(MONEY Magazine) – You're strolling down the street when something shiny on the sidewalk catches your eye. It's a Susan B. Anthony $1 coin. Do you a) scoop it up? or b) leave it for someone who needs it more (or is less shy about picking up change)? If you're like a lot of Americans, you'll just keep walking. Indeed, more people seem willing to stoop and scoop a quarter than one of the ever-unpopular dollar coins.

That was one finding from a little experiment we conducted recently. Money left coins on heavily trafficked sidewalks of six U.S. cities and recorded how long it took for pedestrians to claim them. Our reporters put the coins out one at a time--penny, nickel, dime, quarter and Susan B. Anthony dollar--and repeated the process up to 10 times for each coin.

We knew, of course, that Susan B.s were a hard sell. People who get one in change usually try to foist it on the next cashier they encounter. But hard sell is one thing, hard giveaway another. Yet in all but two of the cities in our test--Denver and St. Louis--quarters disappeared more quickly than dollars.

That the Susan B. is confusingly close to a quarter in size has been considered one of its drawbacks since the ill-fated coin's debut in July 1979. (Because of the lack of demand, the government stopped making them in 1981.) Says Mike White, a spokesman at the U.S. Mint: "The American public simply does not want a dollar coin." That may help explain why the Treasury has some 198 million Susan B.s in storage--and why many pedestrians seem unfamiliar with them.

Among our other findings: The nickels went faster than the dimes on average, probably because nickels are easier to spot. And few pedestrians would pocket a penny, lucky or not. For our national averages on all coins, see the table above. Meanwhile, some city-by-city reports:

--Boston. Stunned at how hard it was to get people to pick up pennies on the bustling Freedom Trail during daylight hours, our reporter decided to leave 10 of the copper coins scattered around well-traveled Copley Square overnight. When he returned next morning to check, seven were still there.

--Denver. Though half of the 13.2 billion pennies the U.S. churns out annually come from the Denver Mint, the coin is hardly a local favorite--at least not in downtown's Larimer Square. One Denverite our reporter pegged for about five years old sauntered up to a shiny new penny, decided it wasn't worth picking up and ambled away.

--Houston. The cliche has it that Texans like things big, but they preferred even the tiny dime to dear ol' Susan B. Dimes disappeared in an average of 15 minutes, while dollars lingered for 20.

--St. Louis. Quickest to scoop up loose change of any denomination in Clayton, a busy suburban business district, were people wearing the spiffiest clothes.

--Santa Monica, Calif. The Third Street Promenade, a popular walkway near the Pacific, is the kind of anything-goes place where spreading loose change on the ground is not considered odd behavior. Our favorite passer-by: a woman who picked up our dollar, studied it for a long moment and put it back on the sidewalk.

--Seattle. Seattle's citizens, we learned, harbor no prejudices against dollar coins: In Pike Place Market, people scooped them up in one minute, 45 seconds on average, the swiftest of any city in our test. Note to the U.S. Treasury: You know all those Susan B.s you have in storage? Seattle just might be interested.

--Brian L. Clark

Reporter associates: Paul Katzeff (Boston), Steve Marsh (Denver), Gary Taylor (Houston), Carol Shepley (St. Louis), Allison Holmes (Santa Monica), Melanie Mavrides (Seattle)