Dollar coins piling up at Baltimore reserve bank

Herald-Review ^ | September 14, 2011

[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.

[Pelham]

“I think part of the problem, is they’re 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.

[cynwoody]

Obviously the big boys at the newspapers in this country have no need of ever trying to buy a sandwich in a company automat.

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.

[muawiyah]

The dividing line between a successful automat and one with broken machines is drawn by the technology ~ you really have to have some heavy traffic to justify the card operated systems ~ there are high maintenance costs.

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.