Susan B. Anthony Coins as Unpopular as Ever : U.S. Has 500 Million Unwanted Dollars

Susan B. Anthony has earned quite a reputation for herself in the six years since she was introduced into monetary circles. She’s notorious as a dollar coin that consumers don’t want and the Treasury doesn’t know what to do with.

The government minted 800 million Susan B. Anthony coins, about 300 million of which are in general circulation or held by collectors. The rest sit in Federal Reserve Bank and U.S. Mint vaults across the country.

Now the Treasury is trying to decide what to do with George Washington’s unloved cousins.

Suggestions have ranged from coloring the coins, so they won’t be confused with their 25-cent counterparts, to admitting folly and melting the whole mess down.

“Any time a bank wants them, we will send any quantity they want,” said Gordon Gregg, manager of the cash services department of the Federal Reserve Branch Bank in Denver.

But such requests are rare. The Denver Fed sends out about one bag of the coins a week, compared with about 1,000 bags of quarters. Otherwise, the coins sit, neatly stacked to the ceiling in a deep vault under armed guard. “We can’t really melt them down because the seigniorage . . . would cost the government 97 cents on every dollar,” said Michael Brown, special assistant to the director, U.S. Mint in Washington. Seigniorage is the difference between the face value of a coin and its cost to manufacture.

Treasury officials predicted in 1979 that the Susan B. Anthony dollar would save up to $50 million a year by replacing the paper dollar with a coin.

It would cost about a half-cent more than a dollar bill to make, but would last 10 times longer, the experts said, noting that it costs about 2.5 cents to print a dollar bill that has an average life of 18 months.

But the government goofed.

“I think they are too close in size to the quarter and that they don’t seem like a dollar. They are too small,” said Kenn With, general manager of Legacy Investments, an Englewood, Colo., dealer in rare coins and precious metals. “People don’t see them as a dollar. I think a lot of it was strictly psychological.”

He said he recently tried to buy batteries at a local F. W. Woolworth store with Susan B. Anthony dollars. The store, apparently mistaking the coins for Canadian money, wouldn’t take them.

The Treasury still hopes the maligned coin will be popular some day--even if it must be colored blue--meaning Susan B. Anthony isn’t likely to suffer a meltdown.

The coins, made of zinc, nickel and copper, are carried as an asset on Treasury books, but for many consumers and merchants they aren’t carried at all.

“I haven’t seen one in probably two years,” said Jim Wells, store manager of the Woolworth store at Cinderella City in Englewood. “The problem is they are almost the size of a quarter and you don’t want to give out a dollar for a quarter.”