I read recently that a significant number of pennies are not spent. A typical
consumer, when they get pennies in change will throw them into a jar or will
sometimes throw them in the trash when they get home. The significant number
of these coins are not spent and put back into circulation.
As for myself, I will sometime take four pennies when I go to the grocery store. If
the total amount of my purchase is is $17.78 I will give the cashier a twenty dollar
bill and three pennies. The change will come to a pair of one dollar bills and a quarter
with no pennies coming back to me.
To my fellow Americans I would like to ask: do you still you still use pennies?
I save them in a jar. I have a tootsie roll piggy bank in my car, too.
Once in a blue moon, I get the grandkids to roll them up. They get the money when cashed in.
The math is fine but who uses cash at the grocery store any more, or suffers the cashier who has to work out arithmetic on your change after bagging your purchase of Whether’s and Jim Beam?
Except for tips I don’t use cash, much less pennies. And restaurant tips go on the card too; it’s just the other personal service items like valets or bellmen where there is no card transaction who get cash. Oh, yeah, and Powerball tickets that can only be bought with cash in my state.
The idea that pennies are mostly disappearing into jars at home everywhere is silly. Yes, lots of people have a big jar of pennies. But those filled up 30 50 years ago. Unless people are forever continuing to get more jars and fill them too, there’s a constant-sized pile of pennies sitting in jars around the USA. Sometimes jars get emptied into Coinstar machines or taken to the bank, then slowly refilled. But the overall size of the home penny jar horde must be substantially constant over the years.
So the idea there’s an ever-growing pile of hoarded pennies makes no sense.
Now do some folks throw them away? Sure. They also get lost. I notice change on the ground now and then and it seems pennies are more likely to be seen than quarters. If we assume they are accidentally dropped, not discarded, you’d expect the mix of change falling on the ground to be about even. Suggesting folks notice fallen quarters more often than fallen pennies and also bend over to pick up fallen quarters more often than fallen pennies.
Yep, I’ve been known to use pennies when paying with cash… which is less and less as time goes by.
Also use pennies since I’m a cashier at work. Don’t mind folks telling me to keep the pennies, I just use them for folks who come up short or round up the change I’m giving to someone who doesn’t want them.
I’d be OK with the elimination of the penny. Oh, there’d be an emotional twinge, losing something that’s been around all my life, but there are solid reasons to eliminate them these days.
The last time the USA eliminated a coin, its value had sunk to about the equivalent of $1.50 today.
So a comparable move today would be to eliminate all US coinage and price everything in round dollars. That is how far behind sensibly-valued coinage we are today. If any coins still existed, we ought to be discussing now eliminating quarters, while dimes, nickels and pennies are so long gone that most living people have never seen one in the wild.
As someone on the retail end of things, yes people use pennies. Not a lot, we don’t usually take in a lot of cash, but I do still have to have penny rolls on hand in our change float.
If I get a penny or three in change the odd time I use cash, I just drop them in the nearest “take-a-penny-leave-a-penny” dish beside a register. But, I do examine them in case they are very old, and once in a blue moon I’ll find a wheatie.
If I have pennies in my wallet, I try to use them in the way the OP does. If it ends up in my pocket, there’s a good chance it’s just going in the trash. Hell, I’ve thrown away nickels and dimes, too when I can’t be arsed to go upstairs to the change jar. I pretty much only keep quarters consistently.
To be fair, over the last few years I rarely use cash, so that change jar needs a long time to cash out. I feel at this point it’s been at least seven years since I cashed it out, and I maybe have ten or twenty bucks in it.
I’ve used pennies at the McDrivethru to pay with exact change on occasion. But mostly, our change goes in a mug on the dresser or a bowl in the kitchen or in the little tray in the car, and periodically, I go to the credit union and run it all thru their machine, then deposit the amount in savings. And I’ll pick up a penny off the ground provided my hands aren’t full.
I’ve never deliberately thrown money away and can’t imagine doing that. Maybe it’s a carryover from my youth when a penny was actually worth something.
My rule of thumb is, if a purchase is $30 or less, I pay cash. More than that I’ll use debit or credit. So I do carry change when I go out: 2 quarters, 2 dimes, 1 nickel, and 4 pennies. If the bill total fits, I’ll use some or all of the change. What annoys me is if I go out with no change in my pocket, the bill always comes to something like $15.06, and I end up with more change, because I’m not going to debit $15.06!
I don’t make a big deal out of counting change, though. I just have it ready if I need it and can count it out in 5 or 10 seconds. It always bugs me to be behind a old lady in the grocery store who feels it necessary to root through a change purse and count out 99 cents in coin to hand to the cashier.
I used to be very “clean” with my cash purchases, and try to hold as few coins as possible, and pay with exact change when I could. I would hoard quarters in a small plastic cup so that I could use it to park (feed meters) and sometimes buy a burger if I’m starved and ran out of cash. It was a point of pride that I (weirdly) spent mental energy trying to do this and pulled it off for decades.
During Covid, I switched to cashless. I now make 99% of my purchases using a debit card. The radio-based chip scanning is super fast and convenient, and is installed almost everywhere I go. Last spring, on vacation in Canada, it was used just as often as it is around my home town and campus in USA. For small enough purchases, like $20 or less, they don’t even need me to enter my PIN or sign anything.
It’s just a no-brainer to stop using cash now. The only time I wish I had some is when I want to tip a worker, like the washing machine delivery guys. Then, I suddenly remember, argh, “oops, no cash. Sorry!” (I’ve not yet started to use any cash apps but I know they exist.)
I very rarely pay for anything with cash these days and even more rarely deal with loose change. I do have a jar of coins but it’s forever old and I can’t remember the last time I put anything into it that I got from outside the house and not coins found in a drawer or cushions. I doubt I’ve actually handed someone a penny in the past eight years.
I rarely ever use cash anymore, it doesn’t matter what the total is. Paying by credit or cash costs me the same amount and credit is easier. Other than a few select places that are cash only below certain amounts, I just use tap to pay. Coins end up living in my pockets for a while until they go into a jar.
No. Pennies. Anything less than a quarter goes in the “Leave a penny, take a penny cup”. If there isn’t one I may just leave the loose change on the counter or refuse to take it. It will just disappear if I keep it. I already have bags, boxes, and jars of coins at home that will never be used, on top of the ones in the couch cushions and under the seat of my car.
I’m confused. What coin are you referring to? The three-cent coin eliminated in 1889? Or the Susan B. Anthony dollar discontinued in 1999? In either case, lower-value coins continued to be minted and circulated, so eliminating those coins was not comparable to eliminating all coins today, was it?
To be clear, I’m all for eliminating the penny, because it is essentially useless, and perhaps even everything smaller than the quarter, for fiscal reasons, and because the objections to eliminating them are illogical. But I’m trying to understand the point you’re making.