Today I found out my wallet is "gay", purely because it has a change purse! Turns out Americans don't ever use coins. This makes a lot of sense because I've been carrying around a fairly uncomfortable half a kilo of silver and copper for the past couple of weeks.
This is how it works: you get coins in change (in the rare event you actually use cash) which you just throw in your pocket and then into a piggybank when you get home - hence no change purse in your wallet. When that gets full there are counting machines in the supermarkets that you can chuck massive amounts of coins into and get paper money back. Man, someone should put that in lonely planet or something because I have cursed the use of pennies on every trip to the US.
So effectively the population has eliminated all practical use of coins, except perhaps parking meters. I wonder how much money the US government would save in minting/metals costs if they eliminated all coins under 25c.....Apparently with the current cost of copper pennies are worth more as copper metal than as currency.
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