Hard change is worth it (Why you should switch to the dollar coin)

A few days ago I went for a beer with my girlfriend. Having just arrived back in Los Angeles from a brief trip to the UK, when I went to pay, it occurred to me how strange it is that the States doesn’t circulate dollar coins. In the UK, both one and two pound coins are common.

As a kid, I remember coming across the occasional novelty coin —there was a Susan B. Anthony and a Kennedy half dollar in my piggy bank that were my equivalent of Gollum’s ring — but never have I received such coins from a register as change after a purchase, and come to think of it, it’s been quite some time since I’ve even seen one. Does the mint even make those pieces anymore? I looked it up.

I was surprised by what I discovered: Not only does the mint still produce a distribute dollar coins, they’ve also been on a mission, struggling to get people to use them for decades. Why do they care so much? Because switching from the $1 bill to the $1 coin would save the government over five billion dollars.

Five billion dollars! And all we have to do is replace that damp bundle of crumpled one dollar bills in our pocket with these cool-looking, easy to manage coins. It seems like such an easy change to make; Yet for the government, it’s been impossibly difficult.

Despite the dollar coin being readily available at any bank, and despite campaigns designed to promote interest (congress voted in 2005 to feature the faces of every US president on the coins, similar to the State Quarters series), adoption has been abysmal, and for no reason other than the most basic: momentum. Nobody uses dollars coins.

At CityGrows, this is a problem we’re all too familiar with. We make every effort to tailor our product to the needs of our customers, and we believe it is our obligation to make sure that switching costs, both hard and soft, are kept to an absolute minimum. But much like the inevitable confusion and awkward moments arising out of switching to dollar coins makes the smart decision to switch a bit tougher, we sell software in a space where deviating from the way things have always been done can be so confusing and disruptive, that taking that first step ends up being a real challenge.

But hard change is worth it. (Get it?)

I went to the bank yesterday and picked up a roll of dollar coins, and today I used a couple of them to buy my morning coffee. Yes, they’re probably just going to end up taking them back to the bank tomorrow morning —and they’ll probably do that most days. But one random afternoon, they’re going to be short on dollar bills, and maybe instead of dolling out a boat load of quarters, they’ll opt to give a customer their change in dollar coins. And maybe, just maybe, that customer will wonder the same thing about them that I did.

Or maybe they won’t. But let’s not let doubt get in the way of progress.

Hard change is worth it (Why you should switch to the dollar coin) was originally published in CityGrows on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.