(no subject)

[vyvyanx]

Well, this poll produced some interesting results, I thought. I'd half expected people to be divided into simply "those who pick up everything" and "those who ignore coppers", but it turns out that there are people who distinguish between every adjacent-value pair of UK coins with the exception of 20p and 50p! (I.e. nobody who answered the poll would pick up 50p but not 20p.) I also hadn't expected that anyone would not bother to pick up any coin in the street (perhaps I should have given further options involving £5 and £10 notes, but that might be getting into the territory where people would consider handing it in to a police station).

I suppose this fairly smooth curve ties in with my experience of finding coins in the street anyway - I find pennies frequently (perhaps once or twice a week), 2p pieces much less often, 5p pieces maybe a couple of times a year, and almost never anything larger, suggesting that other people have already found them and picked them up. I guess there will also be issues of how many of each type of coin are typically to be found in people's possession (probably more 1p than 2p pieces, due to shops selling things for £2.99 and similar); people perhaps keeping different types of change in different places (e.g. higher value coins in a purse or wallet, coppers in a more insecure trouser pocket); people bothering to pick up their own 5p or 10p pieces if they drop them, but not picking up other people's...

Comments

[scy11a.livejournal.com]

I feel a psychology thesis proposal in the making : )

[timeplease.livejournal.com]

I find a reasonable number of coins while cleaning the pub. I have to pick them up otherwise they'd make a nasty rattling noise in the vacuum cleaner...

[senji.livejournal.com]

I won't go to any effort to pick up anything smaller than about 10p; but if it's just lying there....

[kaet.livejournal.com]

I don't pick up coins, not because I can't be bothered but because it seems wrong to me, I guess because I haven't earnt it. But I realise that most people don't have feelings like this, and I've observed that it makes them happy, so I think "Ooh, that'll make someone happy", so it's not really a can't be bothered. As a result, if anything if I saw a shiny 1p or 2p distinguished in some way (some exciting limited edition, or something) then I'd be more likely to pick that up than a higher value coin.

[vyvyan.livejournal.com]

Would you pick up your own coins (earned by you) if you dropped them in the street? I've seen people deliberately not pick up coppers they dropped by accident, for instance.

[kaet.livejournal.com]

That's an interesting one. I would down to 50p, certainly. Below that there's a taper. If I just dropped a 1p or a 2p at my feet I'd pick it up because it'd be littering. If it ran away, I'd just shrug. If I sprayed a load of money about when there was a queue (like in a post office) I might just pick up the ones upto 10p, and then leave the rest. That's a combination of the how-much-do-I-want-it boundary in that situation for me is somewhere in the range 2p-20p combined with the size transition from 5p to 10p makes the cost of picking up small coins much higher. For example, a 5p coin which was larger I might pick up, or not pick up a 10p that was smaller.

It's all lots of sliding sclaes, really. I'd be more willing to pick up coins if I thought nobody would pick them up, or if it was likely to get stuck in a machine, or thrown into a bin (probably accidentally). For most of the small coins of mine, often the value of the coin is exceeded by the pleasure I get in thinking someone might get pleasure from randomly finding and picking up the other coins. There's a certain pleasure in the act of accidentally stumbling on something positive, whatever its value, I think.

[kaet.livejournal.com]

Oh, some other things you might find interesting. I only transfer things >10p from jeans to jeans, the others going into a pot, which I occasionally cash at a bank/post-office. This is because I dislike the complication of all the coins. I only think about the silver and gold ones, the bronze ones (and the annoyingly tiny 5p) just accumulate and are the reclaimed and recycled in bulk-steps, :).

Also, when I'm saving for something (meaning putting physical money aside as a means of cutting back on daily spending for some individual item, say a new computer part) I always save all comemorative coins (L2/50p, mainly) (as well as other money). This is because I like comemorative coins, I think they're attractive, and putting them aside on a table seems less annoying than putting aside regular "boring" money because it kind of appeals to the "collector" thing.

[teleute.livejournal.com]

I was once talking to a friend who said that when she was living on the street she used to live off the coins that were dropped. Therefore, now that she has a house and a job she never picks up any coins because someone else might actually need them. Becasue of that I don't ever pick any up either (but I didn't answer your poll because I was late for work)

[gnimmel.livejournal.com]

I once saw two pound coins on the ground in one day (in places several hundred metres apart). I didn't pick either up.