One of the reasons why I changed banks. My new bank has a coin counting machine in the lobby, you throw your coins in, it consumes them, and gives you a slip that you take to the teller.
As I understand it, coins are considered a government service. Banks and retailers pay to deal with them. Buying them from the public for face value actually saves them money.
It's odd how banks have largely stopped operating change counting machines.
In my childhood we'd hoard loose change then make a trip to the local po-dunk bank serving my neighborhood surrounded by corn fields, and even there they'd take our bucket of loose change and dump it into a counting machine for free.
It was a game to try guess the amount we'd get in paper cash...
Now you have to pay for this service at a grocery store using a cumbersome machine operated by Coinstar.
I have talked to my bank and was told not to roll them, they just throw them in a machine to count them and deposit the money in my count. It is not uncommon to see people bring in a box of coins and the bank takes care of them.
I live in the Eurozone. We had 1 and 2 cent coins for a while. Where I live these were quickly deprecated and I think in most other Eurozone countries too by now.
I have thrown any of these coins straight in the bin soon as somebody gave them. Too much hassle and requires too big a wallet to drag along, for literally pennies.
When I first realized dealing with coins was inversely proportional to their denomination I threw out less than a Euros worth.
I do not understand anyone who doesn't throw out their pennies.
Throwing out cent coins doesn’t seem like an environmental waste to you, like throwing out aluminum cans?
Yes they’re impractical to carry and use but does anyone actually do that? Why not do the standard practice of accumulate them in a jar instead of throwing them in the trash like waste?
it’s easy to take them home and throw them in a jar until suddenly the jar is a Kg of metal that can be fed to whatever coinstar like machine is around.
> Many Americans—and many people who, though not American, enjoy watching from a safe distance as predictable fiascoes unfold in this theoretical superpower from week to week—find themselves now pondering one question.
This is way too much spite for an article about coins. Lord.
If the author of the article had done a bit of searching, they might know that Canadians (the primary predictable American ficasco spectators) phased out pennies years ago. We also "had no plan" for the remaining pennies, and we didn't really need one. They get deposited, lost, and thrown away over time—that's why the mint had to keep printing them. Now they've gone the way of the 50-cent piece. It's not a big deal. Frankly I'm surprised the US didn't do it sooner.
The problem is not strictly the pennies themselves, but all of the prices that rely on being able to quantize things to a cent, and a number of different laws about not playing games with prices.
Most recently, a stick in the SNAP benefits laws is that you can't charge SNAP recipients different amounts from other people - which was presumably intended to ensure you can't play games like charging SNAP recipients more for things, but in practice, means that if you, hypothetically, wanted to charge SNAP and credit card holders exact amounts (which you would likely want to do to avoid weird effects where SNAP recipients, who tend to be very price sensitive, find their bills going up), and charge cash users rounded up or down, you would be in violation.
Those are the kinds of warts you would hope to see a plan for before these things were announced, rather than having to figure out one in the middle.
This rounds physical currency to the nearest $0.05, effectively. Why not round everything to the nearest $0.1? The math and adjustments (changes to every printed price, etc.) would be simpler. How much for the wine? "$19.9". It seems much simpler to me, though I'm sure it's been discussed ...
Is there some item that would be problematic to round to $0.1? I suppose anything that is fractionally priced at ≤$0.05 is now would have a minimum purchase of 2. Items bought in bulk could be priced fractionally.
We already round off fractional pennies all the time, e.g. in securities market prices, tax calculations, gasoline prices, etc. That's not a problem. And any electronic purchase could be for fractional amounts - but why?
(Once upon a time, you probably could sell the idea to IT people by pointing out how much memory and bandwidth it would save.)
In Hong Kong, it's very common now to see prices with just a single digit after the decimal point. That said, they haven't had a 5c coin since 1989 and HK$0.1 isn't worth much more than US$0.01.
For me, one of the nicest currency units right now is the Taiwanese Dollar - 31 TWD to 1 USD and 40 TWD to 1 GBP. They don't have any smaller coins now, so it's nice that everything is in integer units, but the numbers aren't crazily large.
Things are still often priced in €xx.99 in Ireland, but since the 1 and 2 Eurocent coins are all MIA, if you pay in cash, you'll be paying the full €xy.00. Most of my transactions are by card, though, and thus not subject to rounding.
So why? Maybe the vendors reckon it will work out in their favor this way.
Haha, as a Brit, I have quite a few eurocent coins in my foreign loose change drawer.
Also, as a Brit, if I bought something for £9.99 and gave them a £10, I'd expect change. If they said they didn't have any 1p or 2p coins, I'd expect to receive a 5p coin instead. And when I say expect, I've been offered that a couple of times in the past in that situation, I've never had to ask for it.
Spend like an hour researching the most efficient way to sell six thousand metric tons of zinc for its scrap value, then do so. I don't need a bunch of zinc for anything I want to do and money is a generally-useful thing to have.
Interesting how cash money still elicits such emotions.
When the European Central Bank announced a new design for the euro bills nobody in my country really cared anymore because most payments are electronic.
The danger to that ofcourse is that you risk overspending but retailers approve.
It's already a system where unaccountable private monopolistic moralizing multinational middle men have the power to tell you what you can spend your money on.
Supposedly it cost gov 4 cents to mint 1. Does it have to be done with zinc tho? Why not plastic or some cheap material? Although you may be able to 3D print a penny at home (just like it being made from zinc can actually stop someone), but just like with a real one, its not like you will show up at your local bank with $1 million dollar worth to deposit.
Even if they were free to mint they're still effectively worthless trash to most of us. I've been waiting for the penny to die for decades, and it would be nice if we had a functioning government that could handle these nonpartisan issues smoothly, but we haven't had anything like that in a long time, so the rip the bandaid off I say
Zinc is the cheap material though. It replaced copper (except for the foil outer), when copper was too expensive.
If there was a suitable and even less expensive metal, I think it might be reasonable to switch again. But if we have to rebuild coin handling to use a plastic penny, I think it's necessary to consider the costs and benefits of a vastly different material versus the costs and benefits of abandoning pennies.
The other option would be to rebase the currency such that a single penny was a meaningful unit of money again. One potential such way would be to issue new paper notes which represent the old note with a decimal place move such that $10 becomes $100. This has been done before but might not be a great idea for the USA.
That would be a nightmare, you're basically bringing in a new currency at that point because now all cash, every bank account and every price in the whole country needs to change. That's going to be probably hundreds of thousands of times more effort and expense than phasing out pennies!
I guess a reason to discontinue the penny is that it supposedly costs 3+ cents to mint one. I guess a nickel costs like 13 cents, though. I thought it would've been a better move to discontinue printing the nickel then just make all pennies worth 5 cents.
At minimum they're useful as makeshift pie weights when blind-baking a pie crust. After shaping the dough in the baking dish, cover it in aluminum foil and then fill it with pennies. They conduct heat well, and prevent the dough from bubbling or shrinking.
First they are coated in copper, and second nobody bakes pie crusts at a temp that would cause zinc to offgas and third zinc fever is not a big deal unless you're breathing a bunch every day.
Using pennies has long been recommended by reputable cookbooks. Is there really a risk at 375 degrees F? I would think the everyday fumes from an unventilated gas oven are a much more significant problem, and that's fairly common in many parts of the US.
Anyway, I've done it a hundred times, and my brain and lungs still work good-ish?
Readit News
Also, pennies are still legal tender. Folks can take them to a bank or other venue and cash them in. They’re not “trash.”
FWIW my bank refuses to accept unrolled coins, long before this month's retirement of the penny.
As I understand it, coins are considered a government service. Banks and retailers pay to deal with them. Buying them from the public for face value actually saves them money.
In my childhood we'd hoard loose change then make a trip to the local po-dunk bank serving my neighborhood surrounded by corn fields, and even there they'd take our bucket of loose change and dump it into a counting machine for free.
It was a game to try guess the amount we'd get in paper cash...
Now you have to pay for this service at a grocery store using a cumbersome machine operated by Coinstar.
Coinstar also often has zero commission options like gift cards that are an easy way to cash in extra change without paying fees.
My (edit: old) bank refused to accept unrolled coins back in the early 2000s.
So this is long overdue.
I live in the Eurozone. We had 1 and 2 cent coins for a while. Where I live these were quickly deprecated and I think in most other Eurozone countries too by now.
I have thrown any of these coins straight in the bin soon as somebody gave them. Too much hassle and requires too big a wallet to drag along, for literally pennies.
When I first realized dealing with coins was inversely proportional to their denomination I threw out less than a Euros worth.
I do not understand anyone who doesn't throw out their pennies.
Yes they’re impractical to carry and use but does anyone actually do that? Why not do the standard practice of accumulate them in a jar instead of throwing them in the trash like waste?
it’s easy to take them home and throw them in a jar until suddenly the jar is a Kg of metal that can be fed to whatever coinstar like machine is around.
This is way too much spite for an article about coins. Lord.
Most recently, a stick in the SNAP benefits laws is that you can't charge SNAP recipients different amounts from other people - which was presumably intended to ensure you can't play games like charging SNAP recipients more for things, but in practice, means that if you, hypothetically, wanted to charge SNAP and credit card holders exact amounts (which you would likely want to do to avoid weird effects where SNAP recipients, who tend to be very price sensitive, find their bills going up), and charge cash users rounded up or down, you would be in violation.
Those are the kinds of warts you would hope to see a plan for before these things were announced, rather than having to figure out one in the middle.
Dead Comment
Dead Comment
Is there some item that would be problematic to round to $0.1? I suppose anything that is fractionally priced at ≤$0.05 is now would have a minimum purchase of 2. Items bought in bulk could be priced fractionally.
We already round off fractional pennies all the time, e.g. in securities market prices, tax calculations, gasoline prices, etc. That's not a problem. And any electronic purchase could be for fractional amounts - but why?
(Once upon a time, you probably could sell the idea to IT people by pointing out how much memory and bandwidth it would save.)
For me, one of the nicest currency units right now is the Taiwanese Dollar - 31 TWD to 1 USD and 40 TWD to 1 GBP. They don't have any smaller coins now, so it's nice that everything is in integer units, but the numbers aren't crazily large.
So why? Maybe the vendors reckon it will work out in their favor this way.
Also, as a Brit, if I bought something for £9.99 and gave them a £10, I'd expect change. If they said they didn't have any 1p or 2p coins, I'd expect to receive a 5p coin instead. And when I say expect, I've been offered that a couple of times in the past in that situation, I've never had to ask for it.
When the European Central Bank announced a new design for the euro bills nobody in my country really cared anymore because most payments are electronic. The danger to that ofcourse is that you risk overspending but retailers approve.
Favors, trust, and reputation cannot be taxed.
Reporters et al always want 'a plan,' which is ironic because they have problems planning more than a week in advance.
If there was a suitable and even less expensive metal, I think it might be reasonable to switch again. But if we have to rebuild coin handling to use a plastic penny, I think it's necessary to consider the costs and benefits of a vastly different material versus the costs and benefits of abandoning pennies.
Use dry beans for blind-baking. They are almost infinitely reusable with no harmful effects.
Anyway, I've done it a hundred times, and my brain and lungs still work good-ish?