The (Canadian) Senate finance committee is recommending killing off the penny.
Not many details are given of what would replace it–a system of rounding up or dopwn to the nearest 5c?
I kinda don’t care how the rounding happens. I’m all for getting rid of it!
This is just a test run of Obama’s death panels. Except its pennies and in Canada. But the writing is one the wall people. WAKE UP!
If one-cent coins are ever gotten rid of in the U.S. or Canada, prices won’t need to be rounded up or down at all. Only the sum of a total bill of individual items (a cartload of groceries, for example) would have to be rounded to the nearest $0.05 .
The fact that a cent costs more to produce than it’s worth would be a problem if coins didn’t last for decades. They are reusable.
Australia got rid of its penny years and years ago. More than a decade ago. As california jobcase describes, prices are the same as they ever were. $1.99, $2.79, etc. The total is rounded up or down when you pay. Works brilliantly.
My only objection here is that it’s the Canadians talking about getting rid of pennies. I want them gone from the US as well. Gone! Gone! Gone!
We’re apparently getting polymer banknotes in Canada as well. And I’ve started seeing road trains in Ontario. Maybe we’re getting secretly taken over by Australians?
When South Africa got rid of the 1c and 2c coins, the law required retailers to round strictly down - the final transaction total, that is, not individual item prices. The odd thing is that I can still specify amounts down to a single cent when I do EFTs, and yet all the accounts I get diligently round down to the nearest 5c.
Not when people literally throw them away. Almost no one will bend down to pick up a penny any more, either.
I think they need to go away in the US, too. I’ve got containers all over the house with random pennies in them. Periodically, I gather them together and take them to my credit union - I usually have enough to buy lunch…
I hate them were I work, people don’t want them and keep throwing them back at me or in my register. Then I have to count out at day’s end and my drawer is over and I have to get an override. Errrrrr…
good riddance
A nickel for your thoughts?
I can envision people demanding cashiers ring up a bunch of items separately in an effort to save up to four cents per item.
The problem being, what? If retailers don’t want to sell an object priced at 99 cents at 95 cents, there’s an obvious solution: price it at $1! But the easiest solution is what they have been doing in Australia for 18 years now: round total prices ending in 1, 2, 6 and 7 down, and prices ending in 3, 4, 8 and 9 up.
Oh, please! You say that as if my thoughts were worth a nickel!
That’s true. That would end the long-standing practice of ending every price in 99.
Except when you have a sales tax of 13%. (Like Ontario.)
I’m all for eliminating the penny, and adding the half penny.
How soon might this happen, assuming the senate goes for it?
I love pennies as bringers of luck and their uses in idiomatic phrases, but as currency I’m all in favour of getting rid of them. They can make the nickel copper-coloured if they want to; then it would make sense that it’s bigger than the dime.