What does a shortage of coins look like today? Difficulty paying for a parking space or a gumball? Is it just difficulty giving change in a cash transaction? Wouldn't stores have access to banks that arent closed to be able to give change? What's the role that coins play today that would be noticeable?
Coin shortages make it harder to pay for things in cash. Transportation like ferries, light rail, commuter rail, etc often are accepting bills and returning coins as change. If they don't have coins to provide change, you may need to provide exact change, pay more and accept the loss (this is common on buses when paying with bills), not be able to purchase a ticket, or have to use a credit/debit card. In my area, the county bus system decided to make the buses free to avoid handling money and they didn't make change anyway, and the state ferries notified people to be prepared to make exact change and/or use cards.
Same thing happens if coin operated machines with bill accepters don't have coins to make change. It might not be obvious, but the coins inserted into most machines aren't directly dispensable as change, so if it runs out of change, it won't be able to make change until the operator comes to service it, which might be longer intervals these days.
It sounds like the coin requests from banks to the federal reserve can't all be filled, and the federal reserve is rationing coins until that changes. I suspect some of the usually net coin receiving businesses aren't open, or aren't receiving the same number of coins, making it harder for the net coin giving businesses to get the supplies they need.
I can answer the "wouldn't stores have access to banks that aren't closed?" question.
I work in a niche industry that enables stores to order coin from banks. The issue is that stores can't get coins from banks because the banks don't have them either. Banks order coins (and notes) from the Federal Reserve. The Federal Reserve is shorting the shipment of coins to all major banks.
So, when a store like Target orders coin from its bank, they may order $500 in pennies. The bank then may ship them no pennies or a fraction of the order, depending on the bank vault the coin is coming from, what inventory they have, and formulas in place.
Look for this issue to go on through at least Christmas.
There’s some businesses like laundromats serving areas where many folks don’t have washer/dryer in unit that are still coin operated. It’s a real impact for those since people now need to go further to wash/dry or find friends or family who will help out.
Many pay-to-use(coin or card) laundry rooms in apartment complexes are entirely contracted out to a third party company that handles everything; payment collection, machine leasing, service/repairs, etc. On the whole I think it's easier for them this way.
The small apartment building I live in is set up this way. I don't really mind, but I wish they would find a way to accept cards (credit and/or reloadable) rather than only coins because as it stands right now, I have to go to the bank and get $50 worth of "laundry tokens" (quarters) every few months, since I don't spend enough cash day-to-day to naturally collect enough change for the laundry.
That's very interesting. In my MCOL of city I've been looking at buying some apartment buildings and many of them advertise the W/D in the building as a source of revenue.
Charging per-use prevents inefficient use (very small loads in large machines) and tenants letting their friends use the machines, eventually turning the laundry room into the free neighborhood laundromat.
Some buildings have switched (decades ago) to reloadable laundry cards to avoid having to deal with change.
It's to subsidize the cost of the machines and the electricity and water.
The machines are commercial grade, depending on the amount of tenants they will have high wear and will cost to purchase $3000 each. Minimum of a set is 2 so $6000.
If you use a management company that deals in laundromat and repair, the capex is not there but you'll ave a monthly opex of about $50-100 that should include a guarantee and onsite tech. Per set.
It scales up pretty quickly because you can, maybe, push a one set onto 4 units.
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But it's also a sign of cheaper locations and landlords to not have your own washer/dryer inside.
Up front purchase price doesn't matter since it amortizes out over the life of the machine. All you're doing is paying up front for the downtime for service it won't need compared to cheaper consumer grade stuff.
I used to do facilities maintenance for a hotel. We weren't space constrained in terms of laundry so we ran a fleet of cheapo consumer machines. One was down at any given time but it was still cheaper than introducing fewer high grade commercial machines. We had some commercial stuff that was ancient and still worked. Didn't break much less but it was easier to work on (primarily because age) when it did.
Obviously if you want to minimize downtime because you're an absentee landlord who has to pay a PM company to do a visit every time a lid sensor fucks off then having commercial machines makes sense. In terms of dollars per load the cheap consumer stuff is in fact cheaper, assuming you don't live in a regulatory capture hellscape where you are supposed to have a plumber connect your drains and gas lines (or are willing to ignore those rules).
The commercial grade machines I've dealt with in SF apartment and condo buildings were worse overall than the non-commercial ones in Victorians and townhomes. They could take larger loads and washed/dried faster, but they had worse sensors, distributed detergent worse, ran too hot for drying, and slightly damaged some of my clothes.
Having some additional charge/busywork helps to throttle demand so people don't hog them as much and make some effort to economize usage. Depending on the people served, that may or may not be necessary.
I think in CA, such charges are limited by the same laws as rent control, so at least they tend to be under-priced. At one I lived at (if SF's Tenderloin), it charged well below what nearby laundromats did per load ($1.25 vs much more for similar size).
I use a laundry service to pick up my laundry, do it for me, and drop it off. (I wouldn't pay for it if I had a machine in my apartment, but I don't, so this is the tradeoff.)
I'm glad the cost of laundry isn't included in my rent, because I'd just be paying extra.
I use a wash-and-fold service[1] at a laundromat that serves a mainly Hispanic neighborhood, and they recently started rounding my charges to the nearest dollar.
Well, take the store I work at, for example -- we've been told, by our bank that is open, that they're now limiting change orders to one roll of each denomination (for a total of $17.50), as they themselves are limited in what change they can get.
Usually, on a per week basis, we do one change order of at least over $100. Over $100 vs $17.50... The difference adds up rather quick, even if you do a run every other day (not quite sure how frequent change orders can be before they limit that too, though).
Stores are unable to handle cash transactions because they can't make change, because they can't get enough from their banks, because the banks aren't getting enough supply, apparently.
As long as that charity isn't the owner of the grocery store's yacht club I like this idea. In practice, though, the types of charities usually offered are a) the business themselves like Goodwill, or b) controversial at best (say, a Komen-eqsue figure). If there was a way to make this choice with less friction I'd be much more willing to give up change entirely.
In the past month I've received four half-dollar coins as change, which is four more than I've seen in the past decade. It seems like stores are reaching the bottom of their coin drawers; using coins they normally wouldn't.
At work, we've all basically agreed that if we run out of change and can't get any more, that we'll bring in our own jars, count it out, and exchange it for cash.
It's a last resort, for sure, but we've already discussed it. As of right now, we're limited to one roll of each denomination ($17.50) by our bank, so the need may very well eventually arise, and that means that some of my collection might just end up as someone else's change.
Or don't declare your collection. In fact, as the value of coins continues to rise, I would try to maximize (but not horde) my influx of coins, not willfully exchange them for a less-demand form of currency.
Remember, the concept of supply and demand is still valid even for currency marked with an official denomination. You could think of that marking as the _minimum_ value of the currency, as guaranteed by the state.
I think everywhere else I've travelled, someone (or a machine) giving change will optimize it to the fewest coins. £3.85 would be £2, £1, 50p, 20p, 10p, 5p.
The only exception is something like a food stall that's set all their prices to multiples of €1 (I've seen this several times in Germany), they might keep plenty of €1 and €2 coins for change. If someone pays with smaller coins, they have no use for them and will give them as change.
Having lived in Japan, I was a big fan of larger denomination coins. In Japan, the smallest bill is worth about $10 USD, and they have coins worth about $1 and $5. Having a pocket full of change could actually get you something nice! I actually treated two of my friends to a night out at our local izakaya for ~$100 with 20 coins.
In an effort to promote the use of different coins and bills in the US, I would take all of the one dollar bills I accumulated over X amount of time, and I would buy $1 coins (Sacajaweas and Susan Bs) and $2 bills so that I could circulate them and try to get people accustomed to them.
I ran into three issueus:
1. Cashiers would give me the wrong change for the $2 bill. They usually treated it like a $1 bill, but at times I got change for a $20.
2. Cashiers would be mildly annoyed that there was not a slot in their register for $2 bills or $1 coins.
3. I actually had one subway worker (at the T in Cambridge) actually throw the coins back at me and yell at me and my friends that she wouldn’t take our “circus money” while pounding the plexiglass. We were all in business causal and (I hope) didn’t look like circus performers, so it was an odd reaction to say the least.
Anyway, I do all of my banking remotely now, so it’s harder to make exchanges like that, but I still do it sometimes.
I really wish my fellow Americans would embrace the use of larger coins and maybe even ditch the penny and maybe even the nickel.
I think it's dictated from up top; I'd use them if they were common in circulation, but I'm not to go out of my way to request rolls of them from a bank.
Presumably a business can request them from a bank?
I would expect 50¢ and $1 coins to be especially popular with people running vending machines or other machines giving change. 50¢ coins means refilling it less frequently, and encouraging $1 coins means less trouble recognizing paper money.
I wondered how the coin mechanisms on pool tables work in the USA, since nowadays it's probably not unusual for the price to be more than $1 or $1.50 (depending whether the mechanism has 4 or 6 slots). In Europe they just take whatever mixture of coins is appropriate, an image search suggests in the USA one must buy metal tokens to feed the machine.
I remember trying to feed about $6 in quarters into a payphone in the USA, when there was some issue with travel insurance and we had to make a call to Britain. We couldn't put them in fast enough. Eventually, the cheap motel let us use their normal phone.
(The first two are still in widespread use in the UK, although I haven't seen them much in Denmark or Sweden. Here, they're more likely to have replaced the coin slot with a contactless card reader.)
I've heard that some banks will no longer take large amounts of change from people. I'm not sure if they got rid of the change counting machines, or just don't want to deal with it. This could have some effect on the amount of change in circulation. People then have jars/ashtrays/drawers of change that they can't easily put back into supply.
Yep, same in rural North Dakota. All the self serves are card only. Screws up a lot of people here, but we already almost forced a lot of people to get Walmart Money Card or the equivalent because they were required to switch to direct deposit during the stay at home, or have their checks mailed. Welcome to more pain for the unbanked.
