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The government has no plan for America’s 300 billion pennies

theatlantic.com

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Re: The government has no plan for America’s 300 billion pennies

#61

Post by analog31 »

ghssds wrote: post #59
analog31 wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the reasons why I changed banks. My new bank has a coin counting machine in the lobby, you throw your coins in, it consumes them, and gives you a slip that you take to the teller. As I understand it, coins are considered a government service. Banks and retailers pay to deal with them. Buying them from the public for face value actually saves them money.

It's so easy to use coins, pennies included, in day-to-day transactions I never accumulate any. Accumulating pennies or other coins is a concept I don't understand. You can spend up to 4 pennies in any purchase you do, and if you don't can't never receive more than 4. For nickels, dimes, and quarters, the maximum is smaller.

Obligatory Dr. Strangelove reference:

*You don't think I'd go into combat with loose change in my pocket, do you?"

But I must admit that I never formed the habit of bringing change with me when I go somewhere. So it piled up at home. The quarters were easy: They got saved for parking, laundry, etc. But I ended up with a sack of pennies that I finally cashed in at the bank.

Re: The government has no plan for America’s 300 billion pennies

#62

Post by stephen_g »

zdragnar wrote: post #53
sdenton4 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The register might already do the rounding if it was designed to work in Canada, which got rid of the penny over a decade ago.

There's a bunch of regulations that need tweaking. AIUI, it's illegal to charge SNAP more than other customers. someone who paid cash and gets rounded down technically pays less than what the government got charged. It's only on the order of pennies, I don't think the law cares about that at all.

Is that a federal law or state law? Whichever jurisdiction it is, surely you'd only need a one-clause amendment to add an exception for rounding cash transactions by up to two cents to account for the discontinuation of pennies... I just can't imagine that taking more than a few weeks to resolve, surely your political systems in the US haven't become that dysfunctional where this couldn't be fixed that quickly?

Re: The government has no plan for America’s 300 billion pennies

#63

Post by stephen_g »

dimensional_dan wrote: post #17
joering2 wrote: post #6

Supposedly it cost gov 4 cents to mint 1. Does it have to be done with zinc tho? Why not plastic or some cheap material? Although you may be able to 3D print a penny at home (just like it being made from zinc can actually stop someone), but just like with a real one, its not like you will show up at your local bank with $1 million dollar worth to deposit.

The other option would be to rebase the currency such that a single penny was a meaningful unit of money again. One potential such way would be to issue new paper notes which represent the old note with a decimal place move such that $10 becomes $100. This has been done before but might not be a great idea for the USA.

That would be a nightmare, you're basically bringing in a new currency at that point because now all cash, every bank account and every price in the whole country needs to change. That's going to be probably hundreds of thousands of times more effort and expense than phasing out pennies!

Re: The government has no plan for America’s 300 billion pennies

#64

Post by bdangubic »

stephen_g wrote: post #62
zdragnar wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a bunch of regulations that need tweaking. AIUI, it's illegal to charge SNAP more than other customers. someone who paid cash and gets rounded down technically pays less than what the government got charged. It's only on the order of pennies, I don't think the law cares about that at all.

Is that a federal law or state law? Whichever jurisdiction it is, surely you'd only need a one-clause amendment to add an exception for rounding cash transactions by up to two cents to account for the discontinuation of pennies... I just can't imagine that taking more than a few weeks to resolve, surely your political systems in the US haven't become that dysfunctional where this couldn't be fixed that quickly?

> surely your political systems in the US haven't become that dysfunctional where this couldn't be fixed that quickly?

In America this can be done - by 2028 or thereabouts :)

Re: The government has no plan for America’s 300 billion pennies

#65

Post by pengaru »

zdragnar wrote: post #51
pengaru wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's odd how banks have largely stopped operating change counting machines. In my childhood we'd hoard loose change then make a trip to the local po-dunk bank serving my neighborhood surrounded by corn fields, and even there they'd take our bucket of loose change and dump it into a counting machine for free. It was a game to try guess the amount we'd get in paper cash... Now you have to pay for this service at a groc…

COVID happened. However, all three of the banks I visit regularly (over branch of a national bank, two branches of a local credit union) all have coin counting machines in the lobby, though it took awhile for them to be added back to the branches that took theirs out.

No doubt COVID kicked skimpflation into high gear, but this was already a pattern I noticed long before 2019.

It seemed to generally coincide with the demise of retail in general, and of course the elimination of bank-teller interactions and emergence of ATM machines. All of these things are a blurry mess from my past...

Re: The government has no plan for America’s 300 billion pennies

#66

Post by jldugger »

bigfishrunning wrote: post #40
jldugger wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Folks can take them to a bank FWIW my bank refuses to accept unrolled coins, long before this month's retirement of the penny.

So roll them?

I have like 2 dollars in coins, not even a roll of pennies. I just thought I'd try depositing it while running a different bank errand and they were like "naw, go to coinstar with your poor person money"

Re: The government has no plan for America’s 300 billion pennies

#67

Post by xethos »

analog31 wrote: post #47
leoh wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is that legal?

As I understand it, more than X dollars worth of coins is not legal tender. I learned this due to an absurd case in Detroit, where someone stole bags of coins from an armored car, got caught, and claimed their crime was not a felony because it was below the dollar limit for a felony. Of course the judge treated their request with the disdain that it deserved.

There are multiple laws that could have been broken to make it a felony, but if the only reason it would have been a felony was the dollar amount, I'm actually less inclined to side with the judge.

This is all third-hand, through a game of internet-telephone, and my money (if you'll pardon the pun) is on there being additional factors though

Re: The government has no plan for America’s 300 billion pennies

#69

Post by tomhow »

nothrabannosir wrote: post #48
tomhow wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not acceptable to attack fellow community members like this on HN. Critiquing the article is fine, as is flagging it if you think it's unfit for HN. But personal attacks are not OK, no matter who it is or why you think it's justifiable. Please read the guidelines and make an effort to observe them if you want to keep participating here.

Since you're speaking as a moderator I'd like to ask for clarification on the official position: Was that actually a personal attack, or was it a verifiable claim about the quantity and type of submissions by this user? Is the problem that it was labeled "propaganda", and would it have been ok without that word? I thought it was useful context to have a look at the submission history. There is a slew of recent [dead]…

It's generally not OK to bring up someone's past activity, whether that activity be on HN or elsewhere, as way of attacking someone in a discussion on HN. It fits within the "generic tangents" guideline. We can never know if they still agree with what they said or posted in the past. The submitter's history, and indeed the submitter's identity, is not really relevant to the substance of the article, and we want the discussion to be about the substance of the article. (Of course it's relevant if the submitter is the author, because then they can engage in Q&A about the article's content.)

If users notice that someone is posting large volumes of low-quality content (i.e., spam, self-promotional content or articles that break the guidelines) they can email us and we'll investigate.

In this case the user in question just posts a lot of stuff from mainstream publications on either side of the ideological centre – i.e., lots from the NY Times, Washington Post and The Atlantic but also WSJ and Bloomberg. The articles that are [dead] are from sites like The Information that are only banned due to being hard-paywalled.

It's obviously inflammatory to describe their pattern of posting as "propaganda". (Sure it can be argued and debated in the right context, but this is not that.) But even without the word "propaganda", the guidelines still ask us to keep discussions on-topic and to avoid generic tangents.

Re: The government has no plan for America’s 300 billion pennies

#70

Post by nothrabannosir »

tomhow wrote: post #69
nothrabannosir wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Since you're speaking as a moderator I'd like to ask for clarification on the official position: Was that actually a personal attack, or was it a verifiable claim about the quantity and type of submissions by this user? Is the problem that it was labeled "propaganda", and would it have been ok without that word? I thought it was useful context to have a look at the submission history. There is a slew of recent [dead]…

It's generally not OK to bring up someone's past activity, whether that activity be on HN or elsewhere, as way of attacking someone in a discussion on HN. It fits within the "generic tangents" guideline. We can never know if they still agree with what they said or posted in the past. The submitter's history, and indeed the submitter's identity, is not really relevant to the substance of the article, and we want the d…

Ok thanks, makes sense.
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