Considering there's $1 billion unused coins out there, getting them is harder than you'd think

This all started with NPR. Of course.

On June 28, 2011, the Planet Money team ran a story called $1 Billion That Nobody Wants, revealing that there is a billion dollars in unused dollar coins just sitting around in Fed vaults. And because their production is mandated by law, the government has to keep cranking the coins out until 2016.

The story included the photo above, from the Fed branch in Baltimore. Whoa, right? Just look at those things.

A relative of Jen's gave us each one of these coins as a novelty gift, and that's pretty much how we'd experienced them since their production in 2007: not as real money, but rather as a weird token that everyone tentatively agreed to treat like real money. It was like spending Canadian money in America: you slip one coin in among a pile of legal tender, and hope the cashier doesn't notice.

So when we read the NPR story, we thought: Well, what would happen if we started using these things like real money? And so we set a goal: We'd acquire one of the giant Fed bags of coins photographed in the NPR story, and make all our purchases with them unti we ran out.

But getting the coins wasn't easy.

We emailed the Fed, expecting them to happily oblige. Instead, perhaps desperate for some web traffic, they replied with a link to this page of their site. It explained:

To obtain a specific note or coin, we recommend you contact the institution you bank with to see if it will honor your request. Federal Reserve Banks provide currency only to depository institutions, which then distribute it to members of the public.

Ok, cool. That's easy, we thought. We contacted Bank of America, where Jason has an account. They wrote back:

The article features loose bagged dollar coins on Federal Reserve Bank shelves, not consumer bank shelves. Our banking centers may have dollar coins available in smaller amounts or in $25 rolls (if not, they can be ordered), but not in bags.

So, we had to revise our plan: Instead of a bag, we'd just get $500 in coins and put them in our own damn bag. And so, we embarked upon a banking adventure.

Bank of America. On Saturday, July 16, we marched down to the Bank of America in Brooklyn Heights, where we live. It was closed. Honestly, BoA: The rest of America does things on Saturday. Join us.

Next: TD BankNorth. The place looked like a hotel lobby—"the bank for kings," Jen declared breathlessly, because clearly she hasn't walked into many banks. But because we don't have accounts there, they couldn't go into their vault and get coins for us.

You don't have coins outside the vault? we asked.

"That wouldn't be useful," the teller told us.

Oh.

Next: Sovereign. They only exchange $40 for non-account-holders. We said, "Then we'd like $40 in dollar coins." Turns out they didn't even have that; they only had $26. We took it. Finally: coins!

Next: Chase Bank. They had $78 in coins. We high-fived and took them.

We'd buy more coins eventually, but all this work made us hungry. Next up: Brunch.