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Penny hoarders hope for the day the penny dies (2014)
- tobyhinloopen 5y agoI love the text transcript
- vdddv 5y agowhat's the cost of melting the coins and extracting the copper though? It does not look very profitable
- hamandcheese 5y agoPresumably that is already priced in to the going rate for “scrap metal”, no? Well, these aren’t the most rational people so maybe not.
- tudorw 5y agoFar more rational to convince a few people to give you millions of dollars you burn through in 8 months not launching a product no-one wanted leaving a burnt out team, disappointed investors and a dozen second hand Aeron's...
- tudorw 5y agoI should have just said it's rude to call people irrational, we are all humans, we are not computers. Also, how could you tell if something was rational or not without knowing the full circumstances.
- bloak 5y agoThe article suggests that if the government abolishes pennies then it would be legal to melt them down. Is there a good reason for believing that? Germany had something a bit similar. The two Pfennig coins made before 1968 were pure bronze and worth more than two Pfennig as scrap metal in later years. But it would be illegal to melt them down. And they were abolished, of course, when Germany switched to the Euro at the end of 2001. If you found a hoard of them now, would it be legal to melt them down? (Apparently there was an official exception to the law against destroying currency. Those coin-operated machines that squash a small coin and stamp a picture on it for tourists, apparently they were officially legal, rather than just allowed because "we're not going to bother enforcing the law in this case" as they would be in most countries, I guess.)
- dheera 5y agoWhy would you melt them down? If they abolish pennies their collector value would probably be much more than 2 cents. Pennies from the 19th century can be worth several dollars, a few specific ones even several hundred dollars.
- iso1631 5y agoIf there's only a few then perhaps. There are how many billion 1 cent pieces? Going to take a long time to get some value out of them.
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- bastawhiz 5y agoThe overwhelming majority of pennies are not rare, even if they were abolished. There would be many millions (billions?) of coins which aren't really good for much except the material they are made from. Even if you had the time to inspect every penny you planned to melt to see if it was worth something meaningful, the return you'd see would likely not even begin to cover the time you'd spent looking through all those pennies. Unless you had a machine (which costs money) a few hundred dollars is unlikely to make the effort profitable.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- imglorp 5y agoAbout 300 billion were minted up to nowish.
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- dfxm12 5y agoOK. I'll sit on my pennies for a couple centuries until their value raises a couple dollars :) We can look at old, pre-Euro money like pfenning. What are the coins from the 90s worth today? I mean, sure, maybe a few extra bucks, but then you have to factor in some leg work of finding collectors who want what you have. It's not really a worthwhile for most as an investment. The scrap is easy to sell right now.
- ggm 5y agoIf you cost your labour and other inputs at zero. Otherwise you're working for less than minimum wage. Smelting on solar power? No.. then that KWh is going to cost. Or you're stealing energy. Or you're paying seigneurage to somebody to do this for you. Also: calutron silver! Can we measure radioactivity from the silver dollars used to purify U235?
- scandox 5y agoA fiancee who will sit with you sorting pennies? That's true love.
- rini17 5y agoAll 1,2 and 5 eurocent coins are copper-clad steel. Much less worth. I guess EU learned something.
- dheera 5y agoUS pennies from 1943 were made of steel, but they went right back to copper the year after. There were also a few in 1943 made of bronze, if you find one of those they'd be worth several hundred thousand dollars. And then since 1982 they are made of zinc with copper plating.
- shadilay 5y agoI don't understand what's stopping them from just melting them down in their backyard. It's not as if pennies are tracked in any way.
- dheera 5y ago> I don't understand what's stopping them Cops. If you melt enough they'll show up and stop you.
- Cthulhu_ 5y agoI do believe metal traders have to do some diligence and question suspicious supplies, like large amounts of cabling (cable theft is a real problem, they sometimes come in and cut cables from buildings or railways) Anyway they should, but in practice they make good money off of things as well so they turn a blind eye.
- bityard 5y agoI live not far from a city in the US where a house that is left vacant for more than a few days WILL get it's copper wiring, copper plumbing, and HVAC units stolen. So no, scrap dealers do not have to do much (if any) due diligence around here
- binarytox1n 5y agoI just had the copper wire stolen from a new house purchase this week so this hits hard. :(
- PinguTS 5y agoIf you count in inflation over the years you have those pennies in your closet, this would make barely any sense. Don't understand why people believe in that besides considering this some sort of an hobby, like collecting other old currencies, stamps, historic cars, and other historic stuff. Yes you could get lucky and have this one in a million penny, art work, car which was undervalued at first glance. Remember that photograph of Billy the Kid, or so that was sold at a junk yard sale? But you should not count on this as an investment. It is a hobby and you may be the lucky person but 99.9999% will not be that lucky person.
- AtlasBarfed 5y agoThe lottery probably pays better.
- noduerme 5y agoI lived in a fantastically not-awesome apartment in Mexico for awhile, across an alley from a tortilla factory that started squeaking at 5am every morning. Literally, every machine in that factory squeaked. The ladies would line up to buy fresh tortillas around 7am and I'd try to sleep through it. Anyway, there was a half-finished building across the alley, and on Sundays, the tortilla factory was always quiet, but there was this "ping....ping...ping - BANG - ping..ping..." happening. I never knew what it was. I should add that the Maras had covered my building in graffiti so it wasn't like I was going to go check out the alley at 7am to find the source of the sound. Anyway, one day I see some guys in business suits walking on the roof of that unfinished building, and I waived across the alley at them. I said "Hey, could you try to keep the noise down on Sunday morning?" He said "what noise?" I said, "you know, the ping, ping ping BANG noise." So this guy goes "oh shit, Sunday morning is when they're stealing our copper wiring". That episode has made me think for years that pennies are worth more than 1¢...but there's only so much time in life to hoard useless shit.
- CapitalistCartr 5y agoAmerican pennies are 97% zink, copper coated, since 1982. The new ones feel like plastic, but copper is just too expensive.
- noduerme 5y agoWatch me delete my comment about pennies being special.. hah. I give up. I hope they'll let me keep my playstation when I flee this shithole.
- hereforphone 5y agoDon't delete your comment, it was pretty neat
- prawn 5y agoFor anyone else unaware, Maras = gangs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mara_(gang) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mara_(gang) I liked the story!
- pg_bot 5y agoWe probably should have gotten rid of the penny a long time ago. We haven't because of concentrated benefits and diffuse costs, a common problem that plagues the federal government. The zinc and copper lobby are significantly interested in keeping pennies around and most people only pay a small price to keep the penny. I hope we create a law where any coinage that reaches a certain price threshold (~200% of face value) when being made and distributed must be redesigned or retired. This would solve this issue for any future coins that become nonsensical to mint.
- Cthulhu_ 5y ago> The zinc and copper lobby are significantly interested in keeping pennies around and most people only pay a small price to keep the penny. Do you have a source for this? It kinda sounds like conjecture, because I don't believe for a second that the production of pennies are that significant in the metals market. And as the article mentions, pennies are mainly zinc now, very little copper. Zinc is dirt cheap.
- MereInterest 5y agoNot the bulk zinc producers, but the manufacturer of the zinc blanks that are turned into pennies. From 5 minutes of searching, it looks like the Jarden Zinc Products (or their astroturfing) is the main lobbying group, as they are the sole supplier of those zinc blanks. https://publicintegrity.org/politics/saving-the-penny-makes-cents-for-zinc-backed-front-group/ https://publicintegrity.org/politics/saving-the-penny-makes-...
- kortilla 5y agoThe “copper lobby”, if such a thing were to exist, doesn’t give a shit about pennies because the amount of copper in a modern penny is irrelevant. Penny production could disappear overnight and it wouldn’t even be noticeable in copper supply. At 30 million pennies produced a day, that’s 4100 pounds of copper a day or 680 metric tons a year. The US mines over a million metric tons a year and it’s not even a top 3 global copper miner. Pennies ain’t shit in the copper game.
- cletus 5y agoI don’t understand why the US seems so incapable of simple action that displaces a very minor special interest. In Australia we got rid of the one and two cent coins 30 years ago because the buying power of the ten cent piece then was less than one cent piece originally when introduced in the 1960s. There was no big debate or opposition and no lobbying by coin producers or those who produced the metals. It just happened and basically everyone was happy not to deal with more pointless small change. And people still largely paid with cash too so electronic payment wasn’t as significant as it is today. It shouldn’t be this hard.
- newsclues 5y agoMaybe we should have stable currency that isn’t worth 10% of its former value after 60 years.
- HideousKojima 5y agoSadly even before the gold standard was abolished the government found plenty of ways to cause inflation, the problem is the Federal Reserve
- wil421 5y agoNo one is interested because we don’t use that much cash to make it an issue. Even most vending machines have machines for cards or NFC payments on cellphone. The only people still using checks or pennies are more than likely elderly. They vote in droves and will probably strike something like that down.
- chrisseaton 5y agoThe US and Germany are two western countries that have relatively high use of cash, and relative distrust of electronic payments - it's only been in the last decade or so that the US has slowly started moving away from signatures for payment and I'm still regularly asked to do it. That's unheard of in almost all comparable countries. You can also see people paying with literal $100 bills at the supermarket.
- omgwtf1000 5y agoJohn Oliver did a segment on pennies… https://youtu.be/_tyszHg96KI https://youtu.be/_tyszHg96KI
- xyst 5y agoThe half cent was eventually abolished in the mid-19th century of the US. I can see the penny fading away as well in the near future in the digital age. Although, how will transactions paid with cash (ie, a bill of $15.97 paid with $20) be fully resolved? Would the business or the customer be shortchanged by a few pennies? Even if a business does a thousand of these types of transactions (2-4 cent short changing on their end) they stand to lose $20-40 per month (or gain $20-40 per month if the business short changes the customer).
- zaptheimpaler 5y agoThis kind of thing comes up in deciding how to round floats as well. If you always round up or round down, the errors accumulate linearly. Floats use round-to-even [1] to prevent this, although even that method accumulates error proportional to sqrt(number of ops). [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rounding#Round_half_to_even https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rounding#Round_half_to_even
- Gustomaximus 5y agoWe got rid of one & two cent coins years ago in Australia. With card you pay as priced. With cash it rounds price down if ending in 1&2 and up for 3&4. For a while people would joke and try and line up costs to benefit themselves, in more extreme cases buy $1.02 items separately type thing and usual the world is falling people but this didn't last long and no-one thinks anything of it a year later.
- jliptzin 5y agoWhatever they lose would be made up for in time saved not counting and dealing with pennies.
- Beached 5y agoKorea does exactly this, they got rid of 1 and 5 won coins. every transaction is just rounded to the nearest 10. if we got rid of the penny, you round to the nearest 5. if the business hates losing that 2 cents, they will increase the price of their product by. 1or 2 cents so they get an extra 2 cents. if the customer hates that their product costs 3 or 4 cents more, they don't buy
- yupyup54133 5y agoLooks like all US 5-cent pieces minted since 1916 (aka, the buffalo nickel) have almost 6 cents worth of metal in them (75% copper, 25% nickel). Source: https://www.coinflation.com/ https://www.coinflation.com/
- hakfoo 5y agoWith some exceptions, you can go back to 1866. During WWII, some 5c coins were made out of a nickel-free alloy containing 35% silver to preserve the nickel for war efforts. These are identifiable by a large mintmark over Monticello over the reverse. Before 1892, the nickel 5c coin was issued alongside a smaller silver "half-dime". It's likely the growth of automated coin acceptance machines (early arcade amusements, slot machines, vending machines) really locked in the base-metal coin's dominance.
- zafka 5y agoThen there is the nickel which is still made of 75% copper, 25% nickel.
- dalbasal 5y agoTwo things are surprising to me. One is that copper pennies still circulate. I'd have expected most of them to end up in hoards. Gresham's Law (also observed by Maimonides centuries earlier) states that "bad money pushes out good." When a new batch of gold coins is minted with less gold, very quickly only the bad coins circulate. I guess this is a minor violation. The second thing that surprises me is that the law actually stops the coins from being melted. Isn't someone somewhere willing to commit this hard to detect crime? Is it legal to sell 100 pennies for more than $1? If so, 99% of these penny hoarders need not break any law. Just sell them onto someone who will.
- MivLives 5y agoIt is legal to sell 100 pennies for more than a $1. Junk silver is this same concept with a different metal, instead of copper it's silver coins.
- post_break 5y agoDuring this massive coin shortage wouldn't now be the perfect time to remove it?
- fairity 5y agoIf everyone begins melting pre-1982 pennies the day they're abolished, wouldn't the true value-maximizing move be saving them with the intention to sell them as a collector's item down the road?
- handrous 5y agoIn my ideal world, we'd get rid of pennies, nickels, and quarters, and go to dimes and 50¢ pieces, only. And maybe dollar coins, I dunno. I'd also be open to getting rid of everything but quarters. There's damn near nothing you can buy for under 25¢—hell, it's getting hard to find much under a dollar, with tax—and that's just gonna get worse every year. Rip the band-aid off and make the quarter the new lowest denomination. Online inflation calculator tells me a penny in 1913 is the equivalent of 27¢ today, so, yeah, let's go with the second option, actually. It's simpler. Quarters and maybe dollar coins, get rid of the rest. If we start working on it now, quarters might still be worth picking up off the ground by the time the policy's in effect.
- dillondoyle 5y agowould have to upgrade a whole hell of a lot of laundry machines if got rid of quarter! $.5 only is too big imho would have impacts on low earners and families that buy a lot of food.
- handrous 5y agoNo, I proposed either quarters-only, or dimes + fifty-cent pieces. [EDIT: That is, I agree with you that just 50¢ pieces would be too large a minimum-coin-size] Dimes are currently worth the equivalent of sub-penny coins in past decades (~40% of a 1913 penny), like the half-penny, and since those were useful then I can see the argument for keeping them around. Nickels and pennies are just useless. IMO by the time we got around to getting rid of dimes, if we started now, they'd also be useless, so I'd also be open to just going straight to quarters-only.
- kenneth 5y agoBefore I left the USA, I would special order stacks of $2 bills by the thousands and use them for tipping (particularly at bars) and to hand them to friends and acquaintances. It's crazy how much more people appreciate being given a $2 bill vs two singles. People save them and keep them as lucky charms. I got the best service when know as the guy who tipped in twos.
- postalrat 5y agoNickel hoarding is where the real money is at.
- xacky 5y agoAt a $15 an hour wage a penny is worth just 2.4 seconds.
- lastofthemojito 5y agoI'm surprised that this sort of thing isn't part of Coinstar's business. Maybe not the speculative hoarding of copper pennies, but at least collecting older silver coins that are worth substantially more than face value. But apparently Coinstar machines reject silver coins (according to this subreddit where people post what they find in the reject bin of Coinstar machines: https://old.reddit.com/r/CoinstarFinds/ https://old.reddit.com/r/CoinstarFinds/)
- drewzero1 5y agoI've always been a little curious how eliminating the penny might change the way sales tax is handled. Will everything need to be priced in a way that the total including tax will come out to an even 5 or 10? Some stores I've been to already price things to come out to an even dollar amount with tax, so I'm sure it's not impossible. Or could we finally start including sales tax in the listed prices of things? That would be really convenient for most consumers (though it would probably be a headache for non-taxable organizations).
- tomc1985 5y agoIn countries that have gotten rid of pennies, totals are simply rounded (down, I think, but it's been a while) for cash payments. Digital transactions are still at their original amount
- Ardon 5y agoCould always look up how Canada did it, they stopped in 2013
- drewzero1 5y agoI wasn't aware of that, thanks for the tip!
- shaftway 5y agoOr you just move to a model where sales tax is required to be baked into the price that you see. Then make the items all cost multiples of 5 cents. You can still use single cents for checks, credit, or whatever. The only industry I can think of that gets left behind is gas stations, and then only if you post-pay in cash (or overpay with cash I guess). And they already tend to give a discount for cash, so I think rounding off to the nearest nickel would be a pretty acceptable outcome. As a bonus I don't have to constantly explain to the kids why the $10 thing they want actually costs $10.80, or $10.85, or $10.72, or $10.97, or some other amount that differs by state / county / city.
- drewzero1 5y ago
- dehrmann 5y agoAt the Bay Area farmers' market I go to, no one has used pennies for at least a decade, and most vendors have stopped dealing with anything smaller than a quarter. Granted, these are Bay Area prices, so it might not quite work in other places. That made me realize something. El Salvador uses the US dollar, but has a minimum wage of $1.50. There are other countries in this situation, too. It might make sense for the US to stop using the penny, but it's still somewhat important in other countries.
- a_brawling_boo 5y agoI am curious if anyone has ever or can ever do a study to see if this would ever encourages inflation or not, or who knows if it would have a deflationary effect even?