8 ms·

Worth noting this piece was written in 2002. Ten years later in 2012, Canada finally took the penny ($0.01 coin) out of circulation. Cash transactions were to

• seized 3y ago
  Canada still has plenty of those machines, they just have copper or brass blanks in them.
• euroderf 3y ago
  If the US rounds everything to nickels, then the current system of 1-5-10-25-100, which needs an 18-cent piece, becomes (after division by 5) a new system of 1-2-5-20, which needs... what new denomination ? Maybe none ?
  • wiml 3y ago
    A $2.50 coin would fill the gap well.
    • galangalalgol 3y ago
      We could just bump everything to 3,7,11 and ... 29 maybe? And keep 100 cents to the dollar.
• eapressoandcats 3y ago
  I suspect it’s even dumber than that and no one wants to remove a coin from circulation with Lincoln on it.
  • gojomo 3y ago
    It's actually less dumb but more corrupt: it's the lobbying funded by the company that sells zinc coin blanks to the US Treasury: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Americans_for_Common_Cents https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Americans_for_Common_Cents
    • novemp 3y ago
      [dead]
  • Projectiboga 3y ago
    He's on the $5 bill.
• bryanlarsen 3y ago
  The removal of the penny was done in Canada at a time when the government needed a distraction from a scandal. It worked fabulously, and was way more popular than people expected due to the pro-penny faction being way louder than the silent majority who were glad to be rid of the things.
  • throwup238 3y ago
    It devastated the wishing fountain industry though, it still hasn’t recovered. Neither has Canadian wish delivery. There’s only so much the Make a Wish Foundation can compensate.
    • wycy 3y ago
      I feel like this is a joke but genuinely can’t tell for sure
      • robobro 3y ago
        [flagged]
      • graypegg 3y ago
        Was during the Harper government era, like another commenter said, there was basically constant on-going scandals at the time. Big populist decisions like breaking up Make A Wish Canada Ltd (or at least putting some pressure on them) was a distraction from a lot of shady government dealings happening at the time. I think most people assumed we'd see a more bespoke wish market arise, but sadly the downgrading of MAW Canada, then it's eventual restructuring lead to a buy out by Rogers Communications Ltd, who very quickly laid off the Joy and Magic department. They're pretty much just a holding company for the IP now. Things just aren't like they used to be here.
    • graypegg 3y ago
      Gross Domestic Wish Production down 42% from their 2011 peak. Many sectors that were ancillary to the wish industry (Make A Wish foundation included) had to move onto manufacturing Hopes, Dreams, and Aspirations, which sadly even as a combined accounting group still don't generate the sort of revenue we saw with the WishEx market during the predepennification era. I think about my grandfather, who worked in wishmithing before it was even regulated, selling scrap copper to throw into ponds to the local community. Maybe we need to return to that, locally sourced wishes would be a smaller industry, but it would open up new opportunities for the next generation to get into the craft.
• kevindamm 3y ago
  Incidentally, pressing those pennies effectively removes them from circulation.
  • notatoad 3y ago
    which is a useful thing to do after abolishing the penny. not so much while they're still making more pennies.
• analog31 3y ago
  I suspect it's because nobody wants to admit that a penny has become worthless, and probably a nickel too. Also, there may be people who are worried that they will start getting ripped off by the rounding process. I read a book about units of measure, and there was often strong local resistance to adopting regional or national standards because folks thought it would be a chance for merchants to surreptitiously raise prices. They were probably right.
  • quickthrower2 3y ago
    I think Spain and other countries had this kind of inflation when moving to the Euro.
    • deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    • kolinko 3y ago
      Exactly opposite. Accessing Euro-zone in 1999 has stabilised Spain's inflation at around 2-4%, before getting into Euro it was wild. https://tradingeconomics.com/spain/inflation-cpi https://tradingeconomics.com/spain/inflation-cpi From 1997 until 2021 it was at a stable 2-4%. 1985-1995 it was 5%-10%, and 1965-1985 it was 10-20%. Also, if you compare inflation of say Czech Republic, Slovakia, Poland, Estonia and Estonia (or any other comparable countries), you will have a difficult time spotting which ones of them have Euro and when it was adopted.
      • ffgjgf1 3y ago
        It didn’t necessarily have much to do with the Euro. Inflation was high everywhere back in the 80s
    • zeroq 3y ago
      Yes, in Germany Euro was dubbed Teuer-o ("teuer" meaning expensive). Basically, most prices were converted 1:1 from Deutsch Mark to Euro.
  • 3y ago
• nitwit005 3y ago
  Do you remember when someone decided the Starbucks holiday cups weren't Christmas-y enough, and part of a war on Christmas? Major news stations covered the issue. Politicians gave comment (Trump also chimed in). They don't want to get rid of the penny because they know someone will try to pull a similar stunt. At this point it's a proven strategy to get free press and social media attention.
  • Spooky23 3y ago
    Maybe, maybe not. A lot of reactionaries are into coins, specifically hoarding pennies to melt for scrap when they cease to be legal tender.
• jccalhoun 3y ago
  The same reason we haven't gone to the metric system: we hate change. (except for pennies though. I guess that is one kind of change we love...)
• davchana 3y ago
  in Europe, many penny machines now simply aak for a euro or 1.5 euro, and press a copper blank from an internal cassette.
• jandrewrogers 3y ago
  In the US, there are other weird complications if prices were rounded to the nearest nickel. One that is not mentioned much is that some large businesses have used the last digit of the price to encode metadata for decades. It is the equivalent of a tagged pointer in software, except the extra bits are buried in the least significant digit of the price, precisely because changing the value by a couple cents was below the pricing noise floor. I have to imagine quantizing prices to the nearest nickel would create Y2K-like software problems for some companies which makes them an interested party in maintaining the status quo.
  • reaperman 3y ago
    You don't have to quantize the unit price to the smallest coin, only the total final purchase amount. Gasoline is typically priced at $x.xx9/gallon, with the "unit" ending in 9/10th's of one penny, and this doesn't break anything, they just use bankers rounding before calculating the final payment amount. Similarly, sales taxes often result in a fractional penny as well, which again gets floor() or bankers_rounding().
• Paul-Craft 3y ago
  Actually, if I had to guess about the US situation, I'd tend to blame the zinc lobby. US 1 cent coins are mostly made of zinc now, and only plated with copper.