Or just stop printing money for a while to allow the currency to deflate. Of course, this will never happen as long as the government is in debt; inflation is generally beneficial to borrowers.
If you think four variants of each coin is too much, be glad you don’t live in the Eurozone. 
One more reason I’m guessing holders and users of sterling are feeling a wee bit smug these days . . . 
Not by much. The design of the pound coin changes every year and commemorative 50p coins come out every so often. The situation with sterling banknotes is worse than euro notes: eight different banks issue sterling banknotes, each with their own distinctive designs: the Bank of England, the Bank of Scotland, the Bank of Ireland, the Royal Bank of Scotland, Clydesdale Bank, Ulster Bank, the Northern Bank, and First Trust Bank. It’s so complicated that many people and businesses will refuse to accept notes that they aren’t familiar with, even though they’re perfectly valid for payment.
Huh, I guess I understand now why Hong Kong (pre 1997) had a couple of different banks issuing HK paper currency, each (as you mention) having their own designs as well. I thought it was odd at the time.
The retailer can simply display the price with the sales tax already included. They know what the sales tax is there. We’d have to get rid of the ‘x.99’ prices, but 95 works just as well.
Example. You buy shirt for $12.99 at a store, in an area with a 6% sales tax. Sales tax is 77.94 cents. Round to the penny, meaning 78 cents.
Total price, $13.77
Instead, the store could just put $13.75 on the label, and thats just the price. Of course, you’d have to convince them to put a higher label price on everything, which I imagine they would be hesitant to do, even if the actual price did not change.
Alternatively, We could just round tax to 5, and require all sales to be rounded to 5 as well.
Shirt is $12.95
Tax is 77.7 cents, rounded to 80.
Total price is $13.75
the difference would be less than 3 cents for any purchase, and you’d never have a pocketful of pennies.
I’ve noticed several businesses in the area forgo pennies entirely. They just round change up(if you were getting back $1.24, you get a dollar and a quarter back). They stop having to stock pennies, and count them out. It likely even saves them money… Considering the value, its barely worth the clerks time to even count them. When a business decides its worth more to not even use correct change and give customers back more, its probably time to get rid of the thing. However, I feel it will fall much further in disuse before the government actually makes it official.
Also, its not as if its never happened before. We haven’t had a half penny since 1857. Also note that it was worth about 10 cents of todays money when it was discontinued, meaning the lowest value coinage they had thereafter was approximately a quarter, that slowly inflated to the pitiful thing today that most people won’t even bother to stoop to get up. I personally pick the pennies out of my change occasionally and simply set them somewhere where someone else can pick them up(can’t quite bring myself to simply throw it away like trash most times).
Personally, I always liked the wheat penny.
I sometimes have a bit of trouble passing off Northern Irish bank notes as real when I visit England. I explained to somebody in a shop before that if I were making a counterfeit I’d actually attempt to make it look the same.
Coin collector here.
It always makes me laugh when non-collectors discuss coins. They just don’t get the jist of it at all…
I’m just glad that they’re picking one back and sticking to it. I’n so tired of all of these commemerative coins.
I was once on a flight to Europe (Icelandic Air) and wanted to pay for my beer - they were cheap back then, only $1.00. I happened to have ten dimes on me and paid.
A few minutes later, the flight attendant came back with the dimes and said, “I’m sorry, we can’t take these.”
“Why?”
“Well, it doesn’t say how much they are worth on the coin and we don’t know American currency that well.”
Sure enough - I had never noticed, but the dime is the ONE American coin that does NOT say how many cents it is worth! Just “one dime” - and unless you happen to know that a dime = 10 cents, well…
Decent design, but I wish they would use numbers instead of words for the values; “1 CENT” instead of “ONE CENT”. Same thing with other US coinage; “10 CENTS” instead of “ONE DIME”, “25 CENTS” instead of “QUARTER DOLLAR”, and so on.
Once I tried to pay at a fast food restaurant in the United States with a dollar coin (the kind they give you in change in the post office stamp machines), and was refused because they didn’t believe it was legal tender! (And no, the people serving me did not have accents.)
Also - I’ve always heard that for visitors from other countries, what is most confusing about our currency is our paper money … all one color and all the same size. Maybe it’s better now with the new designs.
i think that they should pick one person per type of money. lincoln has 2 types; 5 dollar bill and penny. he should only be on one and give someone else a chance.
also the penny should go to either franklin or jefferson, then give someone else the 100 dollar or 2 dollar bill.
Let’s see — a Latin motto and a caption on a scroll. That’s modern?
Change is good; it’s just that folding money is better. 
I don’t care for it; looks rather dry and spartan. I do like the 2009 issue with a standing figure of Lincoln. Also the nickel with Lewis and Clark’s boat on the back is extremely cool.
Enjoy it while you can. I doubt new pennies will be minted in a few years. The copper in them has been worth more than a penny for some time, and getting more costly.
Really, you’re going with that? You think that getting rid of a coin that is now worth 1/250th of the value it had when the half-cent coin was eliminated is a bad idea worth a head smack? You do realize that we round off prices to the penny now. Maybe we should have 1/3 cent coin for when you buy only one piece of gum that is priced a 3 for a dollar.
There is a little misinformation is this thread. Here are a few facts:
- In most places it is not legal to post prices with sales tax included.
- Other countries usually have a VAT (value added tax) which is included in the price. It has nothing to do with unified rates, just a different method of calculating tax and displaying price.
- Pre-printed prices are disappearing from most manufacturer packaging, and when they are there they are often undercut by the store.
- Rounding to the the nearest penny is already done now, and doing it to the nearest nickel is just as feasible.
Sometimes I don’t see how America can make any progress at all when a concept as simple as rounding to the nearest $0.05 is hard for some folks to fathom