After a meal for nine of us Trujillos at a splendid Santa Fe restaurant, Los Potrillos, where the Mexican food is authentic, I plunked down a tip, all in coins. Well, I suspect the waitperson did some quick math: $2.50 for a meal of about $65, or less than 4 percent.<\/p>\n
Inferring I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d left him 10 quarters, the server must have thought, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Este chango es un cheap-o.” So I assured him, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Son dolares”: they\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re not quarters but dollars. And therefore I wasn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t such a Se\u00c3\u00b1or cusco after all.<\/p>\n
But that\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s the problem. After buying stamps from the often-out-of-order machine at the Las Vegas Post Office, I ended up with a pocketful of Sacajawea dollars as change. The coins were minted in 2000, to replace the unpopular Susan B. Anthonys of July 1979 vintage.
\n<\/p>\n
The design, size and shape of both these dollars are big mistakes. Why didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t someone ask me? Why didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t they learn after two fiascos that the new U.S. Presidential Series dollar coin is going to be more of the same?<\/p>\n
Sure, numismatists will stick around to collect all the series, from George Washington and the next three presidents, available this year, to Hil or Bill or Barack, in 2016. But because the new coins are almost identical to the previous duds, people won\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t use them much, and after the novelty fades away, the only place to get them will be, well, in sometimes-malfunctioning stamp machines.<\/p>\n
In Copenhagen last September, I stopped at a yard sale and came across a silver dollar dated 1848. It had a heavy feel, and it was bigger than the current coins, like the silver dollars we used to cherish in our youth. I liked the clang of the coin instead of the dull thud we hear today. Many of us would probably have more of those coins today — containing real silver — if the economy of our childhood hadn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t forced us to spend rather than save.<\/p>\n
\u00e2\u20ac\u0153How much?” The Danish vendor asked for 60 Kroner, or about $10 American, then told me I could have it for five. At home, my son Stan looked up the coin on the Internet and found values from \u00e2\u20ac\u0153almost worthless” to $350 American dollars. But my interest isn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t in making a killing (or taking a beating) on a coin.<\/p>\n
Back at Los Potrillos, the act of assuring the server that he wasn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t being stiffed meant that I was calling attention not only to the size of the tip but to the fact that I even left a tip. It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s better to leave a tip without publishing that fact in the local press.<\/p>\n
When the Susan B. Anthony coin came around, it featured 11 edges, unlike the many reeded edges that gird a quarter. It honored the women’s suffrage campaigner. The design, theoretically, was to allow the owner to feel the difference and thereby not confuse it with a quarter, as was the case of my Potrillos waitperson. But does anyone have super-sensitive digits capable of discerning those alterations?<\/p>\n
I got hold of one of the 888,842,452 SBA coins produced and sympathized with the fellow at the 85 Coffee Shop who inserted a then-new dollar coin into the jukebox, thinking he\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d get four times as many songs as with a quarter. The SBA coin jammed up the machine, and the only tunes that played were \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Three coins in the fountain,” \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Pennies from Heaven” and \u00e2\u20ac\u0153We\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re in the money.”<\/p>\n
The Susan B. Anthony replacement, the Sacajawea, features the assumed image of the Shoshone Indian guide who appeared on the scene of history in 1804 to assist Lewis and Clark on their expedition west. The Sacajawea, also called the Golden Dollar, contains 88.5 percent copper but no gold.<\/p>\n
The new Presidential dollars, soon at a bank near you, will have virtually identical dimensions. Sure, the new coin will omit the word \u00e2\u20ac\u0153liberty,” as the\u00c2\u00a0 Patriot Act has pretty much obviated the need for the word. But the crux is not information or appearance — it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s a matter of size. Most people reaching into their pocket or purse distinguish one coin from another by its size, not what it looks like. If they even elect to carry the Presidential coin, they\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ll continue to fumble, confusing the dollar for a familiar coin one-fourth its value.<\/p>\n
Remember when a silver dollar was the largest coin in your pocket, and carrying more than two of them usually resulted in your mom\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s having to mend your pockets? And when they landed on the sidewalk, the silver dollars sounded like Big Ben at noon?<\/p>\n
On another occasion, in a Las Vegas restaurant, we read the notice on the menu that parties of six or more require an automatic 15 percent gratuity (fancy word for tip). There were five of us adults and a new grand-daughter, Celina, three weeks old.<\/p>\n
I left a tip, assuming Celina would not bump our number up to six. Yet, when the check (fancy word for bill) arrived, we saw that the \u00e2\u20ac\u0153grat” had been figured in. When I asked how many large t-bone steaks our 21-day-old had consumed, how many times the waitress needed to warm the baby\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s bottle and how many diaper changes the little one required, the manager explained that the number of guests (fancy word for customer) was \u00e2\u20ac\u0153left to the waitress\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 discrepancy” (a kind-of word for discretion).<\/p>\n
I went back to the table to claim the Sacajaweas I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d left, but the waitress — the same one who counted five-and-a-half people as six — had already used her own \u00e2\u20ac\u0153discrepancy” and scooped them up.<\/p>\n
It was w-a-y too generous a tip, but as I said, I never much cared for those dollars that look like quarters anyway.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
After a meal for nine of us Trujillos at a splendid Santa Fe restaurant, Los Potrillos, where the Mexican food is authentic, I plunked down a tip, all in coins. Well, I suspect the waitperson did some quick math: $2.50 for a meal of about $65, or less than 4 percent. Inferring I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d left him […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[2],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/214"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=214"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/214\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=214"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=214"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=214"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}