This has been bugging me for months. The US Mint says people aren't using the new dollar coin. Stores say they haven't seen them, and people say they never get them as change and the few they get they horde.

The problem in the pipeline is simple: Every day thousands of businesses get change and small bills from the bank, for the change they'll be giving out throughout the day. The only way the new dollar coin will be accepted is if the banks, without having to specifically be asked by the vendor, give vendors large amounts of dollar coins instead of dollar bills. This is simply the only way to inject change (both kinds) into the system. You can't ask people to go out of their way to the bank and request the dollar coins, and businesses aren't going to magically get them from their customers until they start giving them to their customers.

You get a single dollar coin as change, you might hold on to it. You get 3 or 4 a day, every day, and you start to spend them. It's really that simple. In the first 9 months of 2000, the US Mint made 1.1 billion of these coins, about 4 for each person, and only half of them have left the mint. Most of that half, in fact, is still sitting within bank branches. Right now there are only about 380 million of these coins actually out in the world, and they're calling it a failure because nobody's using them. They literally can't understand how a $40 million advertising campaign failed to started casual dollar coin use, and their conclusion is that people don't like the dollar coin.

By contrast the mint made 4.8 billion quarters in the same 9 month period in 2000 and, as quarters have an average life span of 16 years, there are about 102 billion quarters out there, or about 366 per person. This compares pretty favorably to the dollar coin's 1.3 coins per person.

I don't think the Mint actually wants the dollar coins out there, or if they do then the banks don't. I think I'll go to the bank tomorrow and get a couple hundred dollar coins. I'm going to make a habit of using only dollar coins for purchases under $20. See if I can start a little casual dollar use on my own...