There are several other dollars in the Americas that have 25 cent coins. Bermuda, the Bahamas, Belize, Canada, the Cayman Islands, and the Eastern Caribbean. And Jamaica did before inflation did away with everything below a dollar. All of these countries adopted dollar-based currencies because of the influence of the US dollar (or a shared heritage in the Spanish dollar), as far as I know.
As noted, Aruba does too, but I think that’s a legacy of the Dutch guilder, which had 25 cent and 2.5 guilder coins.
I have followed this topic for years and I’m surprised I didn’t see this announcement. When I toured the Denver mint a few years ago, they explained the situation and said overall, taken into consideration all coinage, the mint is one of the few profitable government agencies. Though they do lose money on the cent and nickel, they more than make it back on the dime and quarter (called “Seigniorage”). So, overall, coinage isn’t losing money. The situation looks bad focusing just on the cent and nickel, of course, but there is a bigger picture.
To really eliminate the cent, a number of economic changes should also happen simultaneously, as they did in Canada when they eliminated their cent back in 2012. The basis of commerce should officially change to .05 cents. Just letting cents fade out in circulation will still leave a cent-based economy in place.
In any case, I no longer use cash and have no attachment to physical coinage despite some nostalgia. Today’s coinage exists only to make change today, like the half cent from the 19th century. Few can really buy anything for a quarter, or even for a dollar, at this point. So change has really started to become redundant. Regardless, cash still seems to circulate fairly strongly in rural areas. So eliminating it altogether could cause a lot of disruption in some parts of the country. It would need far better planning and preparation than “just stop making it.”
Yeah, Canada and US use the “quarter” while the many other decimalized currencies go for a 0.20 piece and generally follow (or followed once) a 1-2-5-10-20-50-100-200-500 sequence for both fractional and whole denominations.
The “lazy way” historically happens to be the way relatively stable currencies do it — you end up with there being NO fractional denominations, so be it. You run into messy political perception problems if you reset zeroes.
Agreed. It’s rather unsurprising that the current criminal regime are the ones behind this move. Getting rid of the penny is decades overdue. Doing it the way they intend is simply an exercise in arbitrary authority backed only by stupidity.
A classic example of doing a right thing only half-right and for all wrong reasons.
What do you mean by “the base of commerce”? Here in Canada electronic pennies still function, in the sense that a debit precise of $32.07 takes $32.07 from my account, not $32.05, though that’s what I would have paid in cash.
Penny rounding warning: here, the rounding rules were clear and well communicated, but youth and workers from countries with different coinage were useless at it, because they use local coins so rarely that they confuse nickels, dimes, and quarters, and aren’t used to doing the arithmetic involved in producing 85 cents’ worth of coin.
In other words, there will be the odd nickel or dime lost to general low-level incompetence. You will survive.
I should know that, considering how many times I’ve been in Canada, or gotten a Canadian quarter for change while in the U.S.
Count me among the many who have been to Canada recently and didn’t handle any currency.
This is what I am used to. Switzerland, EU, and UK all follow this convention, and this is the currency I handle the most.
Interesting to see what countries use a 0.25 coin, and it does seem to be rather infrequent. I expect that more of the smaller coins will be phased out in all currencies.
Especially since the US & Canada use the 1-(2)-5-10-20-100 pattern for dollar denominations. Canadians use $2 (coin); Americans can (bill / note) but mostly don’t.
After reading this and a associated thread, and seeing that a fair significant chunk of people think that getting rid of the penny will cause prices to change! - I now understand some of the public pressure not to get rid of the penny. Math is hard and economics is even harder.
If doing stuff digitally the pennies are not a problem. Nickels can’t be easily removed because of the popularity of quarters, as has been mentioned. That doesn’t mean you need to make more of them at current rates, or that you could not change the size or composition.
Canada stopped producing pennies years ago, and rounding a nickel up or down if paying in cash makes no significant difference. Personally, I carry a couple loonies around for tips and meters but do not much want to carry coins.
The only thing I wonder about is: What about postage stamps?
The current first class postage rate is 73 cents. Right now, if I need to, I can go to a post office and buy one stamp with cash. If the penny is eliminated, that will be impossible. The stamp price would effectively be 75 cents. But stamp prices can’t be changed without approval from the Postal Regulatory Commission, which like many government bureaucracies, is not quick to action. So I’m not sure what would happen.
You’d buy a 73 cent postage stamp with a 2 cent handling charge. Or, more likely, this being the post office, you’d buy a 73 cent stamp, give them 3 quarters, and they’d give you 2 one-cent stamps in change. Or a single two-center.
The notion that that obscure bit of the US Code would somehow monkeywrench the no-more-pennies juggernaut is fanciful. A way would be found to solve the problem in the first 20 minutes.
ISTM if there are no pennies, and you pay cash, then, no matter what, you are not going to be paying odd values. That is why they round off totals for cash transactions.
Decimal currency used to be rare, or at least rarer than it is now, but now it is not, so (I speculate) its current infrequency has to do with that.
The Bahamas may still have 15-cent coins, 25-cent coins, and $3 (not $2!) banknotes.
Notice the US sub-dollar pieces are face-valued fractionally: half-dollar, quarter-dollar, dime (one tenth), cent (one hundredth),
— only the nickel is face-valued as “five cents”.
- I now understand some of the public pressure not to get rid of the penny. Math is hard and economics is even harder.