I was thinking about this today, instead of the USA (or any country) eliminating the penny due to costs associated with it. Why don’t they just scale production down drastically?
I pulled 10 pennies out of my pocket, the production years were:
1967
1995
1981
1995
2016
2003
1977
2005
1984
1999
My pocket is hardly a fair snapshot of the entire penny stockpile, but I think you guys catch my drift.
There are billions of pennies, some from
severAl decades ago still being used daily. Why is the US still pumping out billions more every year? Is there some sort of legislation forcing this?
The problem is that so many people wind up with huge stockpiles of pennies. I have a gallon of the damn things, and I can’t figure out how to get rid of them. No vending machines take them, I don’t want to be the person holding up the line at the store trying to get rid of them and the commercial coin processing machines are a rip-off. It would seem to be cheaper to have subsidized coin processing machines at every store that would give full value back in bills or debit cards than keep making pennies.
A huge number of pennies go out of circulation each year, so the new pennies are needed to meet the demand from banks. Pretty much every penny enters circulation as change given by a retailer, but a lot of those pennies either never get used again or only get used again after a long delay. Scaling down production of pennies would have the same effect as abolishing them, because the banks’ supplies would dry up fairly soon.
It’s not that much of a hassle to roll up fifty pennies at a time and take the rolls to the bank. I used to do this with my son’s piggy bank, which also included nickels, dimes, and quarters. Eventually there was enough accumulated loot in his kid’s account to buy a few shares in his favorite gaming company on the NASDAQ, and some years later it was all worth real money.
Because of heavy lobbying of Congress by zinc producers (pennies are 97.5% zinc) and companies like the one which makes CoinStar machines (which count all those unwanted pennies out there, for a fee…)
You know what I do when I find pennies in trade-ins at work? I suck them up with the shop vac.
Pennies are a tool for a bygone era. I think they see continued production and distribution due to decades of momentum. Of course one must also factor in the laziness and/or reluctance of the retail world to round up our down to the nearest nickel.
I do not understand why pennies are so hard for some people. If you manage your change correctly you will never have more than four pennies in your possession, and never more than seven coins total. And if you just take the minimal effort to get your change in your hand as you get in line, it adds precisely zero time to your transaction.
There is absolutely no reason to let them pile up unless you just want to stockpile them.
Because the automated check-outs where I work happily take pennies. There is a coin machine just as you describe next to the customer service desk. My bank has a coin sorting machine that performs a similar function, allowing you to redeem the chit for cash in a larger denomination or deposit it in your account.
They’re probably coming out of American stockpiles. Canada last minted pennies in 2012 and stopped distributing them in 2013, so they aren’t coming across the border any more.
Actually, just one zinc producer. The amount of zinc made into pennies is a rather small fraction of the total zinc production. But one company (whose name I’ve forgotten off hand) has the contract to sell zinc to the US Mint. They also fund an astroroots lobbying campaign called Americans for Common Cents.
CoinStar itself is a big on lobbying for the penny. Without it, they’d be out of business in no time.
That’s far more mental effort than most people want to expend.
Same problem here in the UK. We still have 1p and 2p coins (1p is worth a little over a cent). In a discussion recently, a small, unrepresentative group of us were unanimous that if we dropped any copper coin on the ground, we wouldn’t bother to pick it up. As it happens, cash money is on the way out here for most legitimate transactions.