flip of a coin

The US General Accounting Office (GAO) is reversing its course on an initiate to replace the paper fibre dollar bill with dollar coins—a rollout began in 2007 but failed to get traction among the public (over a billion of them are stored in the vaults of the Federal Serve)—after revised studies and projections show the transition will be loss making-rather than cost-saving over the decades. Since the plan was conceived, the life span of a dollar bill has more than doubled due to the pivot away from cash-transactions and physical money circulating less. Vending and other coin-operated concessions were reluctant to retrofit their machines as well—many like parking meters and laundry machines having leap-frogged the issue entirely and allow one to wave one’s gadget over it like a magic wand.