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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

#11

Post by terminalshort »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #4

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.

If you believe this is going to cause chaos or significant burdens on merchants I have got a bridge to sell you (but I don't take pennies). This quote tells you all you need to know.

> The government’s phasing out of the penny has been “a bit chaotic,” said Mark Weller, executive director of Americans for Common Cents. The pro-penny group is funded primarily by Artazn, the company that provides the blanks used to make pennies.

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

#12

Post by terminalshort »

JohnFen wrote: post #9
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.

It's a completely different color than a quarter.

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

#13

Post by basscomm »

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).

We also have a $2 bill that nobody uses for whatever reason.

I never understood the objections to the $1 coin, especially after the redesign to make it more distinct from a quarter. $1 coins are great for buying stuff out of vending machines since you don't have to fight with a dodgy bill acceptor or a mangled bill.

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

#14

Post by patch_collector »

MrHeather wrote: post #6

>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?

20m customers * 17% * 4 cents * 'x' transactions per customer = $136,000 * x

I suppose this makes some sense. In a worst case situation, if every customer makes 10-20 transactions per year, and they always round down the maximum possible amount, they would lose millions per year.

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

#15

Post by pavel_lishin »

MrHeather wrote: post #6

>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?

If we make the maximally pessimistic assumption that every cash transaction would require rounding down four cents, that's 68,000 customers per year times four cents, which is $136,000 per year.

A more reasonable assumption that half of transactions require rounding down cuts that in half, I suppose.

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

#16

Post by JohnFen »

terminalshort wrote: post #12
JohnFen wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's a completely different color than a quarter.

That doesn't help if you're in dim lighting or have vision problems.

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

#17

Post by [deleted] »

basscomm wrote: post #7
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 happenin…

[deleted]

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

#18

Post by didgetmaster »

Many are reporting this as if failing to mint new pennies each year is going to produce some kind of shortage. There are billions of pennies sitting in drawers or jars in homes across the nation (I certainly have one with about a thousand pennies in it).

I doubt anyone who needs a penny will be unable to find one within the next 100 years.

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

#19

Post by delecti »

MrHeather wrote: post #6

>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?

> Kwik Trip, a family-owned convenience store chain that operates in the Midwest, decided to round down cash purchases in stores where it hasn’t been able to find pennies.

They're rounding all cash transactions down to the nearest nickel, so an average of 2 cents per transaction, 3.4 million customers, gives me $68,000 assuming each "customer" makes a single transaction per year. If they mean that there are 20 million unique customers, not 20m transactions, then the a long tail of customers who make frequent small transactions in cash could make their claim check out.

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

#20

Post by nayuki »

We eliminated pennies in Canada in 2012 and the transition was a non-issue. The vast majority of retailers would round cash transactions to the nearest $0.05, but a few would round down to the nearest $0.05 in favor of the customer. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Withdrawal_of_low-denomination...

Canadian cash is better than American cash in several ways: No penny, durable polymer banknotes (instead of dirty wrinkly cotton paper), colorful banknotes (instead of all green) that are easy to distinguish, $1 and $2 coins in wide circulation (instead of worn-out $1 bills).

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