What Happened to America’s Quarters?

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Are we really in a coin shortage? The answer is complicated, writes Choire

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Illustration: Tamara Shopsin Our government just dropped a hot new quarter featuring Maya Angelou with her arms dramatically aloft, posed before a bird’s giant wingspan. It’s the first of a series, each depicting women on the back. Arrival of the long-planned quarter was met with joy tempered with bafflement. Hey — aren’t we in a coin shortage?

A bit panicked, the U.S. Mint and the Federal Reserve introduced an entity called the U.S. Coin Task Force, bringing together government, big retail players, and commercial banks in order to make at least this one aspect of COVID less painful and less prolonged. This group included friends and competitors with a vested interest in the fate of coins, like Coinstar and the armored-car people.

It didn’t work. And meanwhile, the idea that the U.S. was literally running out of quarters and dimes to keep our barely functioning society going had become a meme — obvious, self-reinforcing. Even after people began returning to stores and transacting more normally, we saw coin scarcity everywhere. Some of New York’s retail darlings, in defiance of a 2020 city law mandating that businesses accept cash, stubbornly refused to open their registers.

This coin quandary was minted long before the pandemic. In December 2018, the U.S. Mint privately gathered people in D.C. to brainstorm ways to reduce the country’s dependence on constantly pumping out new coins. Ideas usually include eliminating pennies or nickels or changing their composition. That’s not good business for the quiet interests involved. The zinc industry, for example, is heavily invested in the life span of the penny .

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lpolgreen Choire Old men have huge containers of change hanging around their houses. You can’t take the money, because that’s stealing, they don’t feel like dealing with the change, so the change just stays there for years and years and years

Choire I just this week cashed in $1440 in quarters. Problem solved! 😄

Choire What are coins?

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