# American money is stoopid! **URL:** \ **Category:** In My Humble Opinion\ **Created:** [May 7, 2011, 8:52pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/american-money-is-stoopid/581091 "2011-05-07T20:52:56Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 1\ **Showing post:** 6
**Author:** ![Peremensoe](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/ce7236/32.png) [@Peremensoe](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Peremensoe)\ **Post date:** [May 7, 2011, 9:51pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/american-money-is-stoopid/581091/6 "2011-05-07T21:51:08Z")
As to the costs of the currency itself, large-denominated coins beat small-denominated bills. (It costs less to print a dollar bill than to mint a dollar coin, but the coin lasts far longer in circulation while the bill will have to be replaced several times.) Of course large-denominated bills cost no more than small, and circulate less, so no problem there. Small-denominated coins (cents and five-cent pieces) are outright losers, as soon as they’re struck. From previous threads **[What to do with dollar coins](http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=555202)** and **[Are There/Were There Ever Any 3-Tiered Currencies?](http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=586159)** > [@What to do with dollar coins](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-to-do-with-dollar-coins/531852/114): > > We already pay for things rounded to the nearest cent. > > For example, gasoline is priced to the [mill](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mill_%28currency%29) (that’s the extra “9”), but you pay in full cents. Likewise, any percentage, as for taxes or commissions, can easily produce fractions smaller than one cent, but these are rounded with no objection. > … > Actually, what would make the most _sense_ from the internal logic of American currency, would be to drop the cent and five-cent coins, and make the dime the smallest _unit_ (like it says, “ONE DIME”). > [@Are There/Were There Ever Any 3-Tiered Currencies?](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-there-were-there-ever-any-3-tiered-currencies/561228/21): > > …let the dime be our smallest unit. Just drop “cents,” or render them theoretical, like mills. > > …ending minting of the cent but maintaining “nickels” and rounding off all sums to the nearest five cents…leads to to the perception that somebody is being stiffed a little on each transaction, and it just feels conceptually awkward to have a system in which an actual denomination is a multiple of a theoretical unit (imagine if your pocket change all these years had included five-mill coins). Abandoning physical cents entirely (including the five-cent piece), on the other hand, is a recalibration of the scale to a new unit. Pricing in dollars and dimes is no more “rounding” than present pricing in dollars and cents. --- _[View the full topic](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/american-money-is-stoopid/581091)._