# Ottawa plans to kill the penny **URL:** \ **Category:** Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share\ **Created:** [March 29, 2012, 10:58pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ottawa-plans-to-kill-the-penny/617212 "2012-03-29T22:58:44Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 8\ **Page:** 7
**Author:** ![Lord\_Feldon](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/lord_feldon/32/341_2.png) [@Lord\_Feldon](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Lord_Feldon)\ **Post date:** [February 7, 2013, 11:08am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ottawa-plans-to-kill-the-penny/617212/122 "2013-02-07T11:08:31Z")
> [@Spectre\_of\_Pithecanthropus](#): > > You don’t waste the people’s money looking for a still cheaper alloy so you can keep pumping the worthless things out. IIRC, the US mint has said it would cost them more than one cent to make _any_ penny at this point. ---
**Author:** ![Leaffan](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/leaffan/32/299_2.png) [@Leaffan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Leaffan)\ **Post date:** [February 7, 2013, 1:01pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ottawa-plans-to-kill-the-penny/617212/123 "2013-02-07T13:01:19Z")
I paid cash at a self-checkout in Loblaw’s last night. They had a sign saying that the machines would continue to take and dispense pennies. I guess the software can’t deal with rounding yet. ---
**Author:** ![Muffin](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/muffin/32/4341_2.png) [@Muffin](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Muffin)\ **Post date:** [February 7, 2013, 1:34pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ottawa-plans-to-kill-the-penny/617212/124 "2013-02-07T13:34:02Z")
Poor Penny felt ground down by rejection. ---
**Author:** ![Muffin](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/muffin/32/4341_2.png) [@Muffin](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Muffin)\ **Post date:** [February 7, 2013, 5:39pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ottawa-plans-to-kill-the-penny/617212/125 "2013-02-07T17:39:30Z")
Fees: $354.00 HST@13%: 46.02 Total owed: $400.02 Paid cash: 400.00 Unless electing to not include work in progress, then write off the two cents as a bad debt and claim 13% of that two cents as an input tax credit. By god I should have been an accountant! (Well, maybe not.) ---
**Author:** ![Nanoda](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/n/ce73a5/32.png) [@Nanoda](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Nanoda)\ **Post date:** [February 10, 2013, 7:03am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ottawa-plans-to-kill-the-penny/617212/126 "2013-02-10T07:03:00Z")
I got a price adjustment last week on some electronics hardware I’d bought that turned out later to be open-box. The staff noted that the discount amount got “adjusted” due to penny-rounding to… $1.58. 😕 Apparently their system is rounding prices, _then_ applying GST. :rolleyes: Not that VISA cared one way or another, of course. I work for a small software company that’s made a few custom products that take payment, calculate various taxes, etc. It’s a _lot_ of work to do this properly - sometimes I wonder why we bother. 😛 ---
**Author:** ![Leaffan](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/leaffan/32/299_2.png) [@Leaffan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Leaffan)\ **Post date:** [February 10, 2013, 9:35am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ottawa-plans-to-kill-the-penny/617212/127 "2013-02-10T09:35:39Z")
Credit and debit payments aren’t rounded; they’ll still be calculated to the correct cent, since it’s just an electronic transfer anyway. ---
**Author:** ![Dr.Drake](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/ad7895/32.png) [@Dr.Drake](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dr.Drake)\ **Post date:** [February 10, 2013, 5:38pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ottawa-plans-to-kill-the-penny/617212/128 "2013-02-10T17:38:04Z")
I failed my post-penny life skills exercise the other day. I bought a stamp: “That’s 71¢, but you can give me 70.” I didn’t have exact change, so I gave him a loonie. . . and a penny. I’m so used to minimizing the change in my wallet that it didn’t occur to me what I was doing. (I’ve also picked up several “lucky” pennies, and 7-11s are still giving them in change, so they’re still circulating in my world.) I imagine my next trip to the States is going to feel even weirder, with their archaic one-cent coins and archaic one-dollar bills. When I was growing up, both the US and Canada has one-dollar bills, but now it just seems so old-fashioned. ---
**Author:** ![Spectre\_of\_Pithecanthropus](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/spectre_of_pithecanthropus/32/12343_2.png) [@Spectre\_of\_Pithecanthropus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Spectre_of_Pithecanthropus)\ **Post date:** [February 11, 2013, 12:12am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ottawa-plans-to-kill-the-penny/617212/129 "2013-02-11T00:12:55Z")
> [@Dr.Drake](#): > > I imagine my next trip to the States is going to feel even weirder, with their archaic one-cent coins and archaic one-dollar bills. When I was growing up, both the US and Canada has one-dollar bills, but now it just seems so old-fashioned. I don’t think it’ll seem much weirder than it has in the past. All coined money in this country has already been pretty much demonetized on a de facto basis in that it’s almost impossible to use coins only to pay for any significant purchase. The denominations, sizes, and weights of the coins are too archaic. The only reason anyone offers coins in payment is to avoid getting more pennies and nickels in change. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ottawa-plans-to-kill-the-penny/617212.md?page=6)