When I visit family in Mississauga I have no problem using $1 and $2 coins though I find they tend to accumulate in my pockets. There are at least two factors preventing adoption of the $1 coin. 1) Public reluctance to stop using paper and 2) the inability of Congress to legislate the elimination of the paper dollar due to pressure from the Massachusetts delegation which has Crane and Company (the paper manufacturers) in their state. The delegation representing the mining interests was not strong enough to overcome that opposition but was strong enough to get the coins created in the first place. Pretty much a stalemate.

Worst case, toss a bone to Crane Paper and the “my pockets will wear out” crowd by issuing a modernized $2 bill instead of a $ coin. That would at least cut the number of low-value bills in half. Once people got used to the idea, the bill could be replaced with a coin like they did in Canada. …. oops, I forgot, Canada also has national health insurance, went metric 35 years ago, and does all sorts of other pinko-commie things that will never happen in the US. Bad example.

With a one year gap between the law passing and the new “two cent” coin being introduced, there’ll be plenty of time for every jar, pot, bottle of pennies to be unearthed and cashed in. As I understand it, the cents cost more like two cents to produce so the return of the older one cent coins will be a blessing.

And if you’re gonna argue purchasing power, coins below the quarter-dollar are sufficiently lacking in such power to justify keeping them around. I work in a supermarket and out of the hundreds of thousands of items we sell each week, the average price is between $2.10 and $2.30. The cheapest regular items are Ramen soup noodles (20¢ ea.). Impulse candy at the checkout is priced no lower than 69¢ per bar. Cents, nickels, and dimes don’t fit in this paradigm.

I don’t buy into the arguments against such a move because I’m confident that product sizes would increase/decrease according for pricing structures based on quarter-dollars. I refer to the 5¢ Hershey Bar of yesteryear whose size would increase/decrease based on the price of chocolate. We have a similar thing going on now giving us 59 fl.oz. orange juice containers and 1.75 quarts of ice-cream instead of the traditional half-gallons.