1mo ago

Should the US get rid of the penny?

Is it about time, or is it still useful? If you think its time has passed, what about the nickel/dime/quarter?

54 comments

Sure. Fuck it. I wouldn’t waste any brain power on it when the gestures wildly at everything is still happening

New Zealand abandoned the 1c and 2c coin ~~decades ago~~ in 1990, and then the 5c coin too in 2006. Never been missed. Nothing changed.
See https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Zealand_dollar
Prices are all still in 0.01 increments, and are Swedish rounded when paid for with cash (electronic payments are exact and never rounded).
- Similar story in Norway, with 10 øre deprecated in early 90s; 50 øre in 2012. Prices are still 1 øre below a round number, even though the average Norwegian has never used coins of that denomination. (And lots of us haven't really used cash for a couple of decades now.)

Canada got rid of pennjes like ten years ago. We barely noticed after the first few months.

It was time to ditch the penny 20 years ago. The nickel has since joined that club.
- Didn't the half cent we ditched in the 1800s have the buying power of a dime today when we ditched it?
  
  That was the Stat like 10 years ago. It has to be worse now.

https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2020/07/14/890435359/is-it-time-to-kill-the-penny
By the 1990s, Kolbe says, he was introducing new legislation to kill the penny with every new session of Congress. But he kept facing resistance — for example, from the speaker of the House at the time, Dennis Hastert, who represented a district in Illinois, the home state of Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln, of course, is on the penny, and Kolbe says that proved to be a major roadblock. So were special interests such as zinc miners and the company that supplies the "penny blanks" used to mint the penny.
Penny defenders' strongest argument was that eliminating it would hurt consumers. All those $9.99 products? The prices would be jacked up to an even $10! They called it the "rounding tax." But Whaples, that penny-researching economist at Wake Forest University, conducted a study of convenience stores and found that the final digit of purchases, which usually involve multiple products and a sales tax, was pretty much random. "And so if you round it to the nearest nickel, the customer wouldn't get gouged," Whaples says. Sometimes you'd round up; other times you'd round down. In the end, it would basically be a wash.
- The penny lobby: so many puns and dad jokes just waiting to be released, like in this centence
  
  How much stock in zinc do the plebs even have?
- Yeah. But the penny allows salespeople to provide a price that is enticing to the consumer because it's basically taking advantage of the psychology of how we round things. So it's good for businesses, and that's exactly why it still exists.
  
  I don't follow. We have .99 prices in Canada. Debit and credit pays exact, and the change is just rounded.
  The penny just fails as a currency. You can't buy anything with it. When we had them ten years ago, I would just dump them into recycling bins if i wasn't at home near the penny bucket.
  
  In that case it would actually round down, so $9.99 would become $9.95.

Yes. I think that's what the study explains in the last paragraph there. The customer is still likely to buy the item if it's ending in $.95 vs $.99. However, as the price of the item goes up, that four cent difference is less important. In the decision making of the buyer, but also costs the company more per unit. It's less important to the business/seller the more expensive it is. I think that's part of the reason they called it a wash.
- The prices on shelves don't change when you drop the penny.
  Final cost is just rounded to the nearest 5 cent at checkout if you pay in cash.

Consider the fact that Japan has a ¥1 coin. It is strangely light, and can actually float on water if you are careful enough with the surface tension.
The purpose of leaving that coin in circulation is pricing. ¥399 looks much better than ¥400.
At the moment, ¥1 is about 0.64¢.
- The 1 yen should've been taken out of circulation even earlier than the penny. Right now it's only worth about .65 of a US penny. Other countries have taken their 1 cent equivalent out of circulation and stores haven't stopped doing the .99 ending in prices-- you just round at the register.
- I got to say I disagree about the pricing thing. I know every business uses this psychological exploit, but to any kind of budget conscious shopper, doing math with round numbers is so so so much better. Like if I'm looking at a case of oil for my car and six bottles is $40, it makes it way easier to figure out the price per liter instead of bullshit like $38.99
- Several countries got rid of the penny already, we still have pricing listed to the 1 cent. If you pay cash it's rounded to the nearest 5cent if you pay with card it's not rounded at all.
  Nothing changes you just don't spend money minting coins that cost more than their value, and don't have to wait behind someone digging through their wallet for those pennies that they "swear are in here somewhere"
- I'd argue it's because of a hatred of anything that looks like price increases, especially among the older crowd. Japan is still very much cash-based, especially in those older generations. Then 1-yen coin being light and cheap probably helps, but I don't know if it actually costs more to make.
  That said, I'd be happy getting rid of the 1 and 5 yen coins, especially since machines do not tend to take them.

Yes. Yes. No. Just penny needs to die.
- I hope she doesn't

I say get rid of money completely. Everything should be free for everyone. Except for my neighbor, Ron. He's still gotta pay.

Yes, and daylight savings time and the electoral college too please.

What will we do with all these ‘take a penny, leave a penny’ trays?
- Replace them with "take a twenty, leave a twenty" tray.

I think I remember hearing that the cost to make a penny is now more than one cent. Considering you can't really do anything with them, I'd say it's time to discontinue the penny at the very least.

Only if they round down, and not up. I don't want to pay an extra 4¢ in tax on everything.
- In Canada it only rounds if you pay cash, credit/debit is still to the penny.
  And with cash it rounds up if it's $8.48 but it would round down if it were $8.47 so it generally averages out. Stores still have things listed for $9.99 rather than $10.00 though which is annoying.
  
  Idk man. Richard Pryor's half a penny scam from the old Superman III comes to mind. I'm sure the corporations will use it to figure out a way to make billions more dollars. Basically I don't want anything to change anymore. I can't think of the last positive change since the ACA. It seems like every change, even ones that seem positive, end up screwing us over.
- Well, it would round on the total of the transaction and not the item.
  Plus you can round both up and down and you will end up with a rough wash over time.

Shift the decimal point two over so a penny is worth a dollar.

Lose 'em. Nickels too, gone. Honestly if we ditched dimes too I wouldn't shed a tear. Quarters are cool though, they can stay.

https://youtu.be/aPzU7tePihQ?t=189&si=LacdAeLSyrnS7vK1

I don't think anyone ever gets excited about finding anything less than a quarter. Hell, even today I don't know if quarters are worthwhile. We should definitely get rid of everything besides quarters. I don't think any machines even take anything other than quarters. Maybe some drink machines do, but that's it. Like, two dimes and a nickel is objectively less useful than a quarter. And not just because of the mild inconvenience of carrying two additional coins lol.
I think there are enough places that use quarters that we shouldn't get rid of them.
- Quarters are useful if only to feed into pinball machines.

Can we just round everything to the nearest dollar? If something is still cheap enough to be 25 cents then it should only be sold in a pack of 4.

Nope I use cash almost exclusively.
- Not sure how paying cash would make you want to use pennies, your final at the till will be rounded up or down so that you aren't paying more than usual over time.
- Do you mail your internet provider an envelope full of change?
  
  Ohhh I wish I could
- How is it relevant? Would transactions rounding to the nearest nickel not make it easier for you to carry change?

Currently you can just get rid of all change, or increase the value of the dollar, by a lot.

We need to move to mobile payments. Cash is dirty.
- Cashless is class warfare. Some people can't get bank accounts.
  
  I guess they can't participate in the economy if they aren't participating in society.

54 comments