Now is a good time to buy up all the pennies for cheap. Melt them down the day they're abolished and sell it all as scrap metal (or don't sell if you think it'll hold value like gold does).
Canada ditches the penny
81–90 of 120 posts
Re: Canada ditches the penny
#82"They cost more to produce than they are worth, nobody likes them, they have no commercial value." My very first (very primitive) public facing webpage was dedicated to abolishing the Canadian penny. Good riddance!
CGP Grey has an excellent youtube video on the whole issue for the US. The US currently makes 4 billion 1 cent coins annually. And they have already been abolished at US military overseas bases. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y5UT04p5f7U (Come to think of it, doesn't the US military use a lot more metric system than the general population. If so, this would be a good reason to increase the military since it would app…
The US military also uses a 24-hour clock (2000 hours instead of 8:00 PM) and consistent little-endian date formats (29 March 2012 instead of March 29 2012).
Re: Canada ditches the penny
#83Ridiculously simple solution: Drop the hundredths place entirely. Kill pennies, nickels, quarters, bring back $.5 pieces. A tenth of a dollar is enough precision for any realistic transaction in the United States.
Like dollar coins and $2 bills, 50-cent pieces never went away. People just don't spend them because they're "rare", and hence they appear to be rare.
Re: Canada ditches the penny
#84Does that mean pricing psychology would work differently? 19.99 would be out of fashion?
In New Zealand our lowest denomination is 10c but retailers still use that pricing tactic. Electronic card transactions are very popular here and they are charged to the advertised price while cash transactions are simply rounded to the nearest 10th.
Re: Canada ditches the penny
#85Ridiculously simple solution: Drop the hundredths place entirely. Kill pennies, nickels, quarters, bring back $.5 pieces. A tenth of a dollar is enough precision for any realistic transaction in the United States.
Simple in concept, difficult in execution. How would you recommend the transition between the two systems be handled?
Stop minting pennies, nickels, and quarters; start minting 20 cent pieces and mint more 50 cent pieces; let the free market sort it out. I'm not being flippant, it would actually work, at least as far as not wasting money producing low-value coinage is concerned.
Re: Canada ditches the penny
#86Does that mean pricing psychology would work differently? 19.99 would be out of fashion?
In New Zealand our lowest denomination is 10c but retailers still use that pricing tactic. Electronic card transactions are very popular here and they are charged to the advertised price while cash transactions are simply rounded to the nearest 10th.
Is that misleading? Advertising for 19.99 but charged at the rounded up 20.00.
Re: Canada ditches the penny
#87Earlier quoted context omitted.
It might be construed as a partisan comment, but that is exactly how politics works. After working on a few campaigns (and leaving in disgust), a politician or party will gladly pocket an easy but visible decision like this in order to "steal eyes" away from other -- less positive -- changes or events.
Ok, but in this specific case, the premise of this being an item that is stealing attention away from the more significant cuts in the budget simply isn't consistent with reality. Go to any national Canadian newspaper. The headline will not refer to the elimination of the penny; it will refer to changes to Old Age Security, or cuts to the CBC. The penny has been but a footnote to budget news. The reason that is the o…
The newspaper headline doesn't matter; what they're aiming for is controlling the message that's shared over coffee between friends, at the water-cooler, on the office IM feed, etc. In that context, all anyone will talk about is cutting the penny.
If this seem familiar, last time around it was changing the words to O Canada (http://www.cbc.ca/news/arts/music/story/2010/03/03/o-canada-...).
Re: Canada ditches the penny
#88Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's difficult finding a comparison since the US only has a two-party system. Maybe an example something like Ralph Nader suggesting something and Nixon doing it. Or more modern George W Bush following the advice of Jon Stewart. Anyway (the far?) right agreeing with the left is odd.
Not particularly far to the right. Setting aside the Quebec-only Bloc, the three main parties in Canada are center-right, centrist, and center-left. They all like to claim the others are extremists, but all of them have perfectly mainstream views.
There's another party! And yeah, she's pretty centrist too.
Re: Canada ditches the penny
#89Just as a point of interest, Australia removed the 1 and 2 cent coins from circulation back in 1992. Prices have been rounded to the nearest 5 cent value when paying with cash ever since. A comment on this thread said that it's madness, but it's all someone my age has grown up with.
As a fellow Australian the pennies aren't what I found most bizarre about US and Canadian currency, I more often found myself getting tripped up by the fact that listed prices in US and Canadian stores never include sales tax.
Most stores in the US don't include sales tax in the listed price, but some do. Examples include vending machines, Starbucks and other coffee shops (but not usually locations inside book stores and supermarkets), and concession stands at concerts, sporting events, and fairs. They probably do it because they don't want to deal with pennies. Concession stands often go further and use whole dollar amounts, since the prices are high anyway.
IIRC, some post office vending machines will take pennies, because they can sell stamps one at a time.
Re: Canada ditches the penny
#90Earlier quoted context omitted.
Simple in concept, difficult in execution. How would you recommend the transition between the two systems be handled?
Stop minting pennies, nickels, and quarters; start minting 20 cent pieces and mint more 50 cent pieces; let the free market sort it out. I'm not being flippant, it would actually work, at least as far as not wasting money producing low-value coinage is concerned.
Or, just skip the 20 cent and let 10/50 be the only subdivisions. (Currently, we get by with 1/5 and no 2.)
Frankly, if we're talking radical reform I'd rather keep the quarter and ditch the dime; even 10c seems too small to fiddle with most of the time, so 25c is the smallest denomination that seems worth bothering with. (Also, it's ubiquitous in mechanical coin-op devices like laundry machines, pool tables, etc.)