Money Smarts

My last thoughts about money, I promise.

I don't get why we still have exact-change slots. Anywhere.

When the bus was 25 cents, this made sense. When I hop on the KX and have to deposit exactly $3.50, though, it's a bit silly. Why can't I get change, or just slide my debit card through the machine, like on the CalTrain?

And parking meters are even more ridiculous. When I'm planning my commute to work, it's not that hard to set aside 6 dollars and four quarters. When I'm running off for a quick drive to the store, having to scrounge in the sofa cushions for dimes is ridiculous. But when the alternative is playing beat the clock with the DPT, hoping I can dash in and get change for a dollar so I can feed the meter so I can run back in and do my actual shopping, what choice do I have?

Everyone in Europe is switching to smartcash. You go to the ATM, slide your card through, and instead of getting a 20-Euro bill that can't be used as exact change anywhere, you get a different card, that's worth exactly 20 Euros. And you spend it by waving this smartcard at other machines (including parking meters) which deduct the appropriate amount, until eventually the card is worth nothing.

I've been told that in some countries, you can't spend the last euro, because they want you to recycle the card. Money with a cash-back deposit is an interesting idea, to say the least.

Maybe Americans are afraid of their cash being smarter than them, but I don't see it's any better if we're dumber than everyone else's money just because we're still smarter than ours.

Mo' Money

Why do we even still have a $1 bill? Even before the Euro, coins usually covered everything up to about $2. If you pulled out a bill, it was 5 marks or 10 francs or 20 billion lire or something of similar value.

People always say the same thing: "Americans just can't get used to a $1 coin." More conservative-minded folks will claim it's because the $1 coin always has someone forgettable (code word for "female") like Susan B. Anthony or Sakajewia.

Bullshit. Americans can't get used to a $1 coin because we still have a $1 bill. Get rid of it, and people will use the coins. Nobody's going to magnanimously say "keep the change" and wave away $4.25 because they don't want to carry coins. Or, if they do, it'll be a major change in American consciousness that's probably for the better.

Speaking of coins, some of them are cool. I've always liked the sub-penny-sized dime. (This is a holdover from the days when they contained measurable quantities of copper and silver. As every D&D player knows, 1 gold = 10 silver = 100 copper. And something called electrum comes in there somewhere.)

But other countries have cool coins. Most of the Scandinavian countries--you know, the ones that are 20 years ahead of us in cellphone technology--have at least one coin with a hole in it. Round coins with square holes, triangular coins with round holes, maybe even sawblade coins with intricate holes that can be used as a stencil to spraypaint the prime minister's face on a wall, although I haven't actually seen that one.

If you go far enough north into Scandinavia, the Sami used to have half-ton coins made of stone, probably because of their inherent value as something you could roll down the hill to kill reindeer. OK, I don't want to try to put these in the bus exact-change slot, but I suspect it makes money seem more real.

Money

The Talking Heads said it: American money is the ugliest money in the world; that's why it's worth so much.

Maybe there's something to this. But forget how ugly it is; that's a matter of taste. What's indisputable is how incredibly boring it is, despite the fact that we spend so much more (ugly, boring) money designing our (ugly, boring) money than just about anyone else.

Let's start with the paper. In most countries, bills come in different colors, so even without looking carefully (or soberly) you can immediately tell 20 rupees, which is worth about a gumball, from 1000 rupees, which will get you cabfare all the way across India. They also come in different sizes, so you can reach in your pocket and pull out that Hong Kong $2 as a tip without pulling out and rummaging through that big wad which may have a $1000 on top in front of the local Triad boys.

Our bills--including the fancy new "uncounterfeitable" bills (like "uncrackable" software copy protection)--are all identically-sized, identically-green, identically-dull slips of paper. Although it is cool that you can wash our bills in your pants pockets and they come out good as new (if considerably lower in cocaine content), there's not much else going for them.