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The last-ever penny will be minted today in Philadelphia

cnn.com

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Re: The last-ever penny will be minted today in Philadelphia

#3

Post by hrimfaxi »

I watched a video on the demise of the penny and its predicament was so succinctly explained: everyone gets pennies as change but few carry them around let alone spend them, so we are stuck producing ever more. One news outlet even did an "experiment" where they threw hundreds of pennies on the ground in a city on a busy morning and not one person stopped to pick any up.

Re: The last-ever penny will be minted today in Philadelphia

#4

Post by bryanlarsen »

Many countries eliminated their pennies without chaos or unfair burdens on shopkeepers. In Canada, the process was widely popular after the fact even though newspaper articles prior to the elimination intimated it wouldn't be due to their "both sides" style of reporting.

It's indicative of the current US administration that they managed to screw this up despite many examples world wide of how to do it properly.

Re: The last-ever penny will be minted today in Philadelphia

#6

Post by MrHeather »

>But with 20 million customers a year, and 17% of them paying with cash, the policy will eventually cost Kwik Trip a couple of million dollars a year, McHugh said.

If we figure two-fifths of cash transactions need to be rounded up and the store is losing an average of 1.5 cents each time, their expected losses would be around $2,000, yeah?

Re: The last-ever penny will be minted today in Philadelphia

#7

Post by basscomm »

hrimfaxi wrote: post #3

I watched a video on the demise of the penny and its predicament was so succinctly explained: everyone gets pennies as change but few carry them around let alone spend them, so we are stuck producing ever more. One news outlet even did an "experiment" where they threw hundreds of pennies on the ground in a city on a busy morning and not one person stopped to pick any up.

> everyone gets pennies as change but few carry them around let alone spend them

It's not just pennies, it's all coins. In a former life I worked in retail and almost nobody would fish around in their pockets for exact (or even near) change. They'd always hand me bills for their purchase even if they had just completed a transaction and had the coins in their pocket. That was in the 90's, and I still see it happening today, even though I'm no longer in the retail world.

Re: The last-ever penny will be minted today in Philadelphia

#9

Post by JohnFen »

Analemma_ wrote: post #5

Honestly nickels and dimes, and maybe even quarters, should go too. It's ridiculous that we don't have $1 and $2 coins in widespread circulation in the US (we have a $1 coin but nobody uses it).

I'd mourn the loss of the quarter. I use those quite often.

> (we have a $1 coin but nobody uses it)

Because they keep designing it in the stupidest way, making it easy to confuse with a quarter. I don't know why they do that.

That said, I do prefer paper $1 bills over coins. Paper is lighter and easier to carry. But I'd only slightly grumble if we replaced it with a reasonable coin.

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