many positives to this I can't even begin to imagine (for one, not having to carry around $10 worth of quarters to feed parking meters for a single hour where I don't necessarily feel like swiping my credit card...).
Well … there’s your problem.
In Egypt you can get 25 Piastre notes, they are worth about 4p in Sterling. Local cab drivers sometimes refuse to accept them.
Bus driver in England did not accept my £5 scottish note.
As the article points out this would take "an act of Congress." There is an excellent reason that "act of Congress" is a figure of speech meaning ~Herculean feat of struck-by-lightening probability~
But still, not having to carry Euro coins would be great. They are awfully heavy.
That cost is factored into your purchase somehow, and if it isn't and it's a problem to the retailer paying the fees, it will be eventually. Transaction fees seem insignificantly small, but they'll easily chew into any profit margin and more for a payment as small as €5 (as small as, not less than). This is why at least in the US, lots of retailers try to enforce minimum purchases, tack on surcharges, and have differing prices for card and cash payments even if it's against the terms of their merchant agreement.
There's also that whole aspect of dealing strictly in cash being convenient for tax fraud and purchases that can't easily be traced. Those two are possibly the biggest stumbling blocks for an all electronic currency. Case in point: I love the idea of going that way because it makes my finances easier to manage, but I hate that my CC company already tracks what I buy with my card to determine my credit-worthiness and more that has nothing to do with fraud monitoring, and it's frankly none of anyone's business what I buy with my own damn money if I have had no trouble paying my bills in full on time for years on end.
There's so many pros and cons here, I really don't know which way to go.
Debit card payments (in Germany at least) are as free as it gets for the merchant, and they get their money immediately (not several days later like with credit cards).
(I still prefer cash.)
That being said, speaking from personal experience owning and running retail stores, credit cards are a pain to accept because of the transaction fee vs. microtransaction issue when people decide to pull their credit cards out for all of a $2 purchase, but more customers spend more money usually because they didn't have any cash on them. What can you do....heh.
Do you have any experience with debit cards vs credit cards?
> ...update from the real world.
All things considered, I don't think there's anything fundamentally different about physical purchases vs. online purchases made with a credit card. The only big one is that micropayment systems and fees aren't really in place for brick and mortar retailers that might struggle just to accept cards in the first place, whereas it's becoming more and more common online because people are buying 99 cent songs and apps all over the place. It needs to happen for the former because people make 99 cent purchases everyday anyway (usually combined with something else, or else they're paying with cash...hopefully), but that's a problem that hasn't even been sufficiently solved in an all-digital world that loves the idea but can't easily do it because of all the damn fees.
However, because of the Interac system's flat fee some businesses will give you a 2% credit for using a debit card over a credit card.
Here in Canada we have a $1 and $2 coin and I find it saves a lot of hassle, I can pay for a lot of things by just grabbing my change. I don't like taking my wallet out in a crowded area when I've got a couple 100 dollars in there.
There is a lot more to the cost of accepting credit cards than just the transaction fee, just as there are costs of accepting cash. It's just that the benefits of accepting cash (i.e. tax fraud as I mentioned above) is a lot more appealing than accepting card payments to many businesses. But I digress...
EDIT: There's more details here:
http://www.cutimes.com/Issues/2010/August-11-2010/Pages/New-...
To continue addressing it, credit card processing does not end at a card swipe. Unlike for internet retailers, brick and mortar can have more steps to take to complete a transaction, and routine things like tip adjustments takes just as much time as collecting and moving pieces of paper and metal.
Other fees collected in the process of accepting credit cards can be just as ridiculous as the fees for hiring an armored service to take care of the cash, or the time/effort required to go to the bank. Or employees stealing cash.
It's ultimately difficult to determine if credit cards are in fact cheaper than cash in a broad sense, although that's something you usually can figure out on a per-business basis.
see this, for example:
http://www.schneier.com/essay-114.html
Or one of the latest bits of news from here in the UK - credit ratings firms checking benefit claimant spending looking for fraud:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-10922261
You almost certainly don't need to be committing fraud to attract an investigation and all its hassle.
See http://www.govtrack.us/congress/billtext.xpd?bill=h111-627&#... and http://www.federalreserve.gov/BoardDocs/RptCongress/creditca...
tl;dr off the top of my head: Congress/POTUS passed a law last year that included commissioning a report on whether or not creditors were actively profiling, and how far it went. The FRB eventually found that most of the creditors in the US applied this kind of profiling to the majority of CC holders, but only a tiny fraction of a percentage were directly affected by it. It was also pointed out that the use of this information to track things like fraudulent transactions probably outweighed many negatives of tracking this information for other uses as well, so limiting the profiling would probably be a Bad Thing. But they didn't have enough information to determine if this was overall a negative enough to justify restricting it. And that's kinda...scary. They may not do it now, but what's to stop them from doing it in the future without you fully aware of what's going on?
Eventually I found out why they did this; so people had no credit history could get a card for work.
Why should I have a physical store of value, when I can trust Bank X's database?
Also, now all transactions can involve at least three parties, instead of two.
As a side benefit, a pocket full of coins can mean you're carrying around 10+ EUR. No wallet needed at all!
Et voila, you can always pay exact change for any cent value with only 8 coins.
Switzerland seems to have this figured out as the smallest coin is 5 centimes. To the average American who doesn't like dollar coins, imagine their reaction when they find out that Switzerland has a 5 CHF coin. Their smallest bill is 10 CHF.
I was sure that this would be about pennies. Sure, you get them as change but I've never spent one in my life.
Besides, if we got rid of the penny and nickel, the size of the dime would finally actually make sense.
Head down to Ecuador and pay for something with a five dollar bill. (Ecuador, El Salvador, and a few other places use the US dollar as their official currency). You'll get dollar coins in change.
It works great. Coins have value. Especially since nobody uses pennies down there. Everything costs a multiple of five cents. Hopefully this little bit of 3rd world efficiency will trickle up the the 1st world.
Looking at the title provides clue to human behavior: then there is no need to ask "why do people resist accepting what they hate."
Simple principles of shaping behavior suggest one simple principle: reinforcement: offer discount for using coins (i.e., $1.01 of merchandise for a $1 coin) or transaction penalty for paying with notes.
When you buy something in a store there, they pretty much ignore the two least significant digits. They make up the rounding error for you by giving you a handful of mints.
From what I heard the Treasury doesn't lose money with the direct-ship program, at least with accounting on paper. It's kind of weird. They create the money out of the thin air using some metal. We bought them at face value using our money. The cost of the coins would be the metal, the minting process, plus the shipping cost, which is less than the face value of the coins. It defies intuition when it comes to the fiat money creation process. Of course coins out-last paper money many times and have long term cost saving result for the Treasury.
See especially the "Seigniorage Today" section.
A friend worked in a pub where they had always had a Scottish £5 note in the till to give as change. More often than not the customer would just put it straight in the tip jar.
Edit: I am wrong about the concept of legal tender, and smazero is right. Interesting. Check out the few paragraphs beginning: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banknotes_of_the_pound_sterling...
For example in the UK no coins are 'legal tender' as they can be refused as payment for a debt, but still all shops will accept them as they have a fixed value relative to legal tender.
Alternatively my watch is not legal tender, but if I offered it to a shop keeper in exchange for a newspaper, there is nothing stopping the shop keeper from accepting it.
The EU is better, but I find Switzerland the best so far. No bill smaller than 10, all notes are different sizes so you never accidentally pay with a 100 instead of a 10. A nice big 5cf coin (it's cool to be able to buy a new DVD with 3 coins or less) and no pennies. There is a .05 coin but it's rare, most prices are to the nearest 0.1. Every time I go back home I remember how painful the US system is by comparison.
When I was traveling in Europe I really liked having change that was actually worth something. I especially liked the English Pounds because of their heft and the sound they made when clinked together in the hand.
Sometimes I think we'd be better off eliminating congress...
Back 30 years ago I longed for the Washington Metro Farecard machines to accept them--in those days you about had to send your bills had to be all but starched and ironed before the machines would accept them. The technology improved tremendously, but as far as I know the machines still don't accept dollar coins.