Maybe but how does pricing change?
With no pennies it is not possible to pay $4.99 for a given item using cash.
Not to mention when tax is added.
You either pay $4.95 or $5: the seller changes the prices so there are no $4.99 items or the seller accepts $4.95 and takes a loss of 4 cents [there is also a possibility of rounding to the nearest nickel–but there would be a lot of customer objection to that]. Note there is also the issue of sales tax–this probably needs to be legislatively modified so the increments of tax collected change to a nickel instead of one cent.
I think you are right but I expect merchants to round up. A little more inflation.
That said…pennies really have outlasted their usefulness I think and I won’t be sorry to see them go except for nostalgic reasons.
Okay, I’ve read ahead through the (current) end of the thread, and I’m starting to wonder if my memory is playing tricks on me, because I definitely remember something nobody else has mentioned.
A long time ago, as in multiple decades, maybe 30 or forty or even somewhat longer years ago, there was a period when pennies were in definite shortage, and store owners and such were in fact scrambling to deal with it.
Mostly they did the round/up down thing, but others went creative:
I remember at the local CVS, if your change called for a penny or two, they’d instead give you a single piece of wrapped ‘penny candy,’ Like a butterscotch drop, or most often those red & white ‘star burst’ type peppermints.
The local hardware store kept open big sized packs of gum, you know, like Wrigley’s Spearmint? beside the register, and they’d offer you a foil wrapped slice of gum in that situation.
I remember that Ruth Ann’s, a little stationery store, once telling my mother she could have a few paperclips to cover the difference.
All these were optional, you could be a jerk and insist on getting your penny, but most people either took the candy/gum/whatever or just said ‘keep it.’
I especially remember that the local McDonald’s was offering to BUY pennies from their customers at a raised price. I’m pretty sure they were offering to pay a buck for 90 pennies. I remember this because my brother had this five gallon jar that he’d nearly filled over years, and I spent one evening helping him roll all those thousands of pennies. (Oooh! Profit! Ten cents on the dollar!)
Does no one else remember going through this? Am I from an alternate timeline?
What I don’t remember at all was what CAUSED the shortage. Why weren’t the banks able to get enough coins from the mint? Was there a breakdown, or a shortage of copper, or what? No idea.
After a bit it stopped being a problem. Why? No idea.
It really happened. I remember it too. Without looking it up, 1970s-something.
I think it was when the price of copper spiked. At that time all US pennies were pure copper. Suddenly people everywhere were collecting and melting them by the ton to sell for scrap.
In response the Feds started making the zinc pennies with a thin copper plate that couldn’t practically be melted & separated with home shop tools. Plus the separated material was not worth more then the value of the coins destroyed to obtain it. Those are the kind of pennies we still use now. They cost more than a penny apiece to make, but they have less than a penny’s worth of raw material in them. So no modern incentive to melt them.
The problem went away after about a year when the Feds had converted their manufacturing over to the new kind and had pumped out enough new pennies to again meet the basic demands of retail commerce.
As well, the price of copper was slowly declining, partly due to the influx of former-penny scrap metal. But more due to political stability returning to IIRC Chile where a lot of the world’s copper was then mined.
Nitpick: US pennies were pure copper only from 1793 to 1837. Since then until 1982 they they were various copper alloys (1943 excepted) with nickel, tin, and zinc added, 95% copper except when alloyed with nickel from 1856 to 1864 where it was 88%.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penny_(United_States_coin)#History_of_composition
Thanks for the correction.
If I understand you correctly they were 95% copper until the great debasement after the penny hoarding of the late 1970s/early 1980s.
Thank you! Glad to know I’m not quite that crazy. Yet.
Had another neuron twinge: did the “Hunt Brothers” have something to do with this? Trying to control the market or something?
The Hunt brothers tried to corner the market on silver, not copper. And eventually got screwed for their efforts.
But yes, that market blip had people all over the USA melting down the family sterling. And bags and bags of carefully hoarded silver US coins.
No, no, it’s a great idea. Congress would just screw it up. Any bill would contain bailouts for the zinc industry, somehow manage to create a mathematically impossible rounding system, and basically impose more costs on everyone than any possible savings.
Businesses are already free to set their own cash handling policies. They can just announce that they neither accept nor return pennies, just like they can say they don’t accept bills over $20, or even that they don’t accept cash at all. And we’ve already had coin shortages at times, and somehow society didn’t collapse. They already round to the nearest cent and they can figure out a way to round to a nickel.
No one actually cares about losing a few cents per transaction; it’s all performative. A penny in 1978 is worth a nickel today. Were there hordes of people back then clamoring for a 1/5 cent piece? Did the inherent rounding to 5 cents in 2024 money make a bit of difference to anyone? Did anyone even check if business were rounding to the nearest cent or always rounding down? And that’s not even counting that people made less money then even in inflation-adjusted terms.
Just eliminating the production is an instant savings and imposes no actual costs on anyone. It doesn’t waste legislative time and gives them no opportunity to screw up the process. Business can deal with it whatever way makes the most sense to them. And the problem will be gradual, just making it increasingly difficult to acquire the pennies over time.
Modern (defined as post-1864) ones, yes.
I worked as a barman in a busy London pun back in the 60s.
The bar staff had their own tills and when they were closed at the end of a shift, if the till was down, they had the shortfall deducted from their pay (almost certainly illegal these days).
If they were over that was considered more of a problem as it could indicate that they were stealing. The easy way to take money from the till was to shortchange the customers. Second (and slightly more risky) was to ring up less than the drinks cost, take the full amount, and pocket the difference later. The problem with doing that was that you needed to keep track of how much to take out when you got the chance.
No pub intended?
Yes, let’s make a million business owners deal with this rather than pass one bill through Congress. Make ten million minimum wage cashiers deal with it, and explain their company’s unique take on the issue to 100 million customers a day.
Or, our president could use his political influence to get a clean bill through Congress.
Not to mention that “I don’t want to make pennies” isn’t a long term plan, it’s just what one guy wants to do. Which is fine, until he’s out of office in 4 years and the next guy starts the production back up because people are bitching.
And that one guy will change his mind as soon as some zinc oligarch kisses his…uh, ring.
Yeah. We should all consider every sudden pronouncement of the Traitorous Regime Leader as simply an RFB - a Request For Bribe. It’s the equivalent of the mob tough guy stopping by your retail business and saying “Nice place you got here; shame if something happened to it.”
He’s just trawling for protection money. You wanna be remain a vested interest in the status quo? Pay up.
You don’t get to pretend that a bill has no costs. Every company then has to deal with yet another regulation, and had better abide by it exactly or face a lawsuit. These costs are higher than just being able to pick their own solution (which will, in practice, just be “round to the nearest nickel”) and execute it in some reasonable way.
The customers will not have read the bill and will not understand the rules. The vast majority will not care since pennies are in fact worthless. The small set of people that harass cashiers about their missing pennies will not be dissuaded by a bill they didn’t read. But they will get a free nickel to make them go away.
That is, I suppose, a risk. But again, businesses are not obligated to deal in pennies. 4 years from now, businesses will have set all of their cash registers to do rounding (I expect this is already an option in most cases, especially since military bases have already eliminated the penny), and have closed all their ongoing purchase orders for them, and so on. Even if the Mint starts producing them again, no one will bother buying them, unless there is tremendous customer demand… which I highly doubt.
If you’d read the thread, you’d have seen me and numerous others all talking about actual real world experiences in various developed countries that are not the USA, where these issues have actually been successfully dealt with decades ago.
TL,DR: People get used it quickly and realise that not having to mess around with worthless small change is a good and life-enhancing thing. Eventually even the stupidest people grasp that nobody is stealing anything from them.
Why would people harass cashiers about not receiving coins that are literally not money anymore? That what a bill does that Trump cannot do.
When your local hardware store doesn’t give you 2 cents change that you are owed, because they didn’t start the day with enough pennies (thanks, Trump!), you are genuinely being shorted actual money that could be in your pocket.
When your local hardware store rounds your cash transaction to the nearest twentieth of a dollar, as per law, you’re not being shorted actual money because there is no actual money in existence to give you those 2 cents back. Yes, they could hand you 2 pennies, but you can no longer collect pennies to redeem for actual money, because pennies aren’t actual money anymore.
I think in a previous thread on the subject that the military exchanges overseas don’t deal in pennies. They have the same costs as everyone else to deal with pennies, plus they would need to be shipped in. If it works for the military, why wouldn’t it work for civilian stores in the United States?