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Odd video, but since we're on the topic... After a trip to the US last year it was easy to see the US currency is awful. Coming from Aus where we have polymer

Odd video, but since we're on the topic... After a trip to the US last year it was easy to see the US currency is awful. Coming from Aus where we have polymer banknotes, the paper was just terrible, and I wondered why they hadn't changed it yet. And don't get me started on having $1 notes and 1c coins. Immediately found them (the coins at least) entirely pointless and just ignored them.

andre 15y ago
US paper currency is made up of 75% cotton and 25% linen. Source: http://www.cotton.org/pubs/cottoncounts/cotton-currency.cfm http://www.cotton.org/pubs/cottoncounts/cotton-currency.cfm
- decadentcactus 15y ago
  Ok.. you know what I mean :P It's more the fact that US notes tear extremely easily whereas polymer notes... you have to be pretty determined to damage one without scissors.
sliverstorm 15y ago
I actually really like US currency. Most other currencies I've handled seem to be almost entirely paper, too large, occasionally different sizes... I really like uniformly sized bills that fit easily into a wallet, and the fabric in the bill seems to improve durability and lend a nicer texture. Other currency just feels... cheap. No offense. Agreed on pennies though. They had their place back when they were useful, but they are almost pointless now.
- decadentcactus 15y ago
  The different sizes, I'm not entirely sure but I thought they were for blind people... somehow. Or I might be making that up. This from Wikipedia also explains my dislike for $1: Approximately 42% of all U.S. currency produced in 2009 were one-dollar bills.
  - abstractbill 15y ago
    The different sizes make it possible to select a given denomination without either doing an O(n) lookup, or having to keep your wallet sorted.
    - staunch 15y ago
      What sort of barbarian programmer doesn't sort his bills? Unthinkable.
      - abstractbill 15y ago
        Having different sized bills is kind of like keeping your money in a visual/tactile hash-table. An array is the wrong data structure for your wallet!
      - Harkins 15y ago
        The kind that profiles. The common case to optimize for may be insertion (especially with US $1 notes) rather than withdrawl. Semi-sorting by putting all change at the front while withdrawing for payment from the large bills at the rear is a decent tradeoff.
        underwater 15y ago
        That's what I've found myself having to do. I've never had to have a sorting strategy before living in the US. The lack of distinction between notes is frustrating. I love it when Americans tell me they have colored notes too. I still can't understand the preference for one dollar notes. Whenever I use a washing or vending machine I need to flatten out and align a dollar bill or insert dozens of quarters. Every few weeks I have to buy a couple of rolls of quarters from the bank. I paid a cashier with dollar coins yesterday and she did a double take and inspected each coin.
      - nakkiel 15y ago
        You actually got me to realize how natural it is for me to sort my bank notes. I also put older notes on the top of the stack so that they get out of it first.
- redthrowaway 15y ago
  >I really like uniformly sized bills that fit easily into a wallet You do realize your wallets are just smaller, right? Canadians don't go walking around with bills splayed out of our wallets, our wallets are just big enough to hold them. Not sure which countries you're talking about in regards to the paper feel. I certainly noticed that in South America. Bolivia's currency, in particular, tended to be both in varying stages of decomposition and incredibly dirty. OTOH, the portrait on the 10 Boliviano note [1] was awesome enough to make up for any lack in paper quality. [1]http://cdn2.iofferphoto.com/img/item/581/572/71/f7ce_1_b.JPG http://cdn2.iofferphoto.com/img/item/581/572/71/f7ce_1_b.JPG
  - jamesaguilar 15y ago
    Some countries (Malaysia, that I'm familiar with) actually have notes of a different physical size within the country. For example, the dimensions of the five ringitt and twenty ringitt note are different. I believe this is what the GP was referring to.
    - redthrowaway 15y ago
      Great Britain is the same way. I hate it.
      - corin_ 15y ago
        Aesthetically I love how the £50 note looks, in part thanks to its size, but it is really annoying. I guess most people don't often really come in contact with it, but anyone playing in a casino is likely to get them when cashing out, and they stick out of my wallet just a little, but enough to annoy me. And if you're cashing out a decent sum, asking for £20s isn't really an option,too many notes and the wallet won't even fold over.
    - dohkoxar 15y ago
      Mexico has this too. 20 pesos bill, 50 pesos bill and 100 pesos bill are all three different.
    - 15y ago
- grantbachman 15y ago
  Pennies do have their place though. As much as I dislike carrying them around, imagine not being able to divide up money past the 5 cent barrier. Every store would have to change their prices to the exact point at which the price of the item + sales tax equaled a multiple of 5 cents. Or they would keep the item prices the same, at which point customers might not like they are being charged, at the maximum, 4 cents more than they should. Those pennies add up.
  - ghshephard 15y ago
    If you simply round to the nearest penny (3,4,5,6,7=5, and 8,9,0,1,2=0)on all transactions, then it evens out. Those pennies really don't add up. See if you can find a store that won't add in the extra pennies to round you up, seriously - they certainly don't care.
    - mynameishere 15y ago
      A lot of fraud has been perpetuated by people shaving fractions of pennies off payrolls etc. Of course it adds up, and nobody's going to be rounding down anything. If a product costs 1.37, you will pay 1.37 with a credit card, and 1.40 with cash. And yeah it's the blue collar slob with two bankruptcies whose going to get his pennies shaved off.
      - colanderman 15y ago
        No you won't. I never see charges with fractions of pennies when I use my card at the gas pumps (which charge 9/10¢ extra per gallon, remember); why would I see charges with fractions of nickels when pennies are gone?
    - nirvdrum 15y ago
      I'm pretty sure the IRS cares though. GAAP don't allow you to just adjust numbers.
      - colanderman 15y ago
- jankassens 15y ago
  Different size (and color) make it way easier to distinguish the different bills – especially for blind people.
- enko 15y ago
  Other currency feels cheap? Are you kidding? Whenever I go the US I'm always reminded of how crappy the currency is. It looks and feels like it's printed on low grade recycled paper. Counterfeiting is such a problem that half the shops won't take 50s or 100s. And your wallet is perpetually stuffed with dirty, crumpled, near-useless $1 notes. Imagine if you ordered a credit card from a bank and instead of receiving a shiny plastic card you got a low quality bit of printed cardboard. You'd think that was pretty low class, right? Well that's how I feel comparing the US and Aussie money in my wallet. The production quality on the American banknotes just does not match my expectations for a modern country in 2011. Nothing against America of course, but I don't get the country's weird resistance to progress in certain areas, no matter how much of a no-brainer improvement that progress is. "Protect the greenback" - this is nothing but resistance to change, any change, no matter how beneficial. It's baffling how it can seemingly win the day, again and again. For me it is analogous to not upgrading to OSX 10.7 because you have nostalgic feelings about 10.6. I just cannot fathom how people get themselves into this state of mind. OK, going rather off on a tangent there .. anyway other currencies do not look cheap : ) except the japanese yen, which IMO is the only major banknote series even worse than America's.
  - woobar 15y ago
    Shop's won't take 50s and 100s for another reason. Almost nobody uses them within the borders of USA. The clerk at the store (often a kid from a high school) just don't know how they are supposed to look. ;-)
    - ghshephard 15y ago
      50s aren't particularly common, but ATMs in Nevada and Reno disburse all large amounts using Benjamins. They are a pretty common bill. I'm guessing 99% of those clerks in a store would have no trouble recognizing one.
    - jshort 15y ago
      It is also a pain to make change for a 50 or 100, one example would be buying a coffee from Tim Hortons with a 100.
joezydeco 15y ago
Maybe now that Ted Kennedy isn't around to get paid off by the New England paper mills, we'll see the idea of removing the paper USD$1 get some movement. Although, we've botched up the dollar coin (by not removing the paper buck) so many times, it'll probably never happen.
- dsl 15y ago
  Source please? Only one mill in the world is allowed to produce the "paper" for US currency. Paper mills in general have equipment that works well for wood pulp paper, not the specialized equipment required to prepare and process the cotton based paper used in US dollars. Because of the mandatory security costs involved and the fact they have to buy additional secret materials other than cotton and linen from the government, the profit margins on currency paper are razor thin. The only real benefit they get is a huge reference customer for their other secure paper business.
  - joezydeco 15y ago
    "Save the Greenback ultimately prevented a phaseout of the dollar bill thanks in part to Trent Lott (Mississippi's cotton industry makes the dollar's fabric) and Ted Kennedy (Massachusetts' Crane Paper Co. produces the dollar's paper)." http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/asection/la-oe-stein20feb20,0,1225939.column http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/asection/la-oe-stei... "Kolbe and many other coin supporters said politics has also been a major obstacle. Prominent Massachusetts Democrats such as Financial Services ranking member Barney Frank and the late Sen. Edward Kennedy have been ardent defenders of Crane & Co., which manufactures the cotton-based paper used in U.S. currency." "One-dollar bills represent nearly half of Crane’s currency business, and replacing the $1 note altogether would mean the loss of hundreds of jobs, the company said." "Clearly they had an interest in maintaining the use of the paper,” Kolbe said. [Pay big attention here>>>] “Crane was the only company that could qualify as the producer.” http://www.rollcall.com/news/Dollar-Bill-Coin-Coalition-Lobbying-205041-1.html?zkMobileView=true http://www.rollcall.com/news/Dollar-Bill-Coin-Coalition-Lobb... And just to add to how much a paper dollar costs compared to a coin: A dollar bill costs $0.04 and is remade every 18 months. A dollar coin costs $0.08 and lasts 30 years. http://www.treehugger.com/files/2007/03/lca_coins_notes.php http://www.treehugger.com/files/2007/03/lca_coins_notes.php
pkulak 15y ago
Yeah, the penny thing is annoying. 100 years ago a penny was worth about a dime today. At the very least we should make the nickel the smallest unit.
- fleitz 15y ago
  So what you're saying is that the penny got nickel and dime'd to it's current value?
- warfangle 15y ago
  The weirdest thing about the penny is that it costs more than one cent to manufacture. Given, they last for quite a while. That's why it's illegal to melt them down, and the US restricts exporting them.
  - rkowalick 15y ago
    According to Wikipedia: 1982-present US pennies, which weigh 2.5 grams, are 97.5% zinc and 2.5% copper (coated over the zinc) by weight and have a metallurgical value of 64.376% of the face value So, while the production costs are more than 1 cent, the actual value of the metal inside is still below 1 cent.
- epochwolf 15y ago
  I think the quarter should be the smallest unit. And phase out dollar bills for coins.
run4yourlives 15y ago
The worst possible thing about US money is that it is all the same colour. Whomever thought of that was obviously not working at maximum power.
- paxswill 15y ago
  The new bills ($100, $50, $20, $10, $5) are colored differently.
  - underwater 15y ago
    No they're not. They're green. It's so frustrating. Our Australian notes may look like Monopoly money but at least they are much easier to use.
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
woodall 15y ago
I do a bit of traveling and collect an awful lot of currency- http://i.imgur.com/CWkjX.jpg http://i.imgur.com/CWkjX.jpg - So I'd also like to chime in on this. I like the US cotton bills as they get better with age. Of course, having crisp bills is nice, but nothing stays that way for ever. My polymer bills maintain creases and it makes them hard to sort. Where as the cotton bills age gracefully. Check out the AUS 10, see how folded it looks? Now check out the $5 Military Payment certificate from around 1951. Just an observation.
cbailey 15y ago
I'm American, and I have to agree with you. I travelled to Ireland last month and having 1 and 2 € coins was great. The different sized bills took a little getting used to, but even that was great because I could quickly tell them apart (along with the different colors). I'd like to see wider adoption of 1 and maybe 2 $ coins here sometime in the bear future.
- mahyarm 15y ago
  I'm canadian, and I hate hate hate the $1 & $2 coins. (I don't like change in general) It's really nice to be able to just carry paper most of the time and get your change in mostly paper vs coins.
cageface 15y ago
Inflation has been so rampant here in Vietnam that the smallest bill worth mentioning is 1,000 Dong and I hardly ever see coins at all. It's actually a lot more convenient not to have to separately juggle coins and bills though.

andre 15y ago

US paper currency is made up of 75% cotton and 25% linen. Source: http://www.cotton.org/pubs/cottoncounts/cotton-currency.cfm http://www.cotton.org/pubs/cottoncounts/cotton-currency.cfm

decadentcactus 15y ago
Ok.. you know what I mean :P It's more the fact that US notes tear extremely easily whereas polymer notes... you have to be pretty determined to damage one without scissors.

sliverstorm 15y ago

I actually really like US currency. Most other currencies I've handled seem to be almost entirely paper, too large, occasionally different sizes... I really like uniformly sized bills that fit easily into a wallet, and the fabric in the bill seems to improve durability and lend a nicer texture. Other currency just feels... cheap. No offense. Agreed on pennies though. They had their place back when they were useful, but they are almost pointless now.

decadentcactus 15y ago
The different sizes, I'm not entirely sure but I thought they were for blind people... somehow. Or I might be making that up. This from Wikipedia also explains my dislike for $1: Approximately 42% of all U.S. currency produced in 2009 were one-dollar bills.
- abstractbill 15y ago
  The different sizes make it possible to select a given denomination without either doing an O(n) lookup, or having to keep your wallet sorted.
  - staunch 15y ago
    What sort of barbarian programmer doesn't sort his bills? Unthinkable.
    - abstractbill 15y ago
      Having different sized bills is kind of like keeping your money in a visual/tactile hash-table. An array is the wrong data structure for your wallet!
    - Harkins 15y ago
      The kind that profiles. The common case to optimize for may be insertion (especially with US $1 notes) rather than withdrawl. Semi-sorting by putting all change at the front while withdrawing for payment from the large bills at the rear is a decent tradeoff.
      - underwater 15y ago
        That's what I've found myself having to do. I've never had to have a sorting strategy before living in the US. The lack of distinction between notes is frustrating. I love it when Americans tell me they have colored notes too. I still can't understand the preference for one dollar notes. Whenever I use a washing or vending machine I need to flatten out and align a dollar bill or insert dozens of quarters. Every few weeks I have to buy a couple of rolls of quarters from the bank. I paid a cashier with dollar coins yesterday and she did a double take and inspected each coin.
    - nakkiel 15y ago
      You actually got me to realize how natural it is for me to sort my bank notes. I also put older notes on the top of the stack so that they get out of it first.
redthrowaway 15y ago
>I really like uniformly sized bills that fit easily into a wallet You do realize your wallets are just smaller, right? Canadians don't go walking around with bills splayed out of our wallets, our wallets are just big enough to hold them. Not sure which countries you're talking about in regards to the paper feel. I certainly noticed that in South America. Bolivia's currency, in particular, tended to be both in varying stages of decomposition and incredibly dirty. OTOH, the portrait on the 10 Boliviano note [1] was awesome enough to make up for any lack in paper quality. [1]http://cdn2.iofferphoto.com/img/item/581/572/71/f7ce_1_b.JPG http://cdn2.iofferphoto.com/img/item/581/572/71/f7ce_1_b.JPG
- jamesaguilar 15y ago
  Some countries (Malaysia, that I'm familiar with) actually have notes of a different physical size within the country. For example, the dimensions of the five ringitt and twenty ringitt note are different. I believe this is what the GP was referring to.
  - redthrowaway 15y ago
    Great Britain is the same way. I hate it.
    - corin_ 15y ago
      Aesthetically I love how the £50 note looks, in part thanks to its size, but it is really annoying. I guess most people don't often really come in contact with it, but anyone playing in a casino is likely to get them when cashing out, and they stick out of my wallet just a little, but enough to annoy me. And if you're cashing out a decent sum, asking for £20s isn't really an option,too many notes and the wallet won't even fold over.
  - dohkoxar 15y ago
    Mexico has this too. 20 pesos bill, 50 pesos bill and 100 pesos bill are all three different.
  - 15y ago
grantbachman 15y ago
Pennies do have their place though. As much as I dislike carrying them around, imagine not being able to divide up money past the 5 cent barrier. Every store would have to change their prices to the exact point at which the price of the item + sales tax equaled a multiple of 5 cents. Or they would keep the item prices the same, at which point customers might not like they are being charged, at the maximum, 4 cents more than they should. Those pennies add up.
- ghshephard 15y ago
  If you simply round to the nearest penny (3,4,5,6,7=5, and 8,9,0,1,2=0)on all transactions, then it evens out. Those pennies really don't add up. See if you can find a store that won't add in the extra pennies to round you up, seriously - they certainly don't care.
  - mynameishere 15y ago
    A lot of fraud has been perpetuated by people shaving fractions of pennies off payrolls etc. Of course it adds up, and nobody's going to be rounding down anything. If a product costs 1.37, you will pay 1.37 with a credit card, and 1.40 with cash. And yeah it's the blue collar slob with two bankruptcies whose going to get his pennies shaved off.
    - colanderman 15y ago
      No you won't. I never see charges with fractions of pennies when I use my card at the gas pumps (which charge 9/10¢ extra per gallon, remember); why would I see charges with fractions of nickels when pennies are gone?
  - nirvdrum 15y ago
    I'm pretty sure the IRS cares though. GAAP don't allow you to just adjust numbers.
    - colanderman 15y ago
jankassens 15y ago
Different size (and color) make it way easier to distinguish the different bills – especially for blind people.
enko 15y ago
Other currency feels cheap? Are you kidding? Whenever I go the US I'm always reminded of how crappy the currency is. It looks and feels like it's printed on low grade recycled paper. Counterfeiting is such a problem that half the shops won't take 50s or 100s. And your wallet is perpetually stuffed with dirty, crumpled, near-useless $1 notes. Imagine if you ordered a credit card from a bank and instead of receiving a shiny plastic card you got a low quality bit of printed cardboard. You'd think that was pretty low class, right? Well that's how I feel comparing the US and Aussie money in my wallet. The production quality on the American banknotes just does not match my expectations for a modern country in 2011. Nothing against America of course, but I don't get the country's weird resistance to progress in certain areas, no matter how much of a no-brainer improvement that progress is. "Protect the greenback" - this is nothing but resistance to change, any change, no matter how beneficial. It's baffling how it can seemingly win the day, again and again. For me it is analogous to not upgrading to OSX 10.7 because you have nostalgic feelings about 10.6. I just cannot fathom how people get themselves into this state of mind. OK, going rather off on a tangent there .. anyway other currencies do not look cheap : ) except the japanese yen, which IMO is the only major banknote series even worse than America's.
- woobar 15y ago
  Shop's won't take 50s and 100s for another reason. Almost nobody uses them within the borders of USA. The clerk at the store (often a kid from a high school) just don't know how they are supposed to look. ;-)
  - ghshephard 15y ago
    50s aren't particularly common, but ATMs in Nevada and Reno disburse all large amounts using Benjamins. They are a pretty common bill. I'm guessing 99% of those clerks in a store would have no trouble recognizing one.
  - jshort 15y ago
    It is also a pain to make change for a 50 or 100, one example would be buying a coffee from Tim Hortons with a 100.

joezydeco 15y ago

Maybe now that Ted Kennedy isn't around to get paid off by the New England paper mills, we'll see the idea of removing the paper USD$1 get some movement. Although, we've botched up the dollar coin (by not removing the paper buck) so many times, it'll probably never happen.

dsl 15y ago
Source please? Only one mill in the world is allowed to produce the "paper" for US currency. Paper mills in general have equipment that works well for wood pulp paper, not the specialized equipment required to prepare and process the cotton based paper used in US dollars. Because of the mandatory security costs involved and the fact they have to buy additional secret materials other than cotton and linen from the government, the profit margins on currency paper are razor thin. The only real benefit they get is a huge reference customer for their other secure paper business.
- joezydeco 15y ago
  "Save the Greenback ultimately prevented a phaseout of the dollar bill thanks in part to Trent Lott (Mississippi's cotton industry makes the dollar's fabric) and Ted Kennedy (Massachusetts' Crane Paper Co. produces the dollar's paper)." http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/asection/la-oe-stein20feb20,0,1225939.column http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/asection/la-oe-stei... "Kolbe and many other coin supporters said politics has also been a major obstacle. Prominent Massachusetts Democrats such as Financial Services ranking member Barney Frank and the late Sen. Edward Kennedy have been ardent defenders of Crane & Co., which manufactures the cotton-based paper used in U.S. currency." "One-dollar bills represent nearly half of Crane’s currency business, and replacing the $1 note altogether would mean the loss of hundreds of jobs, the company said." "Clearly they had an interest in maintaining the use of the paper,” Kolbe said. [Pay big attention here>>>] “Crane was the only company that could qualify as the producer.” http://www.rollcall.com/news/Dollar-Bill-Coin-Coalition-Lobbying-205041-1.html?zkMobileView=true http://www.rollcall.com/news/Dollar-Bill-Coin-Coalition-Lobb... And just to add to how much a paper dollar costs compared to a coin: A dollar bill costs $0.04 and is remade every 18 months. A dollar coin costs $0.08 and lasts 30 years. http://www.treehugger.com/files/2007/03/lca_coins_notes.php http://www.treehugger.com/files/2007/03/lca_coins_notes.php

pkulak 15y ago

Yeah, the penny thing is annoying. 100 years ago a penny was worth about a dime today. At the very least we should make the nickel the smallest unit.

fleitz 15y ago
So what you're saying is that the penny got nickel and dime'd to it's current value?
warfangle 15y ago
The weirdest thing about the penny is that it costs more than one cent to manufacture. Given, they last for quite a while. That's why it's illegal to melt them down, and the US restricts exporting them.
- rkowalick 15y ago
  According to Wikipedia: 1982-present US pennies, which weigh 2.5 grams, are 97.5% zinc and 2.5% copper (coated over the zinc) by weight and have a metallurgical value of 64.376% of the face value So, while the production costs are more than 1 cent, the actual value of the metal inside is still below 1 cent.
epochwolf 15y ago
I think the quarter should be the smallest unit. And phase out dollar bills for coins.

run4yourlives 15y ago

The worst possible thing about US money is that it is all the same colour. Whomever thought of that was obviously not working at maximum power.

paxswill 15y ago
The new bills ($100, $50, $20, $10, $5) are colored differently.
- underwater 15y ago
  No they're not. They're green. It's so frustrating. Our Australian notes may look like Monopoly money but at least they are much easier to use.

deleted 15y ago

[deleted]

woodall 15y ago

I do a bit of traveling and collect an awful lot of currency- http://i.imgur.com/CWkjX.jpg http://i.imgur.com/CWkjX.jpg - So I'd also like to chime in on this. I like the US cotton bills as they get better with age. Of course, having crisp bills is nice, but nothing stays that way for ever. My polymer bills maintain creases and it makes them hard to sort. Where as the cotton bills age gracefully. Check out the AUS 10, see how folded it looks? Now check out the $5 Military Payment certificate from around 1951. Just an observation.

cbailey 15y ago

I'm American, and I have to agree with you. I travelled to Ireland last month and having 1 and 2 € coins was great. The different sized bills took a little getting used to, but even that was great because I could quickly tell them apart (along with the different colors). I'd like to see wider adoption of 1 and maybe 2 $ coins here sometime in the bear future.

mahyarm 15y ago
I'm canadian, and I hate hate hate the $1 & $2 coins. (I don't like change in general) It's really nice to be able to just carry paper most of the time and get your change in mostly paper vs coins.

cageface 15y ago

Inflation has been so rampant here in Vietnam that the smallest bill worth mentioning is 1,000 Dong and I hardly ever see coins at all. It's actually a lot more convenient not to have to separately juggle coins and bills though.