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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

#461

Post by acheron »

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.

This was a whole thing in the 70s. There was a 3 step plan:

1) Bring back the $2 bill (it had not been printed for a decade+)

2) Redesign the $1 coin (Eisenhowers being too big and heavy)

3) Stop printing $1 bills

Unfortunately they never got to step 3, which made 1 and 2 pointless, and here we are.

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

#462

Post by jacobgkau »

Jblx2 wrote: post #416
jacobgkau wrote: post #388

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the store is e.g. Walmart, then their scale's already large enough that I don't think this is going to put them under. And if every store's doing it, then there'll be nowhere to turn to.

Won't someone think of the children?

That's an entirely off-topic comment that has nothing to do with anything I said and adds nothing to the discussion.

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

#463

Post by sequoia »

Maxion wrote: post #145
SoftTalker wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a bit odd that the mint doesn't emboss the denomination in braille on each note. I'd think that there would be a way to do that and have it hold up pretty well in circulation?

Braille does not help everyone. Most people with vision issues are not legally lind and do not know braille.

In canada it's "one cluster of dots = $5, two clusters = $10, three = $20" and so on. You just feel the number of dot clusters & count, no braille involved.

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

#464

Post by pwg »

b112 wrote: post #252
Night_Thastus wrote: post #141

I'd say screw it, get rid of nickles and dimes as well. Quarters can stay, for now. It's a complete waste of money and time continuing to mint such low-value currency. It can't be used for just about anything. Unfortunately, I do see the problem with part of this. For a handful of items where it does matter, it will force people to use cards more if they want to avoid rounding. And the card providers already have a c…

I know you're referencing more than pennies, but to speak to pennies, I find the current rounding noise in the US to be weird. Likely, it's just more of the media, talking heads, and youtube personalities trying to turn a nothing into something, story. Back when we did it in Canada, I don't recall a single person I knew concerned about penny rounding. Everyone was sick of pennies. No one cared. Everyone was happy. An…

> Likely, it's just more of the media, talking heads, and youtube personalities trying to turn a nothing into something, story.

It's not. Some US states have laws on the books that make it illegal for retailers to round up. The turmoil is that if the retailer can only round down to the nearest five cents, then they stand to lose from one to four cents per cash sale for any sale that is not a multiple of five cents. Add those one to four cent losses up over a large enough number of transactions and the retailer stands to lose a considerable sum over the course of a year. And many retail shops already operate with thin margins anyway, so the loss from "always round down" could erase whatever thin margins some shops already operate under.

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

#465

Post by toast0 »

JohnFen wrote: post #47
devmor wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I've never had a retailer refuse to accept a $2 bill, although a couple of times the clerk summoned the manager about it. But I've never found a retailer willing to give a $2 bill as change. The resistance to the $2 bill is a very weird cultural thing.

> But I've never found a retailer willing to give a $2 bill as change.

Mostly retailers don't stock $2 bills (because they're weird), so if a customer brings a $2, the cashier will put it in their their exceptional bills area, which usually is just large bills. No change is made with exceptional bills, so twos don't get recirculated.

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

#466

Post by [deleted] »

b112 wrote: post #252
Night_Thastus wrote: post #141

I'd say screw it, get rid of nickles and dimes as well. Quarters can stay, for now. It's a complete waste of money and time continuing to mint such low-value currency. It can't be used for just about anything. Unfortunately, I do see the problem with part of this. For a handful of items where it does matter, it will force people to use cards more if they want to avoid rounding. And the card providers already have a c…

I know you're referencing more than pennies, but to speak to pennies, I find the current rounding noise in the US to be weird. Likely, it's just more of the media, talking heads, and youtube personalities trying to turn a nothing into something, story. Back when we did it in Canada, I don't recall a single person I knew concerned about penny rounding. Everyone was sick of pennies. No one cared. Everyone was happy. An…

[deleted]

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

#467

Post by mulmen »

Night_Thastus wrote: post #141

I'd say screw it, get rid of nickles and dimes as well. Quarters can stay, for now. It's a complete waste of money and time continuing to mint such low-value currency. It can't be used for just about anything. Unfortunately, I do see the problem with part of this. For a handful of items where it does matter, it will force people to use cards more if they want to avoid rounding. And the card providers already have a c…

I’d like to see an estimation of how often coinage is actually used. I play a lot of pinball so I handle quarters frequently but I can’t really think of what I do with the smaller denominations except collect them in a jar.

I wouldn’t mind having larger coin denominations though. Dollar and five dollar coins would be very convenient.

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

#468

Post by zahlman »

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.

> even though newspaper articles prior to the elimination intimated it wouldn't be due to their "both sides" style of reporting.

No idea what you're talking about here. This isn't a left-vs-right issue, and journalism gave the concerns approximately the attention they merited.

> 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.

No, it's indicative of problems uniquely caused by existing American governance and law. When we did it, we didn't have an issue analogous to the one with SNAP payments described throughout the thread, because our welfare programs don't work that way and our legal code isn't designed to enable the same kind of future pedantry. Besides which, the Biden and Obama administrations (and others before them) didn't even attempt this as far as I'm aware, despite that the US penny being costly for quite some time. (As far as I can tell, the current cost is mostly not due to the cost of the base metal, which is almost all zinc since 1982. Checking commodity prices and doing some back of the envelope math, switching back to copper would cost them an additional two cents per penny.)

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

#469

Post by axiolite »

tgsovlerkhgsel wrote: post #364
mattnewton wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

State and local taxes make this infeasible

Just show the price including tax. (half-sarcastic, because obviously that would be an unpopular change for sellers because it makes the visible number go up, but it would solve two problmes...) They could still set the post-tax price to something that results in round numbers, at downside of the pre-tax price having more decimals.

> Just show the price including tax.

With a tax rate as precise as 1000ths of a percent in many jurisdictions*, you'd need extreme precision on the price tag (e.g. $11.798625), OR you need to substantially overcharge for tax (rounding up the tax to the penny or nickel on each individual item, instead of on the total of ALL items).

And sales tax rates can even be different from ONE CITY BLOCK TO THE NEXT.

* Arizona: 10.725% Hawaii: 4.712% Minnesota: 7.875% etc. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sales_taxes_in_the_United_Stat...

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

#470

Post by RobotToaster »

quijoteuniv wrote: post #177
datadrivenangel wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But add a $3.50 coin so that we can strongly incentivize coffee to stay below a certain price.

Just take a zero out of everything and change the name from dollar to something else!

There used to be a $10 coin called an eagle, may as well be violently American and call it eagles.
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