Actually this is less of a sidenote than you might imagine: U.S. Mint Prohibits Melting Down of Pennies and Nickels for Metal, from just last week. But do you think they’ll stop making them, probably not, because the too many people would cry bloody murder and say their constitutional rights are being trampled on because such a step was taking without being submitted to a plebiscite requiring a 90% affirmative vote.
The chumps of change, that’s us.
Spanish coins circulated in the US and were legal tender up until 1856, that’s when “small cents” were first issued, and the large cents went away, not sure about the half-cents. That shows that a penny had significant purchasing power, unlike today.
Interestingly, the large cents are in both size and composition practically identical to the latest and greatest dollar coins like the Sacagawea (minus the gold color), unless one is a collector or serious student of history, it’s difficult to fathom just how debased the coinage has become. It’s a common theme throughout history.
I still think $5, $10 and $20 coins make sense, if only to make searching under the couch worthwhile again.
The fillér (=1/100 Forint) in Hungary is now defunct, but for a while, I’m pretty sure there was only a 50 fillér coin. (Nowadays, it is about 195 HUF = 1 USD
The forint replaced the pengő in 1946. The highest note the pengő was issued in was 10^20, and this makes one think they weren’t printing one pengő notes at the time. (The forint replaced the pengő at the rate of 1 forint = 4×10^29 pengő.)
What exactly does this mean in the context of this thread? Coins don’t get used up, although they do wear out eventually.
ugh! didn’t realize we were at that point. Good luck trying to enforce that, btw. At least the metals in these coins are not as valuable. In Venezuela, once upon a time, the coins had a large percentage of Chromium and Nickel. When you had a car accident and wanted a bumper re-chromed, you just went there with your change jar.
The lowest denomination coin in India is officially 5 paise, but even that is almost impossible to find. The lowest commonly used coin is 25 paise. The old trick of pricing things at 9.99 has been modified to price them at 9.95, but apart from that, life carries merrily on. I wouldn’t really bother getting 5 paise change when I pay with a 10 rupee note, but some people do.
IIRC, the 1 paise, 2 paise and 3 paise coins were withdrawn sometime in the 60s. You can definitely charge non-currency transactions in whatever fractions you want - I’ve written checks for amounts that end in 73 paise and the like, but all currency transactions are just rounded up, to make life easier all round. Usually the amount is too small to quibble over, as far as I’m concerned.
And let us not forget the British farthing, minted (with a cute little wren for reverse) until 1956 and legal tender until 1960. A farthing was worth a grand total of 1/920 of a pound.
There was a quarter farthing issued in Ceylon.
(Wikipedia)
I remember it! I lived in England in the early 1950s, and I don’t think you could get anything for a farthing then. You might have been able to buy one sweet for a ha’penny. The lowest denomination in stamps was ½d.
During the 19th and early 20th century, they minted fractional farthing coins, though mostly for colonial use. They were always too small a denomination to be of much use in the UK itself. 1/2, 1/3 and even 1/4 farthing coins were minted:
http://www.tclayton.demon.co.uk/fract.html
That claims that the 1/3 farthing was minted until 1913.
Hell, people are quick on the trigger today.
At least the farthing got its everlasting fame in the children’s rhyme, “The Bells of St Clement’s.”
Regarding Italy, which I visited repeatedly in the 1990s, I think the smallest denomination I ever encountered was the 50 lire (lire = plural of lira) coin, worth about 2.5 cents European (there used to be this neat exchange rate of pretty much exactly 1,000 lire to the mark, now 2,000 to the euro) . You’d rarely get anything smaller than 200 lire.
Heh, regarding the lira, there was an episode of JAG where the main character, Commander Harmon Rabb, meets Admiral Chegwidden’s daughter when she accidentally hits his car with her car in a parking lot. She’s a charming Italian girl (living in Milan with her mother after her parnets’ divorce), and attempts to pay him off on the spot with a large wad of cash to keep the Insurance companies (and her dad) from getting involved. Harm replies “That’s only like $20 here.”
I’m afraid I don’t have much to contribute here, except to mention that pennies, if used wisely, are an excellent means of saving money. My room mate and I, as an experiment, kept emptying all of our pennies and nickles from the end of the day into jars on our desks. After a year, we were able to cash in the loose change at a Coinstar machine and had enough money between us to buy some really nice steaks and a case of beer. It’s not much, but for a college student who lives on ramen, it’s a helluva nice treat.
But, at that time, worth far more than a U.S. cent is today. Judging by what I’ve read (mainly Beatle biographies), at that time, in many parts of the country, people figured their everyday small expenses in shillings, and a pound was a lot of money.
There are also dropkicks behind the counter who don’t understand (or who are willfully ignorant of) the concept of rounding down.
>>nitpick<< You mean 1/960 of a pound