ETA: I meant “dollar coins”, not singles.
It would be interesting to see what would happen if the pennies weren’t minted for a 5 or 10 year hiatus. Would people go digging around in their old coat pockets and under car seats? It’s 150 years since we dropped the half-penny. It’s time we quit paying out the mint overage.
The one thing I’ve never understood is… why do we keep making the penny? I can sort of understand the reasoning to keep it in circulation, but if the mint stops making them for even a single year, wouldn’t the number of pennies in current circulation be able to cover it? You could even encourage people to bring their pennies into the bank. Make some deal with Coinstar and give an extra bit of cash for pennies.
Or am I just crazy?
In Peru, our coins and bills have to be accepted, always. You can buy you Audi R8 V10 with 1 céntimo coins.
Having said that, the 1 céntimo coin (worth 1/3 of a penny) was dying a natural death since it was basically useless except for poor people buying two or three buns. Then, some shop began not accepting the coin (illegally) causing, sometimes minor inconveniences.
There came the stupid-ass Consumer Defense guy and basically forced, through an incredibly fact-deficient media campaign, the Central Bank to mint the coins is bigger quantities. The tiny motherf***ers were ideal to get lost in your pocket, they even had to switch from brass to aluminium.
Long story short, three or four years later (after the "outrage ended), the coin was recalled and later demonetised and nobody cried its death. Our smallest coin is now 5 céntimos, about 1.5 cent and you nver see in use. I wouldn’t give to a beggar.
Pennies are only for change, not for buying stuff. Every time I go to the US, I get faster than I can use them.
I’d love a 50 cent, 1 dollar and two dollar coin.
KILL THEM ALL!!!
The penny will never be discontinued. Americans love the penny. It’s an icon. Also, Americans hate change.
From the Wiki article (emphasis mine):
Why am I not surprised by that?
Huh? Oh. . .change.
Actually, when I was living on U.S. military bases in Germany back in the mid-'90s (which used U.S. currency on the base), the penny had already been eliminated. (I’m not sure if it was ever subsequently reintroduced–I sure hope not.)
This was because the U.S. military discovered it was wasting ridiculous amounts of time and money ferrying bags of all-but-worthless pennies back and forth across the Atlantic.
Anyway, I found that living without the penny was completely painless. First off, prices weren’t changed. The only thing that changed was that cash transactions were rounded off to the nearest 5 cents.
If you paid by credit card or debit card, the transaction was not rounded.
In such a system, if you paid for ten 44-cent stamps (total of $4.40) with cash, nothing needed to be rounded.
However, if a cash transaction came out to $10.31 or $10.32, it was rounded down to $10.30. If a cash transaction came out to $10.33 or $10.34, it was rounded up to $10.35.
So half of all cash transactions were rounded down, and half were rounded up. It all balanced out over time.
Well, once again the US is sucking hind tit. Canada has announced the their national mint is about to strike its final penny.
Washington bureaucrats aren’t paying attention. The penny is expensive and no longer worth picking up off the ground.
It’s up to politicians, not bureaucrats.
The U.S. has never minted pennies. The word penny is a holdover from British colonial days. The U.S. coin is and always has been a cent.
I think the U.S. mint should crank out legal tender mill (one tenth cent) coins, if only in proof sets.
Or people could read those endless threads about all the excitement in Canada over their new currency.
Being more serious, how long ago was the farthing eliminated? And the half penny went in the 60’s (here).
And it’s called a penny.