In today’s New York Times, William Safire writes a column outlining good reasons to abolish the penny. His arguments basically come down to the fact that given their value, the hassle of dealing with pennies, personally and for retailers, makes them not worth it.
Personally, I throw them out.
If there is a penny jar next to a cash register, I always put them in it. When I clean out my car, the pennies go right into the trash along with whatever trash I find in the car. If I get home from somewhere and fish my keys and change out of my pocket, I’ll throw the pennies in the trash.
Dump 'em. Other countries have gotten rid of them and their economies have not gone down in flames. Of course, we still have a nation of people who are not good at math (see: lotteries) who will have to have it explained to them very carefully that in the long run they’re not going to get completely ripped off every time their purchase comes out to an odd amount.
I don’t throw them out, they go in my change jar, but I wouldn’t miss them much if they went away. It’s not like I save enough pennies to be worth much actual money. I’d probably keep a few just for the heck of it, though.
Pennies do seem to be more work than their worth don’t they? I wouldn’t mind getting rid of them.I used to able to give them to my youngest child but he doesn’t even want to fool with them anymore. I don’t throw them away to often either but so they gather in a little dish on the dresser.
Things at the store still have a price of, oh say, $2.99. When you go to check out it’s rounded to the nearest nickle. Also the $2.99 in Australia would include all taxes.
Such is my memory of three weeks there a few years ago.
Well, this is a cite of a cite-less article bu I hop e Safire didn’t make this claim groundlessly. . .
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Why is the U.S. among the last of the industrialized nations to abolish the peskiest little bits of coinage? At the G-8 summit next week, the Brits and the French — even the French! — who dumped their low-denomination coins 30 years ago, will be laughing at our senseless jingling. **
Silenus – have fun storing, counting, and rolling 1000 pennies for your $10 that they’re worth. Don’t tell me its a lazy man’s excuse.
There is some coin that you would have to agree isn’t worth the trouble of carrying around (say 10000 geegaws made $1).
Well, most of us under the age of 75 have reached that point with the penny.
From Safire’s article. . .
**There is no escaping economic history: it takes nearly a dime today to buy what a penny bought back in 1950. Despite this, the U.S. Mint keeps churning out a billion pennies a month.
Where do they go? Two-thirds of them immediately drop out of circulation, into piggy banks or — as The Times’s John Tierney noted five years ago — behind chair cushions or at the back of sock drawers next to your old tin-foil ball. Quarters and dimes circulate; pennies disappear because they are literally more trouble than they are worth.
The remaining 300 million or so — that’s 10 million shiny new useless items punched out every day by government workers who could be more usefully employed tracking counterfeiters — go toward driving retailers crazy. They cost more in employee-hours — to wait for buyers to fish them out, then to count, pack up and take them to the bank — than it would cost to toss them out. That’s why you see “penny cups” next to every cash register; they save the seller time and the buyer the inconvenience of lugging around loose change that tears holes in pockets and now sets off alarms at every frisking-place.
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Bread definitely doesn’t cost 12,000 geegaws in Australia, and the elimination of the smallest coins (we had both a 1c and a 2c coin) was the best thing that ever happened to money-handling in that country.
Furthermore, you don’t get ripped of, because the law requires that all rounding off be done to the nearest 5c, whether up or down. So, if you get to the checkout at the grocery store and your total is $58.72, it gets rounded down to $58.70; if your total is $58.73, it gets rounded up to $58.75.
Not long after this system was introduced, i actually did a little experiment. Every time i went to the store, i noted whether my total was rounded down or up. Over the course of 100 transactions, the balance was 53:47, and i came out 5c ahead. Over an even longer period, probability suggests that it should end up even.
You know what else eliminating the US penny would do? It would free up a space in the till for a one dollar coin.
How are pennies more work than they are worth?
Years ago we started saving our change, we put it in a big bank. After 5- 6 years we took it into a bank and cashed it in. The change, mostly pennies netted my kids around $500 bucks to spend at Disney World when we went on vacation. We never missed our pennies, but over time they added up.
The Netherlands. Before the Euro, we had the guilder (aso called the florin), and the smallest coin was a five cent coin.
Gettin rid of the dollar bill and replacing it with a dollar coin probably wouldn’t be a bad idea either. The Euro has a one and two euro coin. The smallest bill is for five Euros. The guilder also had a one and two-and-a-half guilder coin. Then again, the guilder was pretty strange.
Here is the “old” guilder coinage with the respective names:
It’s about time we got rid of such idiotic, practically worthless denomination of currency. I always end up stuck behind someone who’s fumbling around looking for one for when his bill comes out to be $5.01.
The smallest denomination coin up until 1857, whereupon it was discontinued, was the half-cent coin. At that time it would have had the purchasing power equivalent to a dime today. And yet somehow we managed to survive the loss of such a valuable unit of currency.
Personally, I think we should discontinue pennies, nickels, and dimes and just round everything to the nearest quarter.
Who the hell rolls coins anymore? Even my little independent bank here in Bumfuck, Wisconsin, has a coin-counting machine. I take my jar, they dump it in, machine sorts it and counts it up, I get bills.
Ain’t you big-city folk got none o’them newfangled things?
I haven’t seen 'em in my bank, but knowing they’re out there I’ll sure keep an eye open for them!
The closest I’ve seen is a Coinstar machine at the local grocery store. You dump in your change, it prints out a receipt, and you take it to a cashier to get your bills… after the machine takes a small percentage cut of what you dump in, of course. I usually roll the quarters myself, but the convenience of not having to roll pennies, nickels and dimes is worth the penalty to me.
Personally, I wouldn’t mind seeing the penny go away. Lincoln deserves a better home, anyway.
I actually use those Coinstar machines to donate my pennies and nickels to charity. You can dump in whatever change you want and select one of three or four charities; they give the whole amount of your donation, without taking their usual 8% cut. I think in the year since I started doing this, I’ve given less than $4 (total) - the pennies are taking up space in my coin purse, but I never have enough of them to be worth that much.
