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Is It Time to Kill the Penny?

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Re: Is It Time to Kill the Penny?

#241

Post by greenshackle2 »

Loughla wrote: post #174
jellicle wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everyone uses an electronic POS system and it will round however the manufacturer told it to round (which will be correctly). The only people you have to worry about cheating you out of 3-4 cents in a world without pennies (the maximum you can be cheated) would be people without electronic systems. Which is to say, no one.

I just disagree with this. We will see Wal-Mart and other chain retailers make their own POS software/systems. 3-4 cents isn't a lot. Unless it's added up by all of the people shopping in those places over the course of a year. The incentive to cheat the system is there, therefore the system will 100% be cheated. That's The American Way, in my experience.

So do you believe they are already screwing you out of fractional cents? There is already rounding going on, there's no guarantee that applying taxes yields a whole number of cents.

Re: Is It Time to Kill the Penny?

#242

Post by vkou »

Sebb767 wrote: post #34
bruce511 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> $0.01-$0.02 per transaction * millions of transactions per day has got to make some accountants happy. You'd think, but actually no. That's because it's per transaction, so the accumulated amount is well pennies compared to the turnover. For example, say you always rounded in favor of the company. That means an average of 2c gain per transaction. If you do 2 million transactions a day that's... 40 grand! yay. Exce…

> Except that if the average transaction is say $50 (which seems kinda low) that means your turnover for the day was $100 million. I don't think that seems low. A grocery store or a bakery probably sees a lot of transaction in the 2$ to 5$ range. But, to be fair, even at 'only' 4 million $ turnover your point still stands.

I don't know what grocery stores you go to, but I've never seen someone standing at the checkout line, holding a single turnip.

Corner stores have the occasional sub-$5 purchase, as do, of course, coffee shops.

Re: Is It Time to Kill the Penny?

#243

Post by jackson1442 »

undersuit wrote: post #222
irrational wrote: post #188

But then how would we make souvenir flattened pennies for .26 at tourist traps? Seriously, I haven’t used cash in so many years that I literally can’t remember the last time I touched paper money or coins. Maybe 15 years ago? As far as I’m concerned, we’ve already transitioned to a 100% digital economy and there is no longer a need for analog money.

The US Mints could just sell blanks to the tourist traps and they in turn could raise the price to $1. I use cash all the time. I like to round out my errands with a beer at a brewery before biking home. Hand the server a $5 bill when I get the beer, so fast also a strong tip on the cheapest beers. I'm also forced to use cash when I purchase my medical marijuana. I drink Americanos when I purchase a coffee, $2 or $2.…

> I think digital and physical money has it's uses and I will use cash in my wallet first because any phone or credit card solution is slower.

Surprised you've had that experience, I've always found waiting for the cashier to make change to be a long and arduous process, while I can simply tap my watch on the reader or insert my card and move along with my day. Not to mention that I have no interest in carting around a pocket full of coin change.

Re: Is It Time to Kill the Penny?

#244

Post by clairity »

gojomo wrote: post #193

The best plan is to re-base all pennies to be worth 5¢, as described by Austan Goolsbee here: https://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/01/business/01scenes.html This is (very) mildly stimulative/inflationary, and in the time leading up to en expected re-basing, accelerates the phase-out of the 1¢ penny (as people hoard in expectation of a 5x return). But as of the moment of re-basing, it flushes all those penny-jars out into…

how about rebasing the dollar to $10 so that the penny has the worth of 10¢, and then apply a one-time progressive wealth tax to pay for saving the economy from collapse while also addressing the regressiveness of that action? maybe call it an anti-revolution tax.

Re: Is It Time to Kill the Penny?

#245

Post by klyrs »

hoorayimhelping wrote: post #78
klyrs wrote: post #46

As an American living in Canada, I gotta say. Pennies and dollar bills SUCK. We have $1 and $2 coins and they're actually useful. Every time I visit home, I end up with piles of pennies and wads of stinky, tattered, overcirculated garbage bills. If you accumulate a pile $1 and $2 coins, nobody looks askance if you plunk down a stack of them. But god, the glares if you want to spend $20 in dollar bills. I say take it…

It wasn't until I went to the UK in my late 20s that I realized how badly America needs coins in the dollar and two dollar denomination. Having spare coins with weight and mass rather than loose dollar bills helped me get a sense of how many loose singles I had, and being able to drop a couple coins on a counter to pay for cheap items (a bag of M&Ms, a cup of coffee) is somehow, I don't know how, but somehow more erg…

The ergonomics are a real selling point for me. Coins are certainly tidier than bills. They're low friction and hard, which makes them easy to stack, don't vanish in a puff of wind, they're easy to count...

Re: Is It Time to Kill the Penny?

#246

Post by jedimastert »

dhosek wrote: post #211
dhosek wrote: post #206

When someone posted an article about the coin shortage on Facebook recently, I realized that I haven't used cash for a purchase since sometime before the lockdown started. And even before that, my primary use of cash was the collections basket at church—which the lockdown has ended up transforming into a credit card transaction now. Our formerly cash transactions for our cleaning lady have converted into Zelle paymen…

Coin-only laundry machines are probably the biggest drivers of persistent cash usage in most of my acquaintances' lives. I'm guessing that apartment buildings big enough to have in-building laundry rooms but small enough to not be able to justify a cashless payment system may just end up shifting to not charging for laundry.

I think that gap is growing smaller.

Sample size of one incoming, but the building I live in only has 16 2-room apartments and has a app-driven option for the machines (they take coins, but there's no change machines and I've never seen anyone actually do so)

Re: Is It Time to Kill the Penny?

#247

Post by gojomo »

ngngngng wrote: post #232
gojomo wrote: post #193

The best plan is to re-base all pennies to be worth 5¢, as described by Austan Goolsbee here: https://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/01/business/01scenes.html This is (very) mildly stimulative/inflationary, and in the time leading up to en expected re-basing, accelerates the phase-out of the 1¢ penny (as people hoard in expectation of a 5x return). But as of the moment of re-basing, it flushes all those penny-jars out into…

So I should start collecting pennies then, yes? 500% returns you say?

I do think enough people believing this could happen, and thus hoarding pennies, could increase its likelihood.

It'd grow a popular constituency for the rebasing, and create a change shortage that's most-easily addressed by incentivizing the release of instantly-more-valuable penny hoards.

Fill your jars, then pass the idea on!

(Does anyone know someone high up in this '4chan' memetic-prankster cooperative I keep hearing about? Nah, they'd probably just trick Congress into doing something useless like rebasing the penny to 4¢.)

Re: Is It Time to Kill the Penny?

#248

Post by OldHand2018 »

> By the 1990s, Kolbe says, he was introducing new legislation to kill the penny with every new session of Congress. But he kept facing resistance — for example, from the speaker of the House at the time, Dennis Hastert, who represented a district in Illinois, the home state of Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln, of course, is on the penny, and Kolbe says that proved to be a major roadblock.

I hear this a lot, and I think its a weak argument. The original coinage act (1792?) authorized a $5 coin. Replace the Lincoln penny with the Lincoln $5 coin; you continue to have a Lincoln coin, you trade a useless coin for one that will be very useful for the next 100 years, and now all US currency with Lincoln on it is $5. Win-win-win.

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