“Get it done, and you will deserve the Nobel Prize!”

September 1, 2024 8:47 AM

America must free itself from the tyranny of the penny (NYT gift, archive.is
posted by box (102 comments total)

My first introduction to CPI was in 1975 when a single scoop of Baskin Robbins went from 25c to 27c.

50 years on, I haven't touched a penny, or any coin for that matter except quarters I keep in my car for parking meters and car washes, in many years.

Money is just numbers in a spreadsheet to me. Kinda weird, really.
posted by torokunai at 8:57 AM on September 1 [2 favorites]

Must be nice for it to be so abstract.
posted by sagc at 9:01 AM on September 1 [21 favorites]

I see aluminum is volumetrically 40% cheaper than zinc so I guess we should just make 1g pennies like the Japanese ¥1 coin.
posted by torokunai at 9:02 AM on September 1 [2 favorites]

(money being abstract for me is more a function of "tap-to-pay" taking over since 2014 . . . my personal finances resemble in-game budgeting like in Eve Online vs real $ now)
posted by torokunai at 9:09 AM on September 1 [7 favorites]

FWIW Canada did this years ago and the effect on day to day life was basically zero. I’ll need to dig out the link, but a while back somebody decided to keep careful track over a year of how much they gained or lost to rounding to the nearest nickel and at the end of it they came out ahead something like nine cents.
posted by mhoye at 9:13 AM on September 1 [18 favorites]

Like other Nobel Prizes, this one also comes with a 1 million dollar award, but payed entirely in pennies.
posted by I-Write-Essays at 9:14 AM on September 1 [10 favorites]

I worked in AU for a month or so back in 2009. I was amazed at how nice it was to have dollar coins (and two dollar coins!) in use, and also how everyone was just kind of baffled at how dumb the US was about the obvious fix of just abolishing the one cent coin like they had in 1992.

But they also had two cent coins up until then, so it's not like they didn't make dumb coin mistakes too.
posted by SaltySalticid at 9:16 AM on September 1 [5 favorites]

I would miss pennies if they took them away. They're part of what makes me feel like Scrooge McDuck every eh two years or so when I take The Change Bucket to the grocatorium to turn it into "free" groc.

And, honestly, a political candidate being all LET'S ELIMINATE THE PENNY! would be a serious negative for me, because it would tell me they're deeply prone to focus on irrelevant details instead of what matters.
posted by GCU Sweet and Full of Grace at 9:24 AM on September 1 [9 favorites]

The article mentions Canada eliminating the penny!

If anyone is just reading the comments and thinking “yeah yeah, cost more than 1 cent to produce, zinc lobby, government inertia, etc.” go and read the article. It’s much more detailed (and funnier!) than most treatments of the subject and I learned a lot more than I was expecting.
posted by smelendez at 9:34 AM on September 1 [23 favorites]

I've switched almost completely to credit cards to never have to deal with change again. On a very practical level, it's nice not having change weighing down my pockets and threatening to scratch my electronics. Since everywhere takes credit cards now, I don't care too much about the existence of the penny personally, but I think it works out to be a tax on the poor and small businesses. Credit cards charge interchange fees to merchants, which cause them to raise prices generally, of which I can recapture through credit card rewards while getting subsidized by cash payers. I may even prefer more privacy over a cashback program, but I'm sure as hell not going back to carrying around coinage.

Relatedly, by the time we get around to eliminating the penny, the nickel will probably be in the same position. One solution that might make sense is to just get rid of everything but the dime, and cut off any price at second figure after the decimal. No reason to have prices that exact, and it would quell any complains about hidden inflation: prices would probably end in .9 instead of .99 by default.
posted by ayerarcturus at 9:37 AM on September 1 [4 favorites]

I'm ready for more radical change (pun int.). Get rid of nickels and dimes, too. They are also effectively worthless. Make the coins $0.25, $0.50, $1, and $2. Notes at $5, $10, $20, $50, $100, $200, and $500.

If you're thinking "A $500 bill, that's crazy!" please remember that currency in the US has not kept up with inflation. In 1969, all bills larger than $100 were ordered to be collected by the Federal Reserve. $100 in 1969 dollars is $857 in 2024 dollars. We actually deserve $1000 bills at this point.
posted by Mister Fabulous at 9:37 AM on September 1 [15 favorites]

Why read the article when you can just share your smug but uninformed opinion based on a headline and a years-long grudge?

Oh, because you'll find wryly funny writing like this:

Within the United States, it is accepted that the Treasury Department will relentlessly flood the penny-sogged nation with nuisance pennies until Congress passes a law to stop it from doing so....

the arguments Mark Weller makes in favor of continued penny production are well represented on the Americans for Common Cents website, an invaluable propaganda armory for penny-manufacture zealots.

...Fortunately, despite a dearth of pennies, the nuclear winter for charity forecast by Americans for Common Cents did not crystallize.

posted by Nelson at 9:39 AM on September 1 [20 favorites]

Europe has approached this in an interesting way by having some countries, like finland and italy, mandate rounding prices to the nearest €0.05, while other countries continue to allow the inescapable €X.99 which allegedly is more attractive to consumers than the one-cent higher price (which makes a little more sense in europe where taxes are part of the price already). I wonder if there's (legal) any reason why a few state governments couldn't mandate $0.05 price increments to show the rest of the country that nothing bad will happen if we rid ourselves of the penny, since it's definitely impossible to do basically anything at the federal level at this point.
posted by dis_integration at 9:49 AM on September 1 [3 favorites]

When I was a kid back in the 1900s, the grocery store still had gumball and toy machines that took either a penny, a nickel, a dime, or a quarter. In retrospect, even then I image my mom handed us the coins to waste on candy and superballs so she wouldn't have to deal with them later.

In high school, when I asked to go on a Girl Scouts Wider Opportunity, a pretty expensive trip, one way my parents had me contribute to the cost was gathering and rolling all the coins in the house. Recollection is that I generated nearly $100 that way.

We made a Coinstar run before we moved in 2022, clearing out the stuff accumulated pre-2020, of course, and I doubt we'll ever do one again. I now use cash almost exclusively for paying folks for odd jobs and handing to folks asking for money. It's really weird. I can't even think of the last time I handled a penny.
posted by hydropsyche at 9:59 AM on September 1 [6 favorites]

Coinstar gets 12% ?!?
posted by R. Mutt at 10:04 AM on September 1 [8 favorites]

This change will have to be done under a military protectorate, because no politician can withstand the malicious nostalgia Americans can project. You might as well suggest something crazy like moving to the metric system.
posted by credulous at 10:04 AM on September 1 [9 favorites]

But [Australia] also had two cent coins up until then, so it's not like they didn't make dumb coin mistakes too.

I couldn't decide if "dumb coin mistakes" was a Jeopardy category, or a crossword clue. But is an anagram of "mimed outback sins" so make of that what you will.
posted by Greg_Ace at 10:05 AM on September 1 [11 favorites]

Let's get rid of coins altogether. The worst outcome would be getting rid of the penny only to lose the dollar bill. I hate coin change and hate it having to treat it seriously.
posted by Carillon at 10:07 AM on September 1 [2 favorites]

Another fun fact about Coinstar is that the pause while it counts your money is bullshit. It already counted all of your money as it fell in. It just unnerved people who didn't want to believe the machine was already done counting, so they literally added a fake "Counting..." delay and coin sorting sound effects just to make people stop freaking out.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 10:07 AM on September 1 [42 favorites]

This doesn't help if someone is going to Coinstar because they need cash for groceries or something, but if you're just cleaning house, I always opt for the gift certificate route. I'm not giving Coinstar 12% of anything!!
posted by kittens for breakfast at 10:20 AM on September 1 [6 favorites]

Well, he certainly put his two cents in.
posted by TedW at 10:23 AM on September 1 [2 favorites]

Look, mark my words, at some point we'll be facing an existential threat that can only be countered by small discs of copper-plated zinc, and the bureaucrats will be like "oh, no, we're doomed, how will be possibly distribute these precisely calibrated bits of metal to every household in time" and one brave little materials engineer will raise their hand, a penny in their palm: "did you just say 2.5% copper, 97.5% zinc?" and that is why I'm a hoarder and you should keep everything around just in case.
posted by nobody at 10:25 AM on September 1 [7 favorites]

Based on the cost of physical therapy, you should only pick up a penny off the ground if your chance of throwing out your back is less than 1 in 200,000.
posted by credulous at 10:28 AM on September 1 [9 favorites]

People in the U.S. are notoriously stodgy when it comes to coinage and paper money. The Lincoln portrait on the penny has been there since 1909. The $1 bill has changed only slightly since the 1920s, and today's bills would be immediately recognizable to soldiers fighting in World War II. The dime has had the same design since 1945, when Roosevelt died.

Multiple attempts at bringing in a dollar coin have gone nowhere.

Multiple attempts to get Harriet Tubman on paper money--especially to replace drunken hillbilly, slave trader and genocide enthusiast Andrew Jackson on the $20--have been slow-walked or blocked.

A big chunk of the resistance to change (no pun intended) are the usual conservative-oriented, conspiracy theory types who also have a very unhealthy obsession with tiny financial transactions and the perception that someone, somewhere, is trying to "rip them off". Well, there probably are wealthy people doing things that are not in your best interest. Raising the price on your McDonald's purchase from 8.99 to 9.00 is not one of them.

The irony is that if you wanted to go back to earlier times in U.S. history....you'd have dollar coins and $1000 bills and more. Talk to very old people--there are still a few people who remember tagging along as kids when their parents would buy a new car, and pay cash with a $1000 bill or two for the purchase.

The period people are weirdly nostalgic for seems to be the period from the mid-60s when silver was taken out of coins, to 1998, when the $20 was very slightly redesigned, or to the late-2000 aughts, when state quarter designs started coming out. During that time, other than bicentennial coins in 1976, there were basically no visible changes to U.S. coins and currency in general use.
posted by gimonca at 10:30 AM on September 1 [9 favorites]

As long as this process is legislated by Congress and it's myriad of special interests, nothing will change. This is why we still have the paper dollar. It's all just so so stupid.
posted by JoeZydeco at 10:31 AM on September 1

You haven’t seen right-wing culture war bullshit to compare to the “Government is stealing your money” propaganda campaign that would be launched at the innumerate if a Democratic administration eliminated the penny.

Also, it turns out “trochilidine” means with the intensity of a hummingbird, if you were also wondering.
posted by Horace Rumpole at 10:33 AM on September 1 [10 favorites]

All that said, I do worry a bit about the ubiquity of credit-card payments. Don't get me wrong, I buy almost everything with a plastic card these days, but having Visa/MC skim a bit off the top of every payment doesn't seem like a great way to run a society. It's a technological chokepoint. And, if cash went away entirely, there'd be a requirement for everyone to have a credit rating and/or bank account to participate, which could be leveraged to exclude and oppress people.
posted by gimonca at 10:35 AM on September 1 [6 favorites]

>The Change Bucket

I had one of these when living in Japan in the 1990s but one day I started grabbing a handful of change on the way out each day and it disappeared pretty quick.

> Visa/MC skim

VISA $32B topline revenue, $17B after-tax shareholder income (53% net)
M/C $25B / $11B (44% net)

ConocoPhillips has a similar ~$60B topline as these two combined but with a $11B after-tax shareholder net (18%), in-line with the oil majors these days. (Apple is at $385B / $101B for 26%).
posted by torokunai at 10:48 AM on September 1 [1 favorite]

Is this another good point to bring up the idea of free government operated checking accounts administered via the post office? Because it remains a good idea.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 10:49 AM on September 1 [27 favorites]

The lost employee time in counting pennies for change is a major transaction inefficiency for cash. But the conspiracy mindset will vote that the penny stays, because to get rid of it symbolizes inflation and getting poorer, among other rumors of evil government.
posted by Brian B. at 10:52 AM on September 1

You want some new money? Try these on for size:

Get rid of the $1 and $2 bills, replace with coins.

$5 bill: Martin Luther King. Reverse: March on Washington, 1963.
$10 bill: Edwin Hubble. Alternate choice: Einstein. Reverse: Hubble (or Webb) space telescope.
$20 bill: Georgia O'Keefe. Reverse: Southwestern scene from O'Keefe painting.
$50 bill: Coltrane. Alternate choice: Sinatra!
$100 bill: Eisenhower. Reverse: Ike with front-line troops.
$500 bill: Steve Jobs.
$1000 bill: Amadeo P. Giannini. Reverse: typical suburban neighborhood, assuming anyone can still afford to get a mortgage.
posted by gimonca at 10:56 AM on September 1 [7 favorites]

First they came for the pennies
posted by gottabefunky at 10:57 AM on September 1 [2 favorites]

Is this another good point to bring up the idea of free government operated checking accounts administered via the post office?

Yes, definitely.
posted by gimonca at 10:57 AM on September 1 [2 favorites]

IIRC coinstar doesn’t skim if you select Amazon credit
posted by gottabefunky at 11:01 AM on September 1 [7 favorites]

I had one of these when living in Japan in the 1990s but one day I started grabbing a handful of change on the way out each day and it disappeared pretty quick.

Same, plus I added a "tradition" of trying some weird drink from a vending machine on the walk back from work every day, which tends to offset my coin accumulation. I do like carrying around a 500-yen coin or two. Paying for something with one coin is weirdly satisfying.

Tip: the train station IC card machines take coins above a certain amount (10-yen I think), so if you filter coins into two jars, then you can take a handful of the larger ones and recover them to your suica card every time you pass through a station. Every little bit helps them not accumulate into a 5 lb. baggy of coins that seem too valuable to just throw away, but too heavy to pack for next time.
posted by ctmf at 11:09 AM on September 1 [2 favorites]

You want some new money? Try these on for size:

$1: John Brown, reverse: pile of dead confederates
$5: Still Lincoln, reverse: pile of dead confederates
$10: Sherman, reverse: Atlanta burning behind a pile of dead confederates
$20: Nat Turner, reverse: pile of dead slavers in front of a burning plantation home
$50: Grant, reverse: Grant personally beheading Lee with Narsil, a pile of dead confederates in the background
$100: Eisenhower, reverse: dead nazis being thrown onto the pile of the same dead confederates but now skeletonized
posted by GCU Sweet and Full of Grace at 11:15 AM on September 1 [58 favorites]

NYT felt compelled to let readers know that the journalist actually went to various places? Most of their “ reporting” reads like the writer communicated via text.
posted by Ideefixe at 11:15 AM on September 1 [1 favorite]

And get rid of nickels too. Anything ending in five cents can be cash transacted exactly by adding dimes to quarters, or getting dimes back from a quarter. We don't need to solve other ways.
posted by Brian B. at 11:20 AM on September 1 [3 favorites]

Look, mark my words, at some point we'll be facing an existential threat that can only be countered by small discs of copper-plated zinc

Such as a critical worldwide fuse shortage?
posted by Greg_Ace at 11:21 AM on September 1 [5 favorites]

You guys have money??
posted by maxwelton at 11:40 AM on September 1 [11 favorites]

Or we could keep pennies and revalue the dollar. $1NEWUSD = $10USD. That makes the penny the equivalent of a dime, and now worth keeping.
posted by CheeseDigestsAll at 11:40 AM on September 1 [1 favorite]

NYT felt compelled to let readers know that the journalist actually went to various places? Most of their “ reporting” reads like[...]

Given the writer's evident sense of irony throughout the piece, I would wager she supplied that bio blurb herself. (I mean, from a certain angle, the entire essay is all about lavishing attention on something so small that no one with authority is willing to spend even 5 minutes contemplating it.) Plus now there's no way they'll deny her those expense receipts.
posted by nobody at 11:43 AM on September 1 [5 favorites]

Or we could keep pennies and revalue the dollar. $1NEWUSD = $10USD. That makes the penny the equivalent of a dime, and now worth keeping.

This may sound extreme to people, but it's actually a real thing you can do.

In 2005, the Romanian leu was revalued at the rate of 10,000 "old" lei (ROL) for one "new" leu (RON), thus psychologically bringing the purchasing power of the leu back in line with those of other major Western currencies.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 11:51 AM on September 1 [5 favorites]

I never realized Talking Heads’ Girlfriend is Better was a political anthem.
posted by Abehammerb Lincoln at 11:51 AM on September 1 [4 favorites]

>get rid of it symbolizes inflation and getting poorer,

the irony is the Cross of Gold the anti-Fed types want to return to was very comfortable for the people with all the money, as long as they didn't lose it in a panic or bank failure.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1tlgw shows the recessionary periods of the US economy since 1854, where we can see the contrast of being on a hard money standard to 1933 vs. 1933 to now; in my lifetime the 1970s and 80s inflation-fighting events were largely pissing in the wind (Fed policy was attempting to slow down the 80 million boomers from overwhelming the financial system), 1991 and 2001 were driven by local economies going bad as the macro economy shifted and burned out uncompetitive industries and otherwise failing investments (the -40% bear market of 2000-2002 fed on itself as our 1990s economy morphed into the 2000s version with more imports and less domestic manufacturing).

That the US in the 19th century experienced recessions at all when our economically active population was booming and we had a continent to expropriate and develop, plus the continuing increase in productivity via advances in technology and sciences. is perplexing but probably just due to having a very poorly regulated macro economy . . . IMO 2004-2008 was a re-run of the typical financial crashes so common pre-Fed, and while the Fed could have done more to prevent it, responsibility for the bubble crash of 2008 lies primarily with the executive branch that engineered the mortgage fraud boom of 2003 - 2006 that produced it).
posted by torokunai at 11:56 AM on September 1 [4 favorites]

As a Canadian, I obviously ran to read the article to see if we were mentioned. Was rewarded with the following:

Many Americans will be surprised to learn that Canada eliminated its 1-cent coin more than a decade ago. Canadians are aware of this — how little Americans know of their world, and how bewildering it must seem in the rare instances we contemplate it. When I interviewed Canadians about their abolition of the penny, I often sensed from their responses that they were handling me gently. “Our country,” one official from the Royal Canadian Mint informed me with an almost apologetic smile, “is just as big as yours.” For all I know, he could be right.

When she talks to a Canadian about how the info campaign about rounding went, she manages to find a very optimistic citizen:

I admit that the thought I might be asked to pay, say, $3.80 (cash) for something that, according to the laws of God and man, has been calculated to cost $3.79 (cash) is not only reflexively infuriating to me but a potential source of permanent confusion. The Canadian government mitigated one of those problems (no hope for the other) with an information campaign that included signs with simple charts dividing potential prices into two columns: “Round down” and “Round up.” I asked Karl Littler from the Retail Council of Canada if there were still signs at cash registers explaining the rounding. “It’s 10 years now, so even the most obtuse people have pretty much figured it out,” he said, and laughed.

Oh Karl. As Canada heads into an election cycle with a popular Trump-style candidate, I hope your view of the obtuse members of the voting public is more accurate than mine. It’s definitely more generous.
posted by hurdy gurdy girl at 11:57 AM on September 1 [5 favorites]

Very much dislike coins. Pennies are especially stupid.

You want some new money? Try these on for size:

$1: Yellowstone National Park
$5: Grand Canyon
$10: Glacier National Park
$50: (another national park)
$100: (etc)

Don't need to worry about placing people on money who might later turn out to be less than perfect.
posted by davidmsc at 12:02 PM on September 1 [11 favorites]

personally i’m voting for the piles of dead confederates
posted by dis_integration at 12:08 PM on September 1 [8 favorites]

So if the author has their way, all American would be... penniless?
posted by demi-octopus at 12:09 PM on September 1 [8 favorites]

Don’t a lot of chain stores in the US use the cents in prices as metadata - like prices ending in $x.57 are non-returnable or $x.88 were on sale?
posted by skyscraper at 12:09 PM on September 1 [4 favorites]

Fantastic article. And incisive - as I think this explains it all:
"the Canadians had a hidden advantage. Their mint shepherds its coins through every stage of their life cycle: forecasting the need for them, producing them, distributing them, recirculating them and retiring them. In the United States, these responsibilities are divided among a hodgepodge of public and private entities"

"Days later, her spokesman replied: The Treasury relies on the Federal Reserve to determine the amount of coins needed; I should contact the Federal Reserve if I had any more questions. When I approached the Federal Reserve, a representative informed me that “any questions on coin” should, in fact, be directed to the Mint. The Mint, in turn, advised me to seek answers from the Federal Reserve."

Less people in charge of things also, although more perniciously, explains the other great source of Canadian money simplicity, Interac (source of the greater dominance of debit and easy e-transfers) - five monstrously large banks, attempted collusion by creating Interac and shutting out smaller players, forced to open up and allow everyone to participate. Efficiency by monopoly. Hmm.

Most don't want to hear the problem with American government is too many people get a say, including dividing power endless ways and lobbying the shit out of each one, but this is the kind of trade-off you get. Pennies forever.
posted by lookoutbelow at 12:22 PM on September 1 [3 favorites]

$1: Yellowstone National Park
$5: Grand Canyon
$10: Glacier National Park
$50: (another national park)
$100: (etc)

...

personally i’m voting for the piles of dead confederates

$100: Piles of Dead Confederates National Monument
posted by Greg_Ace at 12:26 PM on September 1 [14 favorites]

Don’t a lot of chain stores in the US use the cents in prices as metadata - like prices ending in $x.57 are non-returnable or $x.88 were on sale?

They can still do that in Canada. Prices are only rounded when at the payment stage when cash is used (and then on taxed item you add about 15% sales tax so you rarely pay x.99 or x.88). If you use a card, the price retains its full precision.
posted by Monday, stony Monday at 12:28 PM on September 1 [2 favorites]

Maybe it's because I'm a depression-era subsistence farmer, but I just put change in some containers and once a year or so I roll them up, take them to the bank, and go buy a couple chickens, a can of sterno, and a shawl for the missus

Howzabout we just eliminate money? Capitalism is a fatal disease, and some of us haven't forgotten that 2 years when we weren't allowed to leave our houses and you just paid a bunch of us to stay home and play guitar and read.
posted by SystematicAbuse at 12:48 PM on September 1 [10 favorites]

If you use a card, the price retains its full precision.

The receipt shows the price too. It’s just the final tally that is rounded, so the entire bill, and it’s only rounded by the amount of change you get back.

A lot of Canadian stores had long had a “leave a penny, take a penny” jar anyway so pennies were seen as a bit random.
posted by warriorqueen at 12:53 PM on September 1 [1 favorite]

$10: Glacier National Park
...
Don't need to worry about placing people on money who might later turn out to be less than perfect.

I mean, if you're planning ahead, you may want to know something...
posted by Reasonably Everything Happens at 1:18 PM on September 1 [4 favorites]

$3: jerry garcia - reverse: a big red x - lick it and you'll see all sorts of shit in a while
posted by pyramid termite at 1:29 PM on September 1 [3 favorites]

"Look, mark my words, at some point we'll be facing an existential threat that can only be countered by small discs of copper-plated zinc... " - nobody

I do not recall which Callahan's collection it is in, but Spider Robinson's "Did You Hear the One About..." (spoiler) does involve a time-traveling con artist whose society actually needs the copper.
posted by Mutant Lobsters from Riverhead at 1:39 PM on September 1 [5 favorites]

It's like you guys are actively trying to summon K-Fed.

Britney Spears' much-maligned husband joined Americans for Common Cents and Virgin Mobile executives last month in New York's Times Square, ostensibly to "save the U.S. penny from annihilation."

Federline emerged from a red truck wearing an Abraham Lincoln mask, driving the swarm of paparazzi around the truck into a frenzy.

"Man, I feel good about the penny!" declared Federline, who was nattily dressed in a black suit, white dress shirt, aviator sunglasses and sporting his trademark stubble.
posted by ActingTheGoat at 1:40 PM on September 1 [5 favorites]

We keep the penny because Jarden Zinc can pay $140K to keep a $40+ million contract.

You only need one Senator to filibuster it to turn it into a wedge issue that then becomes a third rail shitfight that nobody wants to spend political capital on.

Graft is an excellent investment in the legislative branch.
posted by Your Childhood Pet Rock at 2:03 PM on September 1 [4 favorites]

This article got featured in today's Morning Newsletter from the NYT with an angle we haven't talked about here

I’m pretty sure I found a loophole buried deep in the forgotten annals of the U.S. legal code that could end this pointless penny plague. I think there is one person in the United States who can unilaterally kill the penny this afternoon if he or she wants to.

Sadly this was all phrased as clickbait, but who she is talking about is the Secretary of the Treasury. Because according to 31 U.S. Code § 5111

The Secretary of the Treasury shall mint and issue coins ... in amounts the Secretary decides are necessary to meet the needs of the United States;

The article consults various experts who agree this statement seems to give the Secretary of the Treasury sole discretion of how many pennies to mint. Zero, maybe, or perhaps one ceremonial penny. No need for US Congress to make a group decision, the power rests in the executive. Big if true!
posted by Nelson at 2:12 PM on September 1 [3 favorites]

Don’t a lot of chain stores in the US use the cents in prices as metadata - like prices ending in $x.57 are non-returnable or $x.88 were on sale?

Costco does, so I assume other stores do too.
posted by TedW at 2:31 PM on September 1 [1 favorite]

I, like many others, have moved almost entirely to credit cards but keep a bit of cash on me in case I need to pay for something small and don't want the business to eat the transaction fee. I actively refuse pennies as change whenever I get the chance though and honestly throw them away when I come across them. I don't like them in my pocket and I don't have a change jar anywhere that I can keep them. Even if I did it's not worth my time to process them.

Also I'm a big fan of killing the 1 and 2 dollar bills and just making coins for them. I don't get why the US keeps trying to create a new dollar coin and sell us on it when they literally control the money supply. Just set a date when no more dollars bills will be produced and let things filter out naturally over the next few years. Why keep doing these ridiculous PR campaigns?
posted by mikesch at 2:34 PM on September 1

"Quarter for your thoughts?" just doesn't have the same ring.
posted by Greg_Ace at 2:48 PM on September 1 [4 favorites]

Article completely ignored the political influence of big loafer.
posted by Abehammerb Lincoln at 3:01 PM on September 1 [6 favorites]

Dangnabbit! I'm old, and I like my pennies. I remember taking 3 pennies to the store and getting a whole bunch of penny candy--there was penny candy, and two or three pieces for a penny, or if you had FIVE whole pennies you could get a big candy bar. There were times in my twenties with my first apartment I was only able to make the last couple bucks on my rent by rolling pennies. I'm so dang old that it hurts to bend down, but I still pick up a penny in the parking lot--“Find a penny pick it up, all day long you'll have good luck. If you pass that penny by, then you will surely die”. Christ, who needs an existential threat when your 71?

IMHO, removing the penny is a government conspiracy backed by corporate powers. I'm only partially kidding here, folks. Hear me out. The penny is NOT the lowest unit of currency used in the US. It's the mil. And what is a mil, you say? A mil is one tenth of a penny, and before you pooh-pooh that amount, we use mils absolutely every day. The mil was (and remains) common for property tax assessments, stock issuances, and power/electricity bills-- and most evidently, mil fractional pricing is used at the gas pump. The googles average price today for regular is $3.399. *shakes fist* It's that .9 that's sending this country to hell! In 2022, Americans used about 135.73 billion gallons of gasoline... Multiply that by .9 of a cent, and you bet your sweet bippy that adds up fast! If you say we should do away with the penny because it's irritating and useless, well, let's do away with the mil, too. It's insignificant, so there should and will be no change in price. Today the average 'merican gets to pay $3.39 per gallon. What's that eldritch screech we hear? Gas companies. Don't tell me pennies are worthless. My only problem is that I don't have enough of them.
posted by BlueHorse at 3:11 PM on September 1 [6 favorites]

Oh, yeah. And soon they'll start charging us a nickel to see a three-penny opera.
posted by dances_with_sneetches at 3:58 PM on September 1 [7 favorites]

I have to come to the aide of the 2c coin, not that it should be kept at a time when we're getting rid of 1c and 5c coins, but for consistency's sake - if you're going to have 1c, 5c, 10c, 20c, 50c coins and 1$, 2$, 5$, 10$, 20$, 50$ and 100$ notes of course you are going to have a 2c coin - besides at the time it sort of almost replaced the existing thruppeny bit.

Aussie (and AoNZ) both standardised on the 1/2/5 standard when the decimalised their currencies, the US's is quite broken 1/5/10/25/50 1/2/5/10/20/50/100 - why not have a $2.50/$25 notes or alternately a 20c coin.

I suspect that a big problem with US coinage is sales tax and the habit of adding it on later, unlike almost every other country that quotes prices including sales tax, prices are always going to use pennies until you fix that - also a note about using swedish rounding - if you bin the small coins things still get charged in cents, what you buy is all added up and it's the final total that gets rounded at the till (and doesn't if you don't use coins) - you can't go to the hardware store and add a couple of screws to your bill and get them for free
posted by mbo at 3:59 PM on September 1 [3 favorites]

The penny and the mil are different categories of thing. The mil is a value. The penny is a coin. There is not, and never has been, any such thing as a one-mil coin. No one is suggesting eliminating cents. They just want to stop minting one-cent coins and start treating cents the same way we currently treat mils.

The article is at pains to point out that eliminating pennies would not mean that all monetary transactions would have to be rounded to the nearest five cents. Just those that are conducted using coins, rather than checks, credit cards, bank transfers, etc.
posted by baf at 4:00 PM on September 1 [5 favorites]

There have been one (and five) mill coins! We found a few in my mother’s things after she died. They are described here.
posted by TedW at 4:05 PM on September 1 [2 favorites]

You don't really need more than four...
posted by achrise at 4:05 PM on September 1

Save all your pennies until you have hundreds, put them in a cartoon sack with a "$" on it, and bury or hide it somewhere. Make a treasure map. Give the map to a kid.
posted by ctmf at 4:34 PM on September 1 [8 favorites]

Seems like a lot of people here haven’t RTFA (that’s F for financial).

As someone from a country that got rid of its 1c and 2c coins years ago, I just wish my current one would do the same. 1p and 2p coins must surely also be costing the UK more to produce than they’re worth and going into a weird and expensive perpetual production spiral because nobody actually spends them - like yours. Amazingly, Australia also had people of an age who could remember using them at the time they were dropped, and yet those people adapted. Thirty years ago.

Getting rid of the penny - that metal thing - doesn’t mean getting rid of the cent. You can still price things at $9.99. [Gentle soothing noises] It’ll be okay.
posted by rory at 4:36 PM on September 1 [5 favorites]

Oh, and getting rid of the pennies in circulation doesn’t mean you have to get rid of your personal sockful of nostalgic pennies. You can still keep one in a drawer and pull it out when you need to remember what Abe Lincoln looked like in profile - or to undo the battery compartment at the end of your Mac keyboard, which is what I use the US penny in mine for.
posted by rory at 4:56 PM on September 1 [3 favorites]

Aussie (and AoNZ) both standardised on the 1/2/5 standard when the decimalised their currencies, the US's is quite broken 1/5/10/25/50 1/2/5/10/20/50/100 - why not have a $2.50/$25 notes or alternately a 20c coin.

NZ doesn't have a 1 or 2 cent coin, or a 1 or 2 dollar note (we have coins for the latter.) Works very well.
posted by Sebmojo at 4:59 PM on September 1 [1 favorite]

Don’t a lot of chain stores in the US use the cents in prices as metadata

The heel who owned the little store I worked at as a teen had a policy that everything he sold had a price ending in "7". So $.77 or $6.27 and so-on. Always rounded up from the price you'd calculate from the wholesaler's invoice (40% markup on sporting goods, 50% on clothing items, big-ticket stuff he'd price himself). I think the main reason was trying to avoid return shenanigans...if someone claimed to have bought something from his store and claimed to have paid $.75 or $6.25 or whatever--aha. (Shrugs.)

One other thing about the price tags in that store (this was all well before barcodes)...there was a "stock number" as the first line of the sticker. It was the three-number code of the wholesaler followed by four-digit wholesale cost (this was all sub-$100 stuff).

So the sticker would be:

4010263
$ 3.77

401 - Acme Dry Goods was the supplier
0263 - We paid $2.63 for it
$3.77 - 2.63 * 1.4 then rounded up to nearest "7"

This let you know at a glance if you had gotten a particularly good deal on something and had some margin to barter if a customer was being a pain, or they were just a good customer and you wanted to pass along some savings. (Every once in awhile the wholesaler would sell the 2.63 item for, say 2.00, but we always marked up from "catalog" price.)
posted by maxwelton at 5:04 PM on September 1 [6 favorites]

One thing I greatly appreciate about this article is that it doesn't dwell on the "it costs more than one cent to mint a penny" thing. That's often the cornerstone of people's arguments against pennies, because it's got good shock value, but when you take a moment to think about it, it makes about as much sense as complaining that municipal garbage collection costs more than the value of the garbage. This article, though? It talks about it, but it doesn't try to make it sound like "negative seigniorage" is the actual problem. As it points out, nickels also cost more than their face value to mint, but people actually use nickels.
posted by baf at 5:20 PM on September 1 [3 favorites]

I've been on the anti-penny side for decades now, and I'm continually disappointed that we keep failing to stop production on the damn things.

And yeah, the fact that pennies cost us money isn't actually all that important. I mean, sure, I'm opposed to waste but that's not the reason to dump the penny.
posted by sotonohito at 5:38 PM on September 1 [1 favorite]

They say that people don’t really use pennies, but honestly it’s because of how capitalism encourages everyone to process every transaction as fast as possible and no store hires enough cashiers anymore. I used to pay with pennies, but now there’s ten people in line behind me and a harried and exhausted cashier, I don’t. If it was one person in line behind me, I might.
posted by corb at 5:47 PM on September 1 [2 favorites]

I'm amused to have this post up on the same day as this one.
posted by jenfullmoon at 5:47 PM on September 1 [2 favorites]

One very odd thing about living in Japan is that ¥1 coins are still around, but they somehow don't feel nearly as onerous as pennies, and my working hypothesis is this: the real pain point comes when you have to use both paper money and coins for a transaction. The US sets a very low threshold for that transition point (separately: to hell with the $1 bill). Japan goes hard in the opposite direction, where the smallest denomination of paper money is ¥1,000 (feels like $10), and coins go up to ¥500 (feels like $5). When you can very realistically pay for lunch in all coins, or with a single banknote that you'll receive only coins from in change, the presence of the ¥1 coin doesn't hurt that much, because you're already just dealing mostly with coins anyway.

This all being said, I certainly wouldn't miss the smaller coin denominations if they were to phase them out, of course.
posted by DoctorFedora at 5:56 PM on September 1 [4 favorites]

Greg_Ace: “Quarter for your thoughts?" just doesn't have the same ring.

Not to mention the incorrect denomination to procure hot cross buns.
posted by dr_dank at 7:22 PM on September 1 [2 favorites]

I suspect at least part of that is because Japan bases its entire money system on the yen, so not having a 1 yen coin would be kind of strange. Also, they do use cash there more than we do though Japan is finally moving more towards a less cash intensive economy.

But it's also worth noting that Japan hasn't actually minted any new 1 yen coins since 2016. The Ministry of Finance says if there's any need they'll strike some new ones. Even back in 2007 when I lived in Japan there weren't many people actually using 1 yen coins for purchases. Occasionally, yes, but mostly prices had the smallest quantity in 5 or 10 yen increments. I kept some in my pocket, I used them occasionally, but it wasn't frequent.
posted by sotonohito at 7:26 PM on September 1 [2 favorites]

Why would anyone want $1 or $2 coins? I thought the point was to get rid of coins?
posted by Liquidwolf at 7:35 PM on September 1

$1: Potsie
$5: Ralph Malph
$10: Big Al
$20: Richie Cunningham
$50: Fonzie
$100: Mr. Cunningham
posted by credulous at 8:07 PM on September 1 [9 favorites]

This and the last thread on cashless are reminding me that I have to take the extra step to remember that for the USA, the alternative to cash is credit, and not digital cash, and when that's the case that's no alternative at all.
posted by cendawanita at 8:20 PM on September 1 [3 favorites]

Coins are much more durable than paper money, so for small denominations they can make sense. You still see Canadian $1 coins from the first issue in 1987.
posted by Monday, stony Monday at 8:40 PM on September 1 [4 favorites]

cendawanita, I'm constantly horrified to see people talk about credit cards like they are digital cash. Over half a century of shifty, anticompetitive credit card policies that merchants must follow have successfully blinded people to the fact that every time you purchase something with a credit card, you are indirectly incurring a 1%-3% tax that goes directly to some of the largest corporations in the world. And the most sinister part of it is that purchasers think that they're coming out ahead by accruing 'points', when most pay far more in fees and interest than they earn. Finally, recently, in Canada, a class action lawsuit against Visa and Mastercard resulted in merchants being allowed to charge purchasers for the cost of the transaction, but still, almost none choose to do so, since purchasers have been trained to think of themselves as having the right to use a credit card for free and the nearly invisible drain on the economy continues.
posted by WaylandSmith at 8:51 PM on September 1 [3 favorites]

That -- but I'm still surprised that transaction fees aren't borne by the merchant and/or squirrelly technicalities are tolerated so consumers still pay somehow.

Back to FPP - Malaysia also got rid of our 1 sen coin since 2007, but like elsewhere there's a rounding mechanism policy in place as well. Though with digital cash, you'd assume x.99 sort of sticker prices would come back but people are used to the rounding up/down.
posted by cendawanita at 9:03 PM on September 1

The former Australian 2c coin was also the subject of a then-great, now-forgotten crowd chant, as popular at sports when someone was getting thrown out as at political rallies 'what's the colour of a two-cent piece / copper, copper'
posted by Fiasco da Gama at 10:17 PM on September 1 [1 favorite]

"Quarter for your thoughts?" just doesn't have the same ring.

Shave and a haircut, two Tubmans.
posted by ActingTheGoat at 10:43 PM on September 1 [5 favorites]

Australia got rid of the 1 and 2 cent pieces in 1992, amid cries of imminent rampant inflation and people getting ripped off by retailers left, right and centre. None of which turned out to be true, of course. Rounding was mandated in favour of consumers so any total for a cash transaction that ended in 1, 2, or 3 cents was rounded down. Most people thought it would be the end of x.99 pricing, but that didn't happen either. Now that most people never use cash, it doesn't even have any impact at all, because the rounding only applies to cash transactions.

Of course, paying for everything with cheques was never really a thing here the way it is in the US and they are pretty much obsolete now - any bank account that can be accessed via cheques incurs an additional tax. Nobody ever really trusted them anyway. Coupled with the decades-old universal availability of EFTPOS, it's hard to compare Australia and the US in this, but it still just doesn't make sense to have coins of such low value if, as seems to be the case, nobody actually uses them to buy anything.
posted by dg at 10:46 PM on September 1

Psst, non-Aussies: eftpos.
posted by rory at 11:18 PM on September 1

I also hate cash - it's filthy, literally and metaphorically - and here in the UK we have 2p coins that weigh more than is reasonable. Practically everything is cashless now.

But spare a thought for your bartender (hi!), who despite having a card reader that asks the user to input the tip amount, instead just skips that screen to avoid the hassle, and has to settle for next to no tips to supplement their minimum wage income.

Or further still - spare a thought for the homeless person, sat beside the cash machine, who I wind up giving my meagre coins to. The buskers in town have card readers now, while the literally penniless have to content themselves with not being spat on.

Abstract indeed.
posted by Acey at 3:05 AM on September 2 [3 favorites]

I have one service provider who insists on cash. They don’t care if it’s EUR or CHF and they give me EUR change. Every quarter, I fish out all coins denominated more than EUR 1 and find a collection box for the rest. Problem is there aren’t many left but the airport is a sure bet and it takes all currencies.
posted by koahiatamadl at 8:18 AM on September 2

If you wanted it to be popular, you could a. Stop paying for any new pennies b. Instead create a program to pay people more than 1 cent per penny returned so you could recycle them. People would happily empty their jars for a perceived bargain and it would make them feel virtuous to recycle. And then no more pennies except for people who wanted to keep them.
posted by emjaybee at 9:38 AM on September 2 [3 favorites]

Canadian pennies used to show up in change, in the US. Like all unusual coins I saved them, and was glad that Vancouver bank accepted all ten I had accumulated over the years, exchanging them for a dime; since I could no longer spend them at a store. It was kinda liberating, not having to deal with them anymore (until I got home, and was once again carrying around these little Lincoln tributes).
posted by Rash at 11:08 AM on September 2 [1 favorite]

Hang on. Here's a way to get rid of the 1¢ coin and switch over to dollar coins in one bold move that would be incredibly popular.

The U.S. Govt announces that, effective immediately, all pennies are worth one dollar. The penny is now the dollar coin.

This would be a very progressive policy that would disproportionately benefit the poor. It would benefit small, local businesses and retailers. The local McDonald's manager would still owe the McDonald's Corporation $10,000 or whatever this week, but the contents of her cash registers are suddenly worth more. The people actually holding the pennies would benefit because whatever amount they owe to their employers is recorded in numbers of dollars, not an inventory of the particular denominations of cash they have on hand.
posted by straight at 1:02 AM on September 3 [2 favorites]

The Secretary of the Treasury should mint and issue just enough pennies to stock pressed penny machines. Henceforth, all pennies should be designated for squashing into little ovals with tourist attraction imagery.
posted by andythebean at 8:33 AM on September 3 [1 favorite]

They charge you a dollar to mash a penny into a tourist oval. That's it! The government declares pennies mashed into ovals are now worth one dollar.
posted by straight at 10:50 AM on September 3

I French, we still say "avoir maille à partir" -- having to share a very small coin, meaning having a dispute, even though the maille (worth half a denier, so kind of like the halfpenny) hasn't been in use since the middle ages.
posted by Monday, stony Monday at 11:19 AM on September 3 [1 favorite]

> BlueHorse: "If you say we should do away with the penny because it's irritating and useless, well, let's do away with the mil, too."

From the article (also, imagine that I put it in the Simpsons' "Don't make me tap the sign" meme format):

Here is the most important detail to understand: Canada eliminated only its physical coin, not the mathematical concept of 1 cent. Payment by credit card, debit card, mobile phone or check — any kind of noncash transaction — is calculated exactly as it was before the penny was abolished.

I can assure you that Canadian gas stations still price fuel to the (Canadian) mil.
posted by mhum at 5:42 PM on September 4