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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

#31

Post by [deleted] »

JohnFen wrote: post #28
didgetmaster wrote: post #18

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.

Most of the stores in my area have started requiring people to pay with exact change or by card because they can't get pennies to make change. Personally, I think stores should just start setting prices to avoid the need for pennies, but that would be too easy, I guess.

[deleted]

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

#32

Post by Retric »

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…

I’d regularly use quarters in vending machines, but not waste time during a retail transaction.

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

#33

Post by terminalshort »

smelendez wrote: post #26
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?

They must mean unique customers, not customer transactions. They have about 878 stores, according to Wikipedia, so if it was transactions, each store would only see about 62 transactions per day, which is way too low.

Sure. But multiply by whatever number you want and it is still the same percentage of revenue.

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

#35

Post by mrweasel »

didgetmaster wrote: post #18

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.

I don't know how accurate this is, but someone posted on Reddit some Burger King is already having a hard time getting pennies from their bank: https://old.reddit.com/r/mildlyinteresting/comments/1opdlm2/...

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

#36

Post by delecti »

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).

Quarters might be premature, but the half-cent was discontinued when it was worth a (modern equivalent) of $0.12-17. Even 20-30 years ago, when I was just starting to interact with money enough to have an opinion, I thought it was a hassle to deal with anything smaller than a quarter. The same logic behind getting rid of pennies (they cost more to make than the face value) also supports doing at least nickels.

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

#37

Post by pessimizer »

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?

What's more contemptible: that CNN refused to spend the 30 seconds that it would take to do the math; or that it interviewed a "spokesman" that also didn't spend 30 seconds to do the math, and was sure that nobody would check?

This is the kind of article that should be written by AI (or not written, really.) If you completely fictionalized the empty interviews, nothing would be lost.

Maybe the "spokesman" has been told to angle for a government subsidy for the inconvenience of losing pennies? And from a gas station, which add that goofy fraction of a cent at the end of their pricing.

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

#38

Post by devmor »

basscomm wrote: post #13
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.

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

It’s because retailers wont accept them - they think they’re counterfeit because no one uses them. A catch-22 situation, really.

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

#39

Post by JohnFen »

45764986 wrote: post #27
JohnFen wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

If you have vision problems, US currency is totally unfriendly to you. Unlike other countries, which have bills of different sizes, all the US currency bills are the same size, so getting change as a blind person is basically relying on the honesty of whoever is behind the counter.

Absolutely true. It's one of the several crazy design problems with US paper currency.

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

#40

Post by terminalshort »

JohnFen wrote: post #16
terminalshort wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a completely different color than a quarter.

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

That would explain why 1% of people don't use the $1 coin. It doesn't explain the other 99%.
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