Since when is an automated check-out at a grocery store a “vending machine”? :rolleyes:
What an absurd statement. When I take my coins in for re-processing back into folding money, the vast majority of the coins are not-pennies. I wouldn’t bother if they were just pennies; a whole small dish of them might come to something like $5. But the quarters in there, along with the dimes (and too some extent nickels) can often result in $40 - $50 of folding money.
Most people just ignore pennies. They might come along for the ride with the rest of the change, but if isolated, they might as well not even exist.
Buy some 50c penny rolls, roll them up, and deposit them at the bank.
If you find that’s too much hassle, pay a counting machine to do it.
Or just give it to a deserving child who would be thrilled to take it off your hands.
If you find that’s a ripoff and/or too much hassle, please explain why you feel entitled to conduct business in cash and have someone else process your coins for free.
Here in Canada, when the cent was phased out five years ago, people screamed at first that the merchants would just round things up. They didn’t; why anger a customer for at most 2 c? They (and their cash registers) automatically round up or down to the nearest 5c. If they get rid of the nickel, there would be a problem. Up or down? Or at random?
The cash registers still figure out to the penny (on account of sales taxes, which in Quebec are very nearly 15% (IIRC 14.975%) and are calculated to the nearest cent. If you pay by plastic, you pay the odd cents, but if by cash, then you round up or down.
They had (and in the USA still do, except in states without sales tax) the same problem with the penny, though, and nobody noticed. I have no idea whatsoever what happens in my state if my total comes to some exact multiple of a half cent, and I don’t care. And the sales tax has been around since the penny was worth what a dime is today.
One place I worked used to pay me something weird like £5.46.35 per hour (It was a long time ago). This was because they had been giving percentage pay increases over many years without rounding. The payroll computer simply rounded the whole wage up or down as appropriate.
Wasn’t there a film where some guy made a fortune by diverting the odd fractions of a cent on the payroll to his own account?
Missed the edit window: Actually, since the total is still rounded to the nearest cent for non-cash transactions, it’s still a “problem” for them. If someone in Ontario (13%) buys some taxed good priced at 19.50 and pays with a credit card, do they pay $22.03 or $22.04? Nobody cares. (I’m sure there’s an answer in some rule book somewhere, but my point is that basically nobody even knows this is an issue.)
Brown Penny
Wm. Butler Yeats
I whispered, ‘I am too young,’
And then, ‘I am old enough’;
Wherefore I threw a penny
To find out if I might love.
‘Go and love, go and love, young man,
If the lady be young and fair.’
Ah, penny, brown penny, brown penny,
I am looped in the loops of her hair.
O love is the crooked thing,
There is nobody wise enough
To find out all that is in it,
For he would be thinking of love
Till the stars had run away
And the shadows eaten the moon.
Ah, penny, brown penny, brown penny,
One cannot begin it too soon.
If you guys would just start including tax in your prices, you’d end up using a lot less change, period.
Superman 3.
Because that’s the face value of the money. The whole point of a penny is that it is worth exactly 1/100 of a dollar. They don’t decrease in value the more of them you acquire. The entire concept of cash is based on this. Cash can be traded for cash of equal value. Otherwise it’s not money but a good.
When I was a kid, I took my piggy bank money in to the bank all the time. They didn’t charge me a cent to count it. They just took it and poured it all into a machine. I don’t know if I witnessed it or just heard about it, but I know they would even break rolled up coins and throw them into the machine, rather than trust that they were rolled correctly.
These for-profit machines always charge more than any bank would. They lack the concept of being a customer. I fully understand considering charging over 11% to be a ripoff. I remember the reaction I had when I first saw one, going from thinking it was neat to an additional poor tax, since they are the most likely to need to bring in change.
This is called a salami-slicing attack. It’s a real thing, and has also featured in the plots of several films.
So rather than converting your gallon of copper stampings to, say, $45 in spendable money, you’ll sit on it and get $0 worth of value out of it just because the pretty stampings on the copper add up to $50.23. How is $0 actually better than $45?
Don’t forget that the pretty stampings lose value at ~2% per year due to inflation. Sit on them for 5 more years and you’ll have been money ahead to have paid the 10% vig way back in 2017.
Nope. Things would still be priced to come out at $0.99 or $4.99 or whatever but now with the tax included.
If your bank won’t accept consumer volumes of loose coin, count it in their coin machine, and give you full face value in cash or deposit you’re using the wrong bank.
Coinage is increasingly old fashioned, but service-oriented banks (typically smaller ones or credit unions) still handle it gladly. For free.
True, but at least they’ll use fewer nickles and dimes. And maybe, with time, businesses will realize that coins just aren’t worth the hassle - and that there isn’t a person alive who doesn’t read “$4.99” as “$5” - and dispense with that stupid custom.
Yes. It is worth 1/100 of a dollar. Not 1/100 of a dollar, plus a fraction of someone else’s time to help you spend it. Your money, your effort.
You are responsible for choosing to break bills, you are responsible for dealing with the resulting change. As you stated yourself: go to a bank that provides free rolling, or roll it yourself. Otherwise, stop demanding free labor, nobody is required to do free work for you.
Source: Family business is coin-op, I have rolled a shit-ton of coins in my life, I know this labor (or the equipment that provides it) is worth something.
Office Space
Admittedly, it’s been years since I used Coin Star, but don’t they have a no-fee option if you just get an Amazon gift card or something like that? (I mean, I guess it’s useless if you never use Amazon, but that’s not a problem with 95% of the people I know.) Or have they changed their policy?
The machine at my post office doesn’t take cash of any kind. Cards only. Besides, you can buy stamps at most supermarkets and drug stores. The only reason I wind up at the post office is a bit of personal eccentricity - I don’t like leaving outgoing mail to be picked up by the mail carrier. No rational reason. When I was working in an office environment, I just bunged it into the company’s outgoing mail. When corner post office boxes existed, I bunged it into those. Now I drive around the post office to put it in their drive up boxes. When I’m going to do that is usually when I realize I’m out of stamps. Not that I send much mail these days either. It wouldn’t get rid of pennies very fast if the machine did take them.
I thought that was the point of the OP, that there is no need to actively abolish the use of pennies, just stop making new ones and the problem will sort itself out in time.
Wouldn’t the shortages lead to problems - store doesn’t have enough pennies to give correct change as legally obligated to do. Customer complains and causes a scene if they don’t have change. If stores face enough hardship this or lose enough business, I wonder if they could sue the government…no idea.
Get rid of the penny. Include the sales tax in the price which is rounded to a nickel. End of problem. There’s no need to keep track of tax and sale price separately.
Pennies are as close to worthless as necessary to throw them out. And even if you collect up 100 of them that’s only worth $1 which is pretty close to worthless also.