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Just as crazy is that we still have the penny. Worth less than the metal it's made out of. If you see it in the street, you leave it there. When you get home yo
by eloff 4y ago
Just as crazy is that we still have the penny. Worth less than the metal it's made out of. If you see it in the street, you leave it there. When you get home you empty the change from your pockets, and the pennies just end up taking up space in a drawer somewhere. Not worth enough to even bother counting to change at the bank.
- aidenn0 4y agoIf I could, I would eliminate the penny, nickel, and dime. In terms of value, the dime is a bit iffy, but having to make change with a combination of quarters and dimes would be rather unpleasant, and now that consumer price inflation is going again, the dime should be on its way out anyways.
- dllthomas 4y agoIf memory serves, when we got rid of the half-penny it was worth more than a modern quarter. ... memory of the time I looked it up and did the calculation, not memory of the event, of course.
- gs17 4y agoHow would you handle things like change on a 1 dollar item with 10% sales tax? I use a dollar and a dime to pay for a coffee refill regularly, and no coins smaller than $0.25 would be messy without forcing prices to go up/down to round evenly or elminating all cash. Rounding to the nearest cent now isn't an issue since sales tax should always be roughly an integer percentage, but rounding to quarters is problematic.
- ajmurmann 4y agoThe US could do what Europe doors and just include the sales tax in the advertised price and arrive at desired prices by leveling things out across the offered inventory.
- metadat 4y agoThis approach is too imprecise, you'd constantly be rounding everything up to the nearest dollar -- the net net equates to yet another ripoff against consumers.
- emptybits 4y agoIn Canada, with sales taxes varing from 5% to 15% by province, we round to the nearest nickel on cash transactions. Non-cash transactions are rounded to the nearest penny as usual. Works fine IMO. Note that the rounding is to the nearest nickel, neither up nor down. So it favours neither buyer nor seller; it all nets out about the same for all in the end. We stopped minting pennies 10 years ago. They're still legal tender but rare to see since there's no need with 5-cent cash rounding conventions now. There were brief popular grumblings and misplaced arithmetic anxiety leading up to the death of the penny. I expect the same when we bury the nickel and I bet few will miss it either when its time comes. And then the dime. Of course one can construct amusing temporary edge cases or arbitrage opportunities when buying specific quantities of specifically priced items in the presence of any new rounding rules. The market will respond.
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- CydeWeys 4y agoThe dime is small and worth saving. And if you redesigned the nickel to be even smaller still, then it could be saved too. It's really amazing how the dime is the smallest coin, when you think about it. What a basic design error.
- hakfoo 4y agoIt is a historic artifact, not a design error. From the beginning of US coinage to 1891, silver "half dimes" were issued for the 5c denomination. (There were also briefly silver 3c coins) The 5-gram base-metal nickel was introduced in the 1866 due to silver coins being hoarded amid post-wartime uncertainty, but eventually was preferred to the tiny silver coin.
- eth0up 4y agoPre 1983 pennies are, I think, worth 2-3 cents in copper. The value fluctuates with copper spot price, so this could go up or down.
- forgotmypw17 4y agoI don't leave it there, because it's a pretty coin.
- roomey 4y agoTerry Pratchett did a piece on this in his book, "making money". A scam artist was asked to take over the capital city's rotten central bank, which contained the mint. He made the point that these little coins cost more to make than they were worth, and what was the point? In this case they had a coin that was a tenth of a penny I think. Turns out the point was when you didn't have a lot of money, these coins mattered. They could buy you a not so rotten apple core on the right street. I think the point was; life is a lot different when you are poor, and that's when cents matter.
- thrown_22 4y agoThe penny doesn't really buy you a rotten apple core in the US today.
- VierScar 4y agoWouldn't it be better to not create the pennies in the first place, if they're not worth the metal it's stamped on. And then use the money saved and either give that to the poor or create services for them/donating to not-for-profits
- eloff 4y agoThey don't even matter when you're poor. We got rid of pennies in Canada. Prices are the same, but the final bill at the till is rounded to the nearest nickel. You don't lose anything, just the weight. I'd like to see nickels go away as well. Now that I'm using US currency again the whole penny thing just seems pointless.