Presidential dollar coins not proving popular
As the presidential candidate with the backing of Mark Twain, this Republican lost the popular vote to the Democrat but ignited controversy when he won the presidency thanks to a newly formed Electoral Commission that voted in his favor 8-7 along party lines. As the new president, he immediately inflamed further passions by banning alcohol from the White House.
But as a $1 coin, Rutherford B. Hayes packs all the punch of the Chicago Bears' running game. Our government's new presidential dollar coin series began with George Washington in 2007 and is slated to end with Ronald Reagan in 2016, unless any of the other five living presidents die before then. The coins are a shiny gold color and feature a presidential portrait on the front and the Statue of Liberty on the back. Not that anybody would know.
The $1 coins are more economical because they last longer than paper dollars and could save taxpayers $184 million a year, according to one bill introduced in Congress last week. But most of the more than $400 million in new dollar coins minted last year just add to the surplus of $1.2 billion in coins currently in storage at Federal Reserve Banks. The new $1 coins can't even drum up interest among coin collectors.
“Very little or none,” says Frank Starkey, owner of Arlington Coin for 31 years. “The problem is people want to find coins in circulation, and these coins aren't in circulation. They (collectors) can't get them without buying them.”
Merchants who take a $20 bill and give change in dollar coins are met with blank stares or accusations of a ripoff.
“There's not a lot of people collecting them,” says Eagle McMahon, president of the Elgin Coin Club and owner of Eagle's Rare Coins in South Elgin. Some collectors will buy the complete set, and a few casual fans rushed out to get that first Washington dollar. But interest in the presidential series was about as short-lived as the monthlong presidency of William Henry Harrison, whose coin rolled out in February 2009 to a smattering of yawns.
“When the states came out everybody wanted one,” McMahon says of the quarters coin set that featured all the states in the order they joined the union. “There was a lot of history to it with the year they became a state and what they put on the coin.”
The Illinois quarter featured a young Abe Lincoln, a farm and the Chicago skyline. The Lincoln dollar coin, which went into circulation last November, would be hard to find in our farm towns or Chicago. Even the new America the Beautiful quarters series featuring national parks doesn't seem to capture the public's interest.
Silver dollar coins of centuries past are valuable to collectors. Even the copper-nickel Eisenhower dollars of the 1970s have some cache. But the much-mocked Susan B. Anthony dollar, the lackluster Sacagawea coin, the series of Native American dollars and the presidential series don't get out much.
“People don't want to carry them around in their pockets,” McMahon says. “It takes a lot more money to pay for things now than it did in the early 1970s when we had the big Eisenhower dollar.”
The cost of things also takes a bite out of some coin collections.
“Because of the economy, more people are turning in their coins,” Starkey says.
The hobby “has fallen quite a bit to the wayside because people need to buy necessities,” McMahon says, “but people are still collecting.”
Some people look at coin collections based purely on the value of the gold and silver used to make the old coins. McMahon says he has appreciated the numismatic value of coins since 1980, when he went to a coin-and-stamp show.
“I took my stamp collection around and was looking to buy more stamps,” McMahon remembers. Instead, he sold his two stamp albums for $500 and put all that money into his new coin collection.
“Coins are really neat. They've got a lot of history,” McMahon says. “It's become a big passion for me.”
He understand why some folks will be collecting the presidential series, whether the coin honors Hayes, Harrison, Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy or Richard M. Nixon.
“Growing up in the 1960s, we used to go to Jewel and get the presidential statues and bring them home and stick them on a Styrofoam riser,” says McMahon, remembering a popular grocery giveaway for kids. Each new presidential dollar “brings back the memory of when I used to collect the little statues.”
Yes, but that Rutherford B. Hayes dollar probably will still be worth a dollar in 40 years, while a set of those free miniature statues now is selling on eBay for $59.99.