A Flip Of the Coin

This is significant. In what few pockets their clothes offer, women hate putting anything. Bulges in jeans? Fuggedaboudit. Women might put a credit card and an ID in a hip pocket, but coins in a coin pocket? It is to laugh. And why should they? When was the last time you used a coin to make a phone call?

So if dollar coins rarely show up as money, what's their point?

They might be seen, by some, as objects of admiration. Only 29 percent of all Americans responding to a recent Coinstar poll loathed them so much as to actively avoid them. Buy lunch at a downtown Cosi's with the coins introduced last month and two cashiers vie for the opportunity to buy them out of the till.

Why?

"I'm going to put them on the mantel," says Michelle Moore.

"I want to leave my kids something," says Nevel Butler.

Really?

It's not until you go over to the RadioShack to buy some batteries that the light finally dawns. Michael Shearill, the sales rep, also quickly retrieves some bills from his wallet to swap the coins out of the register. "I've got a whole bunch of them -- around 20 or 30 dollars' worth," he says. "They just look cool."

What do you do, mount them in an album?

Oh, no, he says. "I have a picture of Halle Berry on my desk" at home, he says. He surrounds it with the sparkly dollar coins. "I just love Halle Berry," he says. " She's money."

In a flash, it all becomes clear.

These coins are not money. They are fetish items.