I used to dislike having coins. They’re heavy and loud, and if you constantly have a lot of them on you, you’d need a coin purse to keep them semi-organized.
Every time I get home, I put my coins in a cup because I don’t want them accumulating in my pocket. That is ok because here in the Philippines, coins are essentially useless by now. Nobody bothers with cents anymore, and because of inflation, even the iconic 1-piso coin is well on its way to irrelevance. The latest entry to our coin line up, the P20 coin, can’t even buy an ice cream cone anymore.
To make matters worse, the recent set of coins released by the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas are probably the worst designed ones in the history of mankind, which doesn’t do the Filipino coin any favors, popularity wise. How can you enjoy or prefer using them when you can’t even tell the different denominations apart? Whoever designed and approved that set of coins deserves to go to design and usability hell, forced to count the coins in bad light and with poor eyesight for an eternity.
Another thing about coins is that walking around with those jingly metals in your pocket is not fun, especially if your pants are a little bit big at the waist or baggy. When in a pocket, the weight drags the pants down, and then they either make a noticeable bulge if the pants are fitted, or swing around too much if the trousers are on the baggy side.
However, when it comes to currency, coins aren’t all that bad and do have certain advantages over bills. They are practically indestructible, so they last much longer than bills that crumple, become gross and smelly, and practically disintegrate over time. Coins are also easier to sort and count, which makes automatic payment systems more feasible. Dropping coins into a payment machine is much easier than slipping in a bill that has to be neatly flattened to be acceptable.
It is actually the automatic coin counting payment machine that I encountered in the buses and grocery shops of some parts of Japan that made me reconsider my stand on coins. Most tourists don’t notice these machines, probably because they don’t think of using cash to pay the bus and use a tap or credit card instead. But these automatic payment machines, which accept cards, coins, and bills and even dispenses change, are relatively simple but impressive pieces of technology that can take the place of the Filipino conductor in public transport, and at the same time demonstrate why coins are still a good idea in this age of cashless everything.
The way it works in their bus is that if you want to pay in cash/coins, all you have to do is make sure you have the exact fare. Then you can drop the exact fare in unsorted coins into the coin slot and it will automatically sort and count how much was dropped in. The honesty system is basically in play, and the bus driver merely checks if you put in the right amount (minimum fare is 240 yen) which is displayed on the machine. For those who don’t have the exact change, the same machine can also accept bills and dispense the equivalent in coins.
A variant of the machine is also in grocery stores, where although there is a human to scan the items for those who are not yet comfortable with full-self-checkout, the payment part of the transaction is done via machine. If you don’t want to or can’t pay by card, the machine accepts coins and notes.
After using it a few times and marveling at its speed and accuracy at accepting coins, the realization came to me that coins are the reason why the machines are quick and accurate. Unlike bills that have to be properly flattened to be accepted by the machine, coins are easier to handle, which makes the transactions faster and hassle free. All you have to do is drop them in the slot and the machine sorts and counts almost instantaneously. Maybe that is why they have coins of up to 500 yen (around PHP 200), and their bills start only at JPY 1000 (PHP 400).
The Japanese commitment to coins is different from the way Filipinos have been ignoring and sidelining our coins, which based on their latest iteration, look like they are on their way to becoming totally useless, not just in form, but also in function. Because we don’t have a plan for our coins as they start to lose value and usefulness. However, if you come to think of it, coins can still make sense from a sustainability and efficiency point of view.
Although in our case, it would take a lot of social reengineering to make coins relevant, and at this point, it might make sense for the government to just go for a totally cashless future, instead finding effective ways to make coins useful once more.*
