Posted on 09/20/2011 5:17:44 PM PDT by george76
In a dimly lit underground vault a block from Camden Yards, the Federal Reserve is holding millions of dollars in cash that nobody wants... But a 2005 law requires the reserve bank to keep ordering coins regardless of its stockpile, and so vaults in Baltimore and around the country are filling up.
...
a 2008 Harris poll that showed 76 percent of Americans prefer paper money.
It costs 30 cents to make a $1 coin, but the Fed purchases it for face value - and the U.S. Treasury pockets the difference. In 2010, the Mint put about 400 million $1 coins into circulation, which means the government made a profit of about $280 million.
(Excerpt) Read more at herald-review.com ...
“I think part of the problem, is theyre not being used for change at post offices now, because the USPS is switching to cashless debit card stamp machines, and phasing out the machines which gave the dollar coins out as change.”
That was my guess as well. Those machines were the largest users of those coins.
These days lots of those machines take paper money, and some even take credit cards. A couple of years ago, I bought a newspaper at the DFW airport on my AX card. I think it's the last newspaper I've bought for cash or credit.
BTW, the current cash readers are substantially different than they were 10 years ago. When our money was changed to include metal threads in the weave of the cloth it became, for all practical purposes, the same sort of thing as our coinage. The older image scan systems disappeared and more reliable, cheaper and easier to fix electroconductive systems replaced them.
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