Dump the penny?Follow

Would any of you support dumping the penny as US currency? In your home nation, is there a similar low value coin you would opt to dispose of? Obviously, transactions would be rounded for cash, but could be preserved at current levels of accuracy for electronic transactions.

Insert Superman II plot joke here.

Although the production of most all US coins is declining, down from the peak at which about 50 pennies were produced per person in the US per year, there are still literally tons of coins produced and shipped around the nation wasting a great deal of time and energy above and beyond the time required to make exact change.

The overwhelming majority of pennies do not make it back to banks (whereas the majority of more valuable coins, such as quarters, do) meaning on net most are simply lost.

Edited, Nov 9th 2010 8:55am by yossarian

I have no use for it.

I would like to dump the penny, off the side of a skyscraper into someone's face.

Dude, totally.

Good. Buy moar of it plz kkthx~la

I can't stash 1's and 0's under my mattress.

I'm for getting rid of it. I had heard that it costs more to make a penny than the penny is even worth, so why are we still making them?

Yes, it costs more to produce pennies than each one is worth - last I heard the value was about 1.8 cents each. Since the cost of copper skyrocketed, it may have since gone up.

They used to be pure copper, but the interior was replaced with zinc several decades ago when that became too expensive. And now, the value of zinc has also gone up, and once again the metals used inside a penny are worth more than one cent.

I'd like to do away with the penny, for sure. I think this is an issue conservatives and liberals can even agree on, here.

- Liberals: Less metal in circulation means less metal that needs to be mined, mitigating the environmental impact.
- Conservatives: Less money in circulation is less US tender cash, resulting in a smaller, more efficient US Mint, i.e. smaller government.

Win/win!

Again, this is not how fiat currency works.

What is interesting and kind of relevant to this is that the UK got rid of half-pennies less than 15 years after the decimal system was introduced, and didn't make it much longer in Ireland, both existed in the 70s and 80s, or so the Internet says.

What I encountered in Denmark was kind of frustrating - things would have price tags of something like "79.95kr" (that was for my hairbrush), but the smallest coin is 50 øre (0.5kr) at the moment, so you effectively pay more for almost everything if you use cash. Now mind you, 5 øre is about as much as a cent, but my point is that their system is really strange as the Danish crown has lost a lot of value over the last 70 or so years, more than most other currencies have, and they've repeatedly introduced coins of higher value and withdrawn the smallest ones. And that doesn't mean their economy is worse off than any of the ones where you pay less than 79.95 for a hairbrush, the average income over there is actually higher than in most, if not all, the Commonwealth English-speaking countries.

I'd rather go back to buying some sweets for a Pfennig a piece, though, really. Not even Sainsbury's Basics is that cheap anymore.

This is what it feels like to buy gas in America.

...unless they come out with a .9 cent coin.

I think that's actually similar in most developed countries (at least the ones I've been to recently). I even saw prices like 1.38⁴ in Germany a couple of times when I was there in the summer.

The thing with Denmark is that it seems to be everywhere, and the people working the tills say "80 kroner please" even if it the price tag reads 79.95. Phone charges seemed to be something silly like 8 øre per minute or whatever, too.

Electronic money makes it possible to introduce decimal places that aren't represented in coins anyway, so ultimately it doesn't matter considering how much is paid with debit/credit cards nowadays.

I'm not sure were you are from (I'm vaguely recalling the Netherlands?) but I thought the one and two cent euro coins were not imported to some eurozone nations, but they actually had to accept them as legal currency (e.g. if you hand them to the shop clerk as currency, they had to take them, but all prices were rounded anyhow).