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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

#781

Post by julianlam »

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…

Canadian here. Honestly, the hardest part about Canada dropping the penny is that sometimes you'll go someplace cool and see one of those penny rolling machines, and... um... there are no more pennies.

But they usually have a little bowl of bronze slugs (or old pennies) just for the machines now.

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

#782

Post by varenc »

jjcm wrote: post #743
varenc wrote: post #701

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anything measured by weight is already rounding prices to the nearest cent. If something is $1/lb and I have 0.995 lbs of it, I get charged $1.00 not 99.5 cents. Presumably just rounding to the nearest 5 cents isn't that different. Of course we don't expect anyone to be charged fractional cents because our currency doesn't support it. So just changing our smallest currency unit from 1 cent to 5 cents.

> Presumably just rounding to the nearest 5 cents isn't that different The above context was that rounding to 5 cents might be illegal due to laws regarding SNAP debit prices being different than cash prices.

Yea but I guess my thinking is that all totals would just be rounded to the nearest 5 cents, like how they're currently rounded to the nearest 1 cent. So would be the same price whether debit or cash. We already round percentage based taxes to nearest cent, even though it's feasible you could charge someone fractional cents on a debit card.

Really state laws just should be amended to include something like "costs must be the same or as close as possible using the currently available denominations of currency"

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

#784

Post by linsomniac »

nayuki wrote: post #20

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 c…

>Canadian cash is better than American cash in several ways: [...] $1 and $2 coins in wide circulation (instead of worn-out $1 bills).

I especially liked that the $2 coin breaks into 2 $1 coins if you drop it right. ;-)

(j/k, IIRC that was an early manufacturing defect)

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

#785

Post by hrimfaxi »

MarkLowenstein wrote: post #680
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.

I always pick them up. Every penny buys enough pasta to keep you alive for another 15 minutes. So in case I ever go broke, I've staved off my eventual starvation by 15 minutes.

How did you arrive at this conclusion?

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

#786

Post by mulmen »

toast0 wrote: post #574
axiolite wrote: post #442

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's impractical to eliminate the nickel and penny, while keeping the quarter and dime. The most practical way forward is to keep only the dime, but people will be quite upset about the loss of the quarter.

It might be a little bit cumbersome, but I don't think it's impractical. With only quarters and dimes it's difficult to pay $0.05 or $0.15, but it's possible. If I owe you $0.05, I must give you a quarter and you give me two dimes. Or I give you a $20, you give me $19 in paper money, three quarters and two dimes. If I owe you $0.15, I must give you a quarter and you give me one dime. If I owe you $0.95, I can't give…

> But, if we stopped minting pennies because they cost too much (3.7 cents), it's hard to imagine we're going to keep producing nickels when they cost 13.8 cents to mint. Dimes are much cheaper than nickels (5.8 cents), and quarters aren't too bad relative to face value (14.7 cents).

Coins aren’t disposable. Why does it matter if the production cost is higher than the face value?

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

#787

Post by chipsrafferty »

simpleguitar wrote: post #273
b112 wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

As the article points out, there are laws that say people who pay via SNAP debit cards "cannot be charged more than others". If cash payments are rounded down, but debit card payments aren't, they are in violation of state law. The article also points out that rollback of pennies in Canada and other places were planned, addressing these kinds of issues. USA is doing it with no such planning.

Ok so just round it down then

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

#788

Post by hinkley »

pge wrote: post #537
hinkley wrote: post #524

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think people underestimate how many stores used to set prices to avoid pennies. When I was a kid it was frequent. Goose the price so cost + tax rounded to the nearest nickel. But now everything is 23.99 or sometimes 23.95, and they use the pennies place to denote clearance items. Like 19.94 or 3.98.

There’s a reason for this. Prices that force cashiers to make change force them to run the transaction through the cash register so it is recorded, and the amount in the register can be checked at the end of a day or shift to detect theft. If prices are round numbers, such as $1, the cashier can pocket the payment.

Now that you mention it, there’s quite a lot of overlap between family owned and this pricing to my recollection. If your wife is stealing from the till that’s very different from some high school guy you hired.

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

#789

Post by paulmooreparks »

What I've seen in places that eliminated .01 coins is that the .05 coin begins to be the one that everyone hates. I remember walking around Amsterdam several years ago with pockets full of .05 coins, and the same thing happens now in Singapore. They tend to get dumped into self-checkout machines in grocery stores.
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