Big Mac celebrated with MacCoins

MacCoins are coming Thursday.

They are being issued by McDonald’s to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Big Mac.

Hooray.

You can bet I will be at my local McDonald’s to buy a Big Mac and receive my coin.

It looks like I will have to return again and again to collect the whole set.

There will be five designs.

Each of them honors one decade in the 50-year run of this tasty burger.

Most coin collectors are old enough to remember when this enlarged form of hamburger was created.

I certainly remember it.

I have been a fan of McDonalds since I was a kid.

The question is will this promotion appeal to younger generations?

Will many of them discover when they receive and use these MacCoins that they have an interest in coin collecting?

I hope so.

The coin collecting hobby could not ask for a greater promotional gift.

There are millions of customers of the Golden Arches.

This is a 50-country promotion.

If just a few thousand in each country decide to collect MacCoins, the seeds will have been planted to grow numismatics.

The most critical aspect to this promotion is that MacCoins are intended to be used.

They will be redeemable for the rest of 2018.

Technically, this makes them a good-for token.

They have value because they are good for a Big Mac.

They are spendable only with the issuer, which is the historic purpose of a good-for token.

If I seem a little excited, I am.

Who would have thought in the age of Bitcoin that we would see a national chain of restaurants revert to something so familiar to coin collectors as a new promotion?

What better excuse could I have to chow down on Big Macs in the coming days?

Naturally, we collectors will want to know mintages.

We’ll have opinions about designs.

But best of all, we will get to eat while we think.

McDonald’s will also benefit from those of us collecting MacCoins.

They profit if we don’t redeem them and simply collect them.

But to truly make it a complete experience, I will want to redeem at least one MacCoin to say I did it.

So I have marked my calendar to visit McDonald’s on Thursday to start my new set.

Why don’t you head there, too?

Buzz blogger Dave Harper won the Numismatic Literary Guild Award for Best Blog for the third time in 2017 . He is editor of the weekly newspaper "Numismatic News."

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