I’ve wanted to get rid of it for at least thirty years. When you can’t purchase something with a single coin, it’s time to end it, and with the penny, it’s long past time.
16 thoughts on “Death To Pennies”
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I’ve wanted to get rid of it for at least thirty years. When you can’t purchase something with a single coin, it’s time to end it, and with the penny, it’s long past time.
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Why not rid ourselves of nickels and quarters as well? Ditch the whole 10^-2 place while we’re at it and make a clean break. Just dimes and half-dollars from now on.
The inflation calculator says that we’ve only had about 12x inflation since 1800. I’m not sure how meaningful that calculation is over that time period, but it supports your position. I’d like something between a dime and a half dollar; maybe they could bring back the 20 cent piece.
It’d be easier to ditch dimes and nickels and just keep quarters.
They should get rid of pennies and nickels. Use the two cups in cash registers for one and five dollar coins. And they should starting printing $500 bills again.
I’ve wanted to get rid of pennies as well. I find them annoying.
If you got rid of the Fed instead, maybe you could keep the penny.
BTW: do you ordinarily call them pennies instead of cents or is it a poetic alternative?
Cents are the denomination (“That costs thirty-eight cents”). Pennies are the coin having the value of one cent.
Like nickel is the five-cent coin and dime is the ten-cent coin and quarter is the twenty-five cent coin.
I think “penny” was a holdover from British usage, although “cent” is the correct term in America (1/100 of a dollar). The British penny was not part of a decimal system until the 1970s.
Sounds like a regionalism. I call them pennies.
The only way americans are going to accept $1 and $5 coins is to do what the Canadians did–stop printing the bills. I’m not too keen on that option.
Correction Daver – we got rid of $1 and $2 bills and now have Loonies and Toonies. The dollar coin has a picture of a loon on it. Still got lots of $5 bills here.
Yeah, I know. The US, like the Canadians, tried several times to ditch the paper money. The only way the Canadian government got the Canadian people to use the coins was to get rid of the bills. So far the US hasn’t tried that option.
Couldn’t we just re-value our coinage? Just issue new coinage at 1 penny per dime, cut everyone’s pay by 90%, cut all prices likewise, etc. I assume there’s some technical reason this couldn’t be done.
I’ve always wished my state would settle on a sales tax (applied to all cash purchases) that rounds all values up to the nearest nickel, making pennies die out.
I actually don’t mind getting change. I make all of my day-to-day purchases using paper money, and come home with a pocket full of change. I sort them in one of those four-tube coin banks, then when I get a full roll I deposit it in the bank along with my paycheck. It’s a painless way to save a little more.
I still habitually sort through my change at the end of the day looking for silver dimes and quarters, but I hardly ever see them nowadays. I save pennies from 1982 and earlier since they contain copper. They could potentially be of some use in a post-SHTF scenario.
I wonder what happened to half dollars? I hardly ever see them any more. You’d think that with inflation, they would still be in use.
What costs woudl be imposed on commerce if the penny were discontinued? Would those costs exceed the cost of minting pennies?