Spending Sacagawea dollars has become much easier in recent months. I have commented in the past about how I spend many of these at the self-checkouts at grocery and other stores. It's much quicker to insert the coins into a slot than it is trying to get the machine to accept a well-worn $1 bill. Now my grocery store has made it even quicker and easier to use dollar coins than it is to use a credit or debit card.
New self-checkout machines installed at my grocery store have a tray instead of the traditional coin slot. You just take a handful of dollar or other coins and dump them into the tray. The coins funnel down into the machine. It's similar to coin counting machines that tellers use at your local bank. It used to take me months to spend a $250 box of Sacagawea dollars, but now with these new self-checkouts I can go through a box of dollars in just a few weeks.
An added benefit of these new self-checkouts is that my son loves dumping the coins into the tray and watching them "go down the drain." Any unruly behavior at the store is quickly checked by a threat of not letting him put the coins into the tray when we checkout. What more could any parent want out of the new Sacagawea and Presidential dollars?
