Every pay phone in America cost a dime when I was little. Then, by the time I was old enough to need to carry around change for a pay phone, all of them only took quarters. Do you know how many millions of pay phones there used to be? They somehow found it cost-efficient to modify almost every single one of them in the entire country. After the Bell system was broken up.
During the era of payphones, a quarter was still significant money so it was still worth the time to adjust the machinery. Nowadays, there are typically only four machines that people regularly interact with that accept quarters:
Laundry machines, which increasingly don’t take coins at all and instead have card readers on them
Parking meters, which also increasingly get replaced with signs telling you to pay online using a website or app
Vending machines, which also usually have card readers.
Self-checkout machines at grocery stores.
These machines take coins, but generally deal in such small-dollar amount terms that replacing the coinage mechanisms just isn’t worth it in 2025. That’s the biggest issue with coinage reform plans. Hell, not even when the UK decimalised their currency did they change the size and weight of the coins, for exactly this reason. An old shilling was the same size, weight, and value as a new 5p coin and no changes had to be made to the machines.
Now, the problem is that while coin usage (and cash usage in general) is on the decline, these systems must still function for the percentage of people who want to use cash. And you definitely have a moral right to use cash and be able to conduct your daily life in cash if you want, either for privacy reasons, or because for small transactions it’s just simpler.
Every pay phone in America cost a dime when I was little. Then, by the time I was old enough to need to carry around change for a pay phone, all of them only took quarters. Do you know how many millions of pay phones there used to be? They somehow found it cost-efficient to modify almost every single one of them in the entire country. After the Bell system was broken up.
During the era of payphones, a quarter was still significant money so it was still worth the time to adjust the machinery. Nowadays, there are typically only four machines that people regularly interact with that accept quarters:
These machines take coins, but generally deal in such small-dollar amount terms that replacing the coinage mechanisms just isn’t worth it in 2025. That’s the biggest issue with coinage reform plans. Hell, not even when the UK decimalised their currency did they change the size and weight of the coins, for exactly this reason. An old shilling was the same size, weight, and value as a new 5p coin and no changes had to be made to the machines.
Now, the problem is that while coin usage (and cash usage in general) is on the decline, these systems must still function for the percentage of people who want to use cash. And you definitely have a moral right to use cash and be able to conduct your daily life in cash if you want, either for privacy reasons, or because for small transactions it’s just simpler.