The national shortage of coins has been an unusual side effect of the pandemic. Among his victims? Vendors, washing machines and even the dental fairy.
The Federal Reserve announced in June that the coin supply system was severely disrupted by the pandemic. Although there are still enough coins, they do not circulate as freely, because many businesses are closed and consumers do not simply spend.
The U.S. Mint and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin have urged Americans to use coins or bank them in banks to help now. As the economy recovers and businesses reopen, currency supply is expected to normalize.
In the meantime, people are forced to find solutions.
Large and small retailers have instructed shoppers to use cards or make exact changes when possible. Some will not provide change. Grocery giant Kroger Co. still accepts cash, but offers customers the option to load their change on loyalty cards to use at their next visit or to donate the balance to charity.
Convenience store chain WaWa offers customers a free drink at some of their stores when people deposit $ 5 coins, like a sandwich for $ 50 or more. Community State Bank, a regional bank chain in Wisconsin, even offered a $ 5 bonus for every $ 100 worth of coins people brought. They had to stop it after a week due to overwhelming reaction.
As the shortage continues, it has become clear that there are still some conundrums that only coins can solve.
“It’s at least a nuisance … at least it’s a business challenge,” said Brian Wallace, CEO of the Coin Laundry Association, a laundry group. “We provide a basic facility for health care. People need to do their laundry. ”
About 56% of washing machines serving the public take quarters as the only form of payment. And 89% take quarters as some form of payment, with cards, loyalty programs or mobile payments as an alternative, according to the trading group.
Laundries rely in part on coins because many of their customers are unbanked or underbanked, which means they are among the millions of Americans who rely solely on cash to pay for things.
Daryl Johnson, who owns Giant Wash Laundry – a chain of 11 laundries in the Minneapolis area – said his company typically buys anywhere from $ 4,000 to $ 8,000 a quarter for a week for his change machines. But after the Fed began distributing coins, his bank said it might not be able to supply one.
“Obviously we were a little freaking out,” he said.
Johnson got creative: he asked friends and family on Facebook if they had any change he could buy. He set up signs in stores asking customers to bring in their own coins and adapted his exchange machines to accept only smaller bills to limit the outflow. Meanwhile, he reached out to other laundry operators who might be willing to sell too many coins, and even drove more than 4 hours to Omaha to buy $ 8,000 in quarters.
“It’s that when my businesses close,” he said.
Things have stabilized somewhat, both for himself and his bank, in terms of supply. “I did not complain because our company stayed open and everyone had a fight. This happened right to us,” Johnson said.
People who rely on coin-operated washing machines in laundries and apartment buildings have difficulty, too. Stephanie Sabin of Portland, Oregon has a washing machine at her apartment complex that only lasts quarters of an hour. She bought four rolls of quarters in March. In mid-June, she bought two more. But in July, her neighborhood bank was closed to business in person. The next five locations they tried were closed or unable to give up their neighborhood. She could do her laundry with quarters that her family had on hand or that she bought from her boss.
‘Desperate times,’ she said. “You can’t apply for quarterly rolls at grocery stores or even get change if you pay with cash at a food tower.”
Toll booths, parking meters, vending machines and other spots that were once coins were largely modernized to accept other forms of payment. But pockets of problems still exist, such as at an air station of a gas station or doing a car wash.
Some people find themselves in need of change for other situations.
Leigh Ann Tognetti of Rio Grande City, Texas, had just started paying her 5-year-old daughter a fee in July: two quarters for each day she picks up her room.
“It’s a lot of quarters to go through in a week,” she said. “I had no idea or even imagined that there could be a shortage of coins.”
To keep her promise, she used change of vending machines at work and coins sent to her by a friend. Instead, she also used a stack of dimes like doubling two-day payments with a dollar bill.
“If she were to pick up every day, we would have a problem,” she said. “So far, I do not want to get too creative.”
In late July, the U.S. currency prompted Americans to do their part, urging the public to start spending, depositing or exchanging their coins at banks or currency redemption kiosks. Mnuchin took to Twitter last week to truncate the same.
For the North Carolina Aquarium at Pine Knoll Shores, a shutdown in March caused an unexpected opportunity to compensate for lost revenue and also led to a tackle on the coin shortage.
The aquarium closes its waterfall so it could erase about 100 gallon coins that visitors have tossed in the past 14 years. The coins, which are still being washed and counted, will go to operating expenses.
“We feel the pinch for sure,” said Danielle Bolton, a spokeswoman for the aquarium. “Every cent counts literally.”
The deficiency is felt even by the boy.
Take Jen Vicker, of Bollingbrook, Ill. Her 10-year-old daughter was recently awakened with a loose tooth and worried that the tooth fairy could not pay due to the shortage, unaware that her parents had imposed a stash of coins.
So she wrote a note: ‘Dear tooth fairy, you may already know this, but there is a national currency shortage in America. You normally let me have dollar coins, but until this situation is resolved, I want to have cash for my teeth. I apologize for the inconvenience. “
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