For years I spread an urban legend that the US dollar coin had been unsuccessfully introduced in about 2002. I wasn’t doing this intentionally. A friend of mine told me a story where he had gone to a store in Vermont with new US dollar coins and the clerk had refused to honour honor them. And then I swear – swear – I saw a news story on the Burlington affiliate of one of the major networks that they were discontinued.

Now it turns out that they were never discontinued, at least not in the sense that I thought they were. (So maybe I heard the story but misunderstood – I was in university after all.)

Rather the coins have been minted periodically since the inception of the United States. They stop minting them from time to time when the circulation gets too high and because the coins are so unpopular. Whenever they resume minting, the coins are minted with new images (and sometimes a different metal content) so that they are noticeably different from previous additions. I guess they do this for collectors.

But I didn’t know any of this.

So imagine my surprise when I bought a train ticket in Seattle with a $20 (I had no smaller bills) only to receive 16 US dollar coins in return. I used a few of them in a vending machine at the Seattle-Tacoma Airport but, because I was a zombie, I completely forgot to pay for my breakfast in Minneapolis with them the next morning. After I realized what I had done, I figured I would just take them to my bank (TD).

I did so earlier this week. The teller and an assistant manager both told me that TD doesn’t accept US dollar coins. This blew my mind. They take pennies, nickels, dimes and quarters. And they take all bills. But they don’t take dollar coins. So I wanted a good reason why. But they have one:

US banks do not accept their own dollar coins from foreign financial institutions.

Their own currency. They don’t accept it.