Whose boneheaded idea was this?
The U.S. Mint Presidential $1 Program.
The thing that I feel is boneheaded is that these are $1 coins. People in this country HATE $1 coins with a passion, I’ve worked enough retail to know that if you ever gave a customer any $1 coins back in change, they will yell at you, bite your head off, and threaten to kill you.
Somehow, I forget how, I found myself with a gold-colored $1 coin with a picture of James Monroe on it. I put it aside and didn’t think about it for a while, not until I saw a TV ad for this: a Presidential Barack Obama dollar coin. It’s one of those silly *collector* coins that is a real coin, but is painted with the full-color image over the actual coin. I have seen some of these in person, featuring such people such as Dale Earnhart, Elvis, and others. In person, they look very tacky, and you can tell that the image was painted on over a real coin.
I may be an Obama fan, but I will not buy one of those coins. Also, it’s tacky because according the the laws of the U.S., one must be dead before they get to be on money. Postage stamps, too, but now that you can put your own pics on custom stamps, that has sort of changed. So let’s just say that any postage stamp put out by the U.S. Postal Service must not depict any living person.
Anyhoo, I went and looked at my James Monroe dollar, and saw that this Obama thing has the same image on the reverse, of the Statue of Liberty. And it made me wonder…did they just replace the older Sacajawea dollars with James Monroe ones, or is this an ongoing series, like the 50 State Quarters?
I found that it is, indeed, an ongoing series that began in 2007, and they release four dead Presidents on coins per year. You can see the full schedule HERE.
I have been collecting the state quarters since Day One, I have almost all of them, except for several Denver Mint ones that are hard to find around here. I think that only Hawaii is not out yet, at least I don’t have one yet. I’ll get one eventually, though. It is MUCH easier to find quarters in corculation than these dollars, which is why I think it was boneheaded to make these Presidential ones as dollars. As I said, most Americans HATE the dollar coins, and it is nearly impossible to find them anywhere. The U.S. Mint website suggests going to your local bank and asking for them, but I have a feeling that if I tried, I’d be laughed right out of the place.
I want to collect these, though. The best way I found is to buy the uncirculated sets from the Mint, already in nice collectable folders, one year’s worth per folder. You can get sets with just coins from the Philly or Denver Mints for $8.95/set, or sets with both mints for $15.95 per four dead Presidents.
Maybe it’s not so boneheaded after all, from the viewpoint of the Mint. I just plopped down more than face value to buy the 2007 and 2008 sets, from both Mints, and I will likely drop another $15.95 per year until the set is complete.
Now I wish they had a way for me just to buy all of the Denver Mint state quarters that I am missing. The Mint does not sell single coins. There used to be a coin dealer store not far from us, but it went out of business. I guess in order to complete my collection of those, we’ll just have to keep keeping an eye on our pocket change!
