And how would we deal with the cash already in circulation when such a multiplication takes effect?
By issuing new currency. At least that’s how it’s been done in other countries following a currency revaluation like that.
Not that it’s a good idea in the case of the US, of course.
In Norway the last øre coin, the 50 øre (half a krone) stops being legal tender May 1st. Our smallest denomination coin will then be the one krone, worth about 17 cents, while before the change the smallest was worth just shy of 9. We’ve been ditching small denomination coins since the seventies.
The reasoning from the national bank on this last change is that the 50 øre wasn’t properly in circulation. People would receive the coins in change, but would dump them at home, removing them from circulation requiring the bank to make more.
With electronic payments taking a larger and larger share of all payments, and with the minimal impact of losing the ability to make cash payments in increments of .5 krone, no one is making a fuss. I didn’t even know about it until a couple of weeks ago.
Adieu penny, adieu.
I’m going to keep my penny jar, and one day, they’ll be worth millions!!
Seriously, though, I think it’s a good idea to pull the penny, but it’s going to be a little weird.
Any idea if that changed the convential monetary display/system from two decimal places to one? I’ve been wondering how that would affect things (ex. cash registers…although I’d assume that they can all be re-programmed these days).
The US military bases in South Korea have essentially phased out the penny. A customer may present pennies when purchasing an item with cash. When a customer does not present exact change for the purchase, the clerk will round the total cost to the nearet nickel and thus no pennies are given in change.
Nobody seems to be worse for this policy.
Regarding the number of places for display on the registers: My guess is that it won’t change. Here in South Korea, there are no longer one won or five won coins, but the costs for everything still is shown with that final zero. For example, a one thousand two hundred ten won purchase will be displayed as 1210. Effectively, that’s really 121 ten won coins (since the ten won coin is the lowest denomination). There’s really no reason other than tradition to list it as 1210 instead of 121. The government even considered changing to the latter but the general public protested that plan.
This weekly ad (PDF) for a grocery chain in New Zealand still has prices ending in 99 cents, so it doesn’t look like it.
I’m not hearing much of a debate - I take it there is a general consensus that this was a good idea.
I did once hear of someone going to a store Down Under that had grapes priced by weight, and buying a single grape for 2 cents rounded down to free. Of course, that’s only worth doing as a stunt, and I’m sure the store got a lot more than 2 cents worth of publicity out of it.
Those medals must have been freakin’ huge. 
Currently, we cannot withdraw the nickel without withdrawing the dime at the same time. Otherwise we’ll have to round prices to the nearest $0.10, which will get confusing when we have a $0.25 coin in circulation.
If we withdraw both, however, we can start rounding prices to the nearest quarter dollar, sidestepping the whole problem.
I’d sooner ditch the nickel and quarter and add a half-dollar, preferably a bit smaller than the current quarter. Then downsize the loonie to quarter size and the toonie to loonie size.
Make the quarter a fifth, worth 20 cents.
What could they hope to accomplish at Toronto city hall?
The current Canadian half-dollar is a very odd coin: it apparently exists, but I have never actually seen one in circulation.
This Slate article doesn’t cover much new ground, but ends with bang:
I wonder how mild the stimulus would actually be - any number for how many pennies are in circulation? And I guess you’d have to do it as surprise (too late!), or the day before people (and banks) would order a crap load of pennies.
Canada (briefly) used to have a 20 cent coin. It’s also what they use in Europe. But now it’d be too much of a hassle to change Canadian coinage in this way, especially since we want to follow American usage.
I think you can ask for them in banks. Right now they’re basically never used, but if the 5 and 25 cent coins were withdrawn we’d start minting them in greater amounts and they’d become more popular.
They’re pretty big, though. I got one from a grandparent or something when I was a kid, along with one of the voyageur silver dollars. If we’re doing a significant revamp of our coinage I think it would make more sense to go to 10, 50, 100, and 200 cent pieces with sizes roughly equivalent to current dime, nickel, quarter, and loonie respectively. I don’t expect this to happen, as we’ve got so many loonies and toonies in circulation and all the existing coin-op stuff is based on current sizes.
Pre-1996 Canadian pennies are worth just over 2 cents in metal value (after that they made them with zinc, and the melt value is less than half a cent). The best are pre 1979 pennies, currently valued at 2.6 cents each for the copper ($3.78/pound)