Poka Yoke the Dollar Bill

Last month the Supreme Court ruled U.S. paper money discriminates against the blind.  I don't disagree.

Close your eyes, reach into your wallet and try to distinguish between a $1 bill and a $5 bill. Impossible? It’s also discriminatory, a federal appeals court says. Since all paper money feels pretty much the same, the government is denying blind people meaningful access to the currency, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit ruled Tuesday.

What followed was an out roar on the potential costs associated with changing the currency to avoid such discrimination.

The decision could force the Treasury Department to make bills of different sizes or print them with raised markings or other distinguishing features.     Treasury has previously considered making different sizes of bills but ran into opposition from makers of vending and change machines. Government lawyers raised this issue in court, saying it could cost billions to redesign vending machines.

All very expensive solutions.  A couple years ago I heard of a simple solution, and was reminded of it by a letter in the WSJ yesterday:    

Your "Money is Blind" editorial (May 21) does not mention the least expensive solution to make our bills recognizable by the blind: Cut off the corners - $100 no corners cut off, $50 cut one, $20 cut two, $10 cut three, $5 cut all four.

How simple is that?  I bet the amount of money the government has already spent fighting the other proposed changes would pay for the simple cutting equipment to accomplish this task.  The only modification I'd make is to do the corner-cutting in reverse, so the $1 bill has no corners cut off.  That way the bill with presumably the highest production volume would require the least amount of secondary operations.

Comments

[Peden]

Very clever and low-tech idea there. I think you missed something about the corner-cuttings. Leaving the corners on, on the larger bills protects against cheating the blind. A one dollar bill could be made into a hundred dollar bill just by cutting off the corners - not so with the corners on the larger ones.

[Tommaso Palmitesta]

Your simple solution is of course the best, but your poka-yoke suggestion at the end is not: if the 1 dollar bill keeps all the corners, then anybody can cheat a poor blind - just cut 1 corner and you have a 5, cut 2 corners and you have a 10, 3 corners a 20, 4 corners a 50 ... and what about $100? A good way to get rich by just cutting corners... By the way, in Europe we have different size bills AND vending machines that have no problem accepting them!

[Beth Robinson]

The corners part is a neat idea. One potential reason to cut fewer corners off of higher denominations is so that it is more difficult to cheat a blind person. A disreputable person can't make a five into a fifty, for example.

[Kevin]

And now you know why you need a team of people to make decisions... a manufacturing guy sees it from one perspective...!

[Stan Heard]

Eliminate all bills except the $1 Bill.

[Julio Rodriguez]

With the amount of blind people we actually have (about 0.8% of the population): why would we want to change 100% of the paper money for less than 1% of the population? I would be more cost effective to provide the blind with simple detection/identification devices.

[mike t]

Cutting corners would help the blind when paying but wouldnt prevent anyone from cheating them if they wanted to use an old full sized dollar bill.

[kathleen fasanella]

My first thought was what Peden, Tommaso and Mike said.

Re: Julio's suggestion, legislation and taxpayers are unlikely to address the matter of detection devices. Rather, it would become yet another cost of living assumed disproportionately by the disabled. It costs more to be disabled than able bodied, perhaps more significant when juxtaposed with the fact that 90% of disabled people are poverty level. I'm endlessly annoyed that senior citizens get discounts that we all subsidize yet only 10% of seniors are poor. That's 10% of seniors, not 10% of the total poor. If discounts are based on economic need, it's the disabled who should get discounts.

A part of me wonders what the longer term effect would be of disparately sized bills. Could they become like curb cuts? When curb cuts were proposed, taxpayers bellowed about the costs of implementing them. Since then, people trolleying shopping carts, baby carriages and the like couldn't imagine life without them.

As someone who grew up overseas, the size of US paper money always puzzled me. The US was supposed to be more advanced and progressive...