I'd say screw it, get rid of nickles and dimes as well. Quarters can stay, for now.
It's a complete waste of money and time continuing to mint such low-value currency. It can't be used for just about anything.
Unfortunately, I do see the problem with part of this. For a handful of items where it does matter, it will force people to use cards more if they want to avoid rounding. And the card providers already have a choke-hold on retailers, and the whole thing is basically a scheme that funnels money from the poor to the wealthy via interest and fees on the consumer, interchange fees, and rewards programs.
I know you're referencing more than pennies, but to speak to pennies, I find the current rounding noise in the US to be weird. Likely, it's just more of the media, talking heads, and youtube personalities trying to turn a nothing into something, story.
Back when we did it in Canada, I don't recall a single person I knew concerned about penny rounding. Everyone was sick of pennies. No one cared. Everyone was happy. And the math seems fair enough:
Basically, if something is $1.01 or $1.02, you round down. If it's $1.03 or $1.04, you round up. Rounding is to be applied after all taxes are paid, etc.
Of course, there was also central guidance and, well, everyone just followed it. It's called "having a society".
People blathering on about stores fixing the rounding are morons, there's no way to do so if you buy more than one item. No one gets ripped off with the above method. In the end, it just works out.
As the article points out, there are laws that say people who pay via SNAP debit cards "cannot be charged more than others".
If cash payments are rounded down, but debit card payments aren't, they are in violation of state law.
The article also points out that rollback of pennies in Canada and other places were planned, addressing these kinds of issues. USA is doing it with no such planning.
There are already stores in the US that are rounding their transactions because of the penny shortage that is already happening. Many are just simply rounding all transactions down to the nearest $0.05.
When the US attempted to transition to the metric system, gas stations raised their prices per unit volume and the American consumer was convinced that the metric system was bad. I have family that think metric is bad because some fringe people thought there should be 10 hours in a day and 100 minutes in an hour, also something like 10 months a year, and the whole thing is bad because some awkward ideas were floated.
Here, it's a question of resolution, with a proven history that transitions screw the consumer, though maybe it won't be so. We're ok with arbitrary hundredths of a dollar, why were we not at thousandths? The American half cent disappeared a long time ago. You still need to include the cents in a tax bill that runs into the millions of dollars.
It's just an awkward stage in inflation. Eventually a US dollar will be worth what a Zimbabwean dollar was, and we won't have $100 bills anymore.
Rounding is such a weird boogeyman to me because people are like "the companies are just going to use it to get more money from the customers" but, they're doing that anyway. They don't need this excuse to raise prices they'll just do it anyway.
Same thing when people complain that raising minimum wage will increase prices, meanwhile prices have increased for 50 years completely separate from wages. They don't need the excuse to raise prices they're just gonna do it anyway.
If they want companies to not raise prices the only answer is regulation, but regulation is communism and therefore bad.
Media is just doing media things, ignore them. Nobody I know has even mentioned the penny thing, let alone expressed a strong opinion about it. From my perspective I have seen zero evidence of the American public caring one iota.
> Basically, if something is $1.01 or $1.02, you round down. If it's $1.03 or $1.04, you round up.
So everything's going to be $1.03 or $1.04. Not sure why you think retailers (or any sellers) would ever, ever, ever let this play into customers' advantage.
But apparently pointing out that obvious truth makes me a "moron," because you can think of some clever ways to get around it that retailers surely won't work around.
The last time a coin was dropped was the half penny in the late 1850s, when I think it was worth about 25 cents today, so there is a precedent for what you are suggesting.
A noticeable number of places around me in an urban area in the USA already now have signs up saying they won't make any coin change at all! Pay with a card, or exact change, or they'll round up to the dollar keep the difference.
Sometimes the sign says "due to the penny shortage" and has been up for a year or whatever, I dunno. But they aren't just not giving you pennies in your change, they are refusing any coins in your change. I am curious as to the motivation, I could guess but it's not obvious to me. They will still take coins as payment, just not give them as change.
You can either put payments into the register or the safe.
If it goes into the safe, it's nearly impossible to steal because there's a time lock preventing the cashier from accessing it. But you can't make change.
This means you have a optimization problem to have the minimum possible cash in the register to meet all change needs.
Eliminating denominations makes the optimization problem easier, if nothing else.
Nickles are likely to go shortly after. You can do everything you can with nickles with dimes and quarters, nickles have worse economics than pennies, and have had their minting suppressed below the market needs for years. Once pennies leave circulation, the problems with nickles will become urgent and they'll quickly leave.
Dimes are small and cheap to make though, so they'll probably stick around.
> It's a complete waste of money and time continuing to mint such low-value currency. It can't be used for just about anything.
The problem: the dollar is almost global in its usage. The penny may not be important to the US, but it dam well is every where else where dollars are still in use frequently, along side, or in place of the local/native currency.
Getting rid of the penny will have implications, getting rid of more coins would endanger the use of the dollar globally.
There is still a large portion of the world where 100 dollar bill and a Rolex will get you home safely.
Approximately nobody uses US coins outside the US. Even in countries where the dollar is widely accepted, trying to use coins will get you weird looks at best.
I don't like inflation either. The fact that it's 'normal' or 'required for growth' to me sounds like economic bollocks and a lot of pretending that it doesn't cause issues in the long run.
But it's here to stay, nothing we can do about it.
Some interesting complications with rounding I had not heard about before were mentioned here, worth noting I think, especially given the prominence of SNAP in the news lately:
>Four states - Delaware, Connecticut, Michigan and Oregon - as well as numerous cities, including New York, Philadelphia, Miami and Washington, DC, require merchants to provide exact change, according to the National Association of Convenience Stores (NACS).
>In addition, the law covering the federal food assistance program known as SNAP requires that recipients not be charged more than other customers. Since SNAP recipients use a debit card that’s charged the precise amount, if merchants round down prices for cash purchases, they could be opening themselves to legal problems and fines, said Jeff Lenard, spokesperson for NACS.
>“Rounding down on all transactions presents several challenges beyond the loss of an average of 2 cents per transaction,” Lenard said. “We desperately need legislation that allows rounding so retailers can make change for these customers.”
They can round down the card transactions too if it’s really a problem to charge differing amounts.
For those that seriously think this would be a major problem there was a comedy skit circulating in Australia when this happened. A guy would push his car to the petrol pump, fill with 2c of petrol, rounded down to 0. The guy at the counter just laughed at it. You could in theory do this 1000 more times (would take hours) for $20 of free petrol. At least until the worker got sick of it and enforced the whole right to refuse service.
In the Netherlands cash payments get rounded to the nearest 5 cents, in both directions. Card payments are not rounded. If I’m not mistaken, you can still demand exact change according to the law and you’re allowed to pay the exact amount (cents are still legal tender). Most merchants wouldn’t be able to give you exact change, so it depends on the situation what would happen. I’ve never heard of such a situation happening, though.
The SNAP equal treatment rule requirement works in both directions: Prices cannot be higher or lower for SNAP recipients. As a retailer, there is an option to request a waiver, though.
Too early to say "ever", considering there has been no act of congress on this matter and the penny continues to be legal tender. The decision to stop minting it is a (legally debatable) executive order, and the next president or even the current one can change their mind about it tomorrow.
I agree it's time to follow Canada and the rest of the world but it needs to be done through congress, not executive orders. It needs to have a proper framework for migration and laws for how payments are rounded.
We eliminated pennies in Canada in 2012 and the transition was a non-issue. The vast majority of retailers would round cash transactions to the nearest $0.05, but a few would round down to the nearest $0.05 in favor of the customer. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Withdrawal_of_low-denomination...
Canadian cash is better than American cash in several ways: No penny, durable polymer banknotes (instead of dirty wrinkly cotton paper), colorful banknotes (instead of all green) that are easy to distinguish, $1 and $2 coins in wide circulation (instead of worn-out $1 bills).
I am suspicious of any claims about relative cleanliness. As with wooden vs plastic cutting boards, our intuitions are likely misleading.
To be an effective fomite the currency has to not kill the microbe, and it has to readily give up the microbe to the next recipient. Organic materials like cotton or linen seem more likely to simply absorb a viral envelope or bacterial cell wall, thereby rendering it ineffective. Furthermore, the porous nature makes it more difficult for the note to give up any microbe that isn't immediately killed before it naturally dies over time.
A brief search of the scientific literature doesn't seem to show any conclusive results, but it does seem like the relative performance is pathogen specific.
I'm reminded of when Minnesota passed the Minnesota Clean Indoor Air Act (MCIAA) close to 20 years ago. (Some) restauranteurs - along with the GOP - made pronouncements about how this would destroy the economy. No one would go to out to eat or for a drink again. Doom and gloom.
Last I checked, there are plenty of restaurants open in the state, and things are going fine. In fact, just before the MCIAA went into effect, I had a newborn, and we went out to eat one time with him in tow. We asked for a non-smoking area but were placed immediately next to a family chain smoking. We decided to never go out to eat again until we could do so without risk of second-hand smoke.
My point is that there are frequently these predictions of things being impossible or even just incredibly difficult and not worth the effort, and in the end, it's not a big deal.
People overestimated the importance that smokers placed on being able to smoke in public.
A Japanese airline (Air Do) tried reintroducing the smoking section in the 1990s. It did not go well for them, and Japan's tobacco use rate was several times the US's.
I'll agree on all but one point. The cotton/linen notes feel so much better in the hand than the candy wrapper plastic of Canadian bills. I know it's a dumb reason, but I just hate the feeling.
> The United States is the only country that prints all denominations of currency in the same size. The US and Switzerland are the only two countries that use the same colors for all of their various bills. Needless to say, this sameness of size and color make it impossible for a blind person to locate the correct bills to make a purchase without some sort of assistance, or confirm that he or she has been given the correct change by the sales clerk. Even people with partial sight may have trouble distinguishing a $1 bill from a $10, especially if the bill is old and worn.
From dealing with Euro notes, I like being able to look down at the money in the wallet and pull the right notes out based on color. With USD I need to take the bills out of the wallet.
Which is great if you are fully abled! But for folks for whom sight isn't as strong, additional aids (different colors, different sized banknotes for different denominations) are super helpful.
The linked article raises a few problems that the US could have with that solution:
> Four states - Delaware, Connecticut, Michigan and Oregon - as well as numerous cities, including New York, Philadelphia, Miami and Washington, DC, require merchants to provide exact change.
This seems like a non-issue as long as they round the price down. Because there's no law that the store can't discount their total by a small amount and then provide exact change.
"Congratulations customer, we have a special coupon today for $0.03 off your purchase. Here's your change :)"
If the US properly got rid of pennies (instead of Trump just doing another end-run around congress, by ordering the Mint to stop making them, on shaky legal ground), the legislation could easily supersede those state laws.
> $1 and $2 coins in wide circulation (instead of worn-out $1 bills).
This has its own pros/cons...
One advantage of $1 bill over coin is the majority of people in US don't need a wallet with zipper to hold coins. Five $1 bills is much less bulky and much lighter than five $1 CAD or five 1€ coins
There are several US states where, by law, retailers are not allowed to give preferential treatment to credit card paying customers over cash paying ones. Which means, in those states, retailers will be required to always round transactions to the cash paying customer's benefit, where in other states the retailer is allowed to round to the nearest 5 cents. This is going to cost large retailers millions.
Interestingly many of them had already put the work into updating the cash register software to allow for this due to the penny shortages during covid.
When we got rid of the half-penny, it was worth more in 2024 cents than the dime is now.
We waited so long past when we should have gotten rid of the penny that now a coin ten times as valuable is also worthless enough that we ought to get rid of it.
So how would you propose paying for something that cost $0.40, or would you just like to see all prices be multiples of 25c?
BTW, the reason for wanting to get rid of the penny isn't so much the low purchasing value, but more that they cost more to make (~4c) than their face value, so the government loses money making them. The same is true of nickels.
> We eliminated pennies in Canada in 2012 and the transition was a non-issue.
That's because Canada had a plan, thought it through, and rolled it out.
In the US...
“We had a social media post (by Trump) during Super Bowl Sunday, but no real plan for what retailers would have to do,” he said, referring to the president’s February announcement.
We have a deranged old man posting random shit on social media determining federal policy, so of course it's a chaotic shitshow.
Better is very subjective here. I hate the colorful, plastic, canadian money. It feels toyish, like monopoly money. Whereas USD feels much more nice to deal with.
>But with 20 million customers a year, and 17% of them paying with cash, the policy will eventually cost Kwik Trip a couple of million dollars a year, McHugh said.
If we figure two-fifths of cash transactions need to be rounded up and the store is losing an average of 1.5 cents each time, their expected losses would be around $2,000, yeah?
> Kwik Trip, a family-owned convenience store chain that operates in the Midwest, decided to round down cash purchases in stores where it hasn’t been able to find pennies.
They're rounding all cash transactions down to the nearest nickel, so an average of 2 cents per transaction, 3.4 million customers, gives me $68,000 assuming each "customer" makes a single transaction per year. If they mean that there are 20 million unique customers, not 20m transactions, then the a long tail of customers who make frequent small transactions in cash could make their claim check out.
Whatever the total ends up being, it's basically a marketing expense that they're electing to make. Probably they do it for a year and then switch to rounding to the nearest nickel, which is what everyone else will be doing.
20 million customers doesn't mean 20 million transactions. Considering we are talking about a convenience store I'm sure a large chunk of their customers visit every day, some probably multiple times a day.
Assuming 3.4 million customers (cash users) and 2.5 cents average loss per transaction, it would only take one visit a month for them to cross a million dollars in losses.
Of course at that scale it's not like that million or two is really making a difference to their bottom line. Doing some quick Googling their annual revenue is estimated to be $6-7 billion.
If we make the maximally pessimistic assumption that every cash transaction would require rounding down four cents, that's 68,000 customers per year times four cents, which is $136,000 per year.
A more reasonable assumption that half of transactions require rounding down cuts that in half, I suppose.
20m customers * 17% * 4 cents * 'x' transactions per customer = $136,000 * x
I suppose this makes some sense. In a worst case situation, if every customer makes 10-20 transactions per year, and they always round down the maximum possible amount, they would lose millions per year.
They must mean unique customers, not customer transactions.
They have about 878 stores, according to Wikipedia, so if it was transactions, each store would only see about 62 transactions per day, which is way too low.
What's more contemptible: that CNN refused to spend the 30 seconds that it would take to do the math; or that it interviewed a "spokesman" that also didn't spend 30 seconds to do the math, and was sure that nobody would check?
This is the kind of article that should be written by AI (or not written, really.) If you completely fictionalized the empty interviews, nothing would be lost.
Maybe the "spokesman" has been told to angle for a government subsidy for the inconvenience of losing pennies? And from a gas station, which add that goofy fraction of a cent at the end of their pricing.
Hmm. I actually still like coins and paper money. However had
in the EU, I don't like the 1 and 2 eurocent at all. These are
just pointless really. I'd like a 5 euro coin and a 2 euro
paper instead.
I watched a video on the demise of the penny and its predicament was so succinctly explained: everyone gets pennies as change but few carry them around let alone spend them, so we are stuck producing ever more. One news outlet even did an "experiment" where they threw hundreds of pennies on the ground in a city on a busy morning and not one person stopped to pick any up.
> everyone gets pennies as change but few carry them around let alone spend them
It's not just pennies, it's all coins. In a former life I worked in retail and almost nobody would fish around in their pockets for exact (or even near) change. They'd always hand me bills for their purchase even if they had just completed a transaction and had the coins in their pocket. That was in the 90's, and I still see it happening today, even though I'm no longer in the retail world.
Nowadays I pay for everything with my phone but back in the day I too hated using coins.
Having to calculate and fish out coins? Ain't nobody got time for that.
Random anecdote: I go to a boulangerie almost daily (as one does here in France). There is one close to me that started charging 12 centimes for slicing the bread. I got annoyed with this and nowadays make a point to take lots of small change from the coin jar and use it. They don't seem to mind.
I remember moving out of a place (decades ago). I was the last roommate out, and so was stuck with some of the cleanup (wanted to get that deposit back!).
One of the things we had was a ton of pennies (no idea why). I had no room in my car, so I spend a few minutes late at night flinging pennies out onto the sidewalk after a long day of cleaning the place.
Would it not have been better/easier for all involved to have just set a container of all the pennies on the street on your way out? If someone really could use them, you're kind of a dick for making them picking them up one at a time, but if they were all together...
Like many people, I throw my change into a jar when I get home. One time I only kept pennies and used an old apple cider jug. Turns out that a gallon of pennies is worth almost $55 [0]. And that carrying a heavy glass jug filled with pennies to the Coinstar machine is very anxiety inducing.
Speaking of which - the Coinstar machines near me will give you several options for redemption. Some of which have been Amazon and Home Depot e-gift codes that have no redemption fee.
Do any other countries have/had “penny squish” souvenir machines? You put in 2 quarters + a penny, and it stamps a design onto the penny. My favorite souvenir, small, cheap, can keep in a booklet, and many landmarks have the machines. There are a few machines that take a $1 bill and use a fresh penny blank internally.
Our money is being depreciated at a rate of 3% per year and up to 25%-30% during the last inflationary cycle and is now to the point where coins are nearly useless. At the current trajectory, the one dollar note will also be obsolete in our lifetime.
I’m old enough to remember being able to scrounge around the house for pennies and heading down to Gracie’s corner store so I could buy some Swedish fish. They were 1 cent each. Gracie counted them out and put them in a small paper bag for you.
A major score was finding a dime or quarter on the street. When the Whatchamacallit first came out they were 25 cents!
As much as there's a lot of reasonable arguments for ending the minting of the penny, the method in which this president waves his hands and fundamentally changes things such as our White House, our currency, our trade policies, our universities leaves me with a bad taste in my mouth and it's hard to support even sensible decisions this authoritarian regime makes.
Step one: make all items cost an even five cents after tax.
step two: when making price adjustments like discount, round the effect to the nearest five cents.
Step three: charge everyone this amount
The fact that you'd need to even mint them in 2025 is mind boggling. Why isn't there a law that stops minting coins that cost more than their values? You'd think they would have figured this out by now?
It's been useless baggage for decades. The even saner approach would be to fade-out an order of magnitude of currency every century. The math checks out.
> When Robert Whaples, an economist at Wake Forest University, published an article in 2006 about the imperative to eliminate America’s 1-cent coin, he received a personal note: “Get it done, and you will deserve the Nobel Prize!”
Russia eliminated all kopeck coins years ago and anyone hardly noticed. Seemingly the only place you could still see any is a bank. Retailers usually round down to whole rubles if you're paying in cash.
Many countries eliminated their pennies without chaos or unfair burdens on shopkeepers. In Canada, the process was widely popular after the fact even though newspaper articles prior to the elimination intimated it wouldn't be due to their "both sides" style of reporting.
It's indicative of the current US administration that they managed to screw this up despite many examples world wide of how to do it properly.
It costs on average 2 cents because without legislative authority to round to closest the retailer must round down and eat up to 4 cents of difference.
Cash costs retailers money too. Safely transporting it to the bank, et cetera. For many, cash is more expensive than credit cards.
If you believe this is going to cause chaos or significant burdens on merchants I have got a bridge to sell you (but I don't take pennies). This quote tells you all you need to know.
> The government’s phasing out of the penny has been “a bit chaotic,” said Mark Weller, executive director of Americans for Common Cents. The pro-penny group is funded primarily by Artazn, the company that provides the blanks used to make pennies.
Many are reporting this as if failing to mint new pennies each year is going to produce some kind of shortage. There are billions of pennies sitting in drawers or jars in homes across the nation (I certainly have one with about a thousand pennies in it).
I doubt anyone who needs a penny will be unable to find one within the next 100 years.
There's a cash-heavy business I work with that's already having a hard time sourcing the pennies they need. I guess they're all in a jar under your desk.
It seems to me that if there was truly a shortage of pennies, banks could offer to pay 2 cents for every penny someone turned in (still far cheaper than minting a new one) and enough people would pull out their penny jars and cash them in.
I have a hard time believing any business relies on access to Pennies when all cash transactions can be rounded to a nickel in some way amenable to both parties. I imagine most customers just don’t give a damn.
> I doubt anyone who needs a penny will be unable to find one within the next 100 years.
Based on my experience with the universe, this ability of being able to find something whenever you need it, only happens until you start expecting it and when you really need it, you're not gonna be able to find it anywhere. Maybe "Murphy's law" isn't what I'm looking for but something similar? For when what you really need is no longer there, universe always works against you? Can't recall.
Setting prices to avoid the need for pennies is probably technically challenging given the combination of requirements to post prices and sales taxes that don't always round the same way.
If the effective tax rate is 7.432%, you can price single items so that the price plus tax ends up in a multiple of $0.05, but if you get a purchase with multiple items, you either need to round somewhere or post prices that are like $9.346263437.
It isn't that simple. There are stacked tax jurisdictions that can change their fraction of the tax independently. Some of those taxes are conditional at point-of-sale so the exact rate varies from customer to customer.
It is a mess but also not easy to unwind or patch over.
I'm now seeing signs in stores begging people for exact change due to a "penny shortage"
Seriously? You can't give up 4 cents per transaction to round to a nickel? Fuck, round it up for all I care, 5 cents is worth approximately nothing today.
Yes. I used to work at a movie theater, where all transactions were to the nearest $0.25 because it made it easier for the kids like me behind the counter to count the change and not lose track... seemed sensible at the time and that was 20 years ago.
Honestly nickels and dimes, and maybe even quarters, should go too. It's ridiculous that we don't have $1 and $2 coins in widespread circulation in the US (we have a $1 coin but nobody uses it).
We also have a $2 bill that nobody uses for whatever reason.
I never understood the objections to the $1 coin, especially after the redesign to make it more distinct from a quarter. $1 coins are great for buying stuff out of vending machines since you don't have to fight with a dodgy bill acceptor or a mangled bill.
My only real objection I guess, and the reason I don't carry change of any sort, is because it's constantly falling out of my pockets. I'm rather tall, so many seating positions put my knees higher than my waist, which I think contributes to that.
Further, since I don't have enough pockets to have a dedicated change pocket, it's always getting caught up in my keys and/or pocket knife.
Nobody really gave us training on this stuff, do other countries use a coin purse or some such?
Lastly, they're just comparatively heavy.
I just carry cash around in either a clip or a "front pocket wallet" I think they're called, and it seems more convenient all around.
Yeah. My proposal would be to have 10 cent, 50 cent, and $1 coins (rounding everything to the nearest 10 cents), with $2 the smallest bill. And probably you could drop the $5 bill at that point.
Quarters might be premature, but the half-cent was discontinued when it was worth a (modern equivalent) of $0.12-17. Even 20-30 years ago, when I was just starting to interact with money enough to have an opinion, I thought it was a hassle to deal with anything smaller than a quarter. The same logic behind getting rid of pennies (they cost more to make than the face value) also supports doing at least nickels.
> The same logic behind getting rid of pennies (they cost more to make than the face value)
I've honestly never understood why this is a valid reason to object to the coin. Coins aren't used only once, so that they cost most to make than their face value doesn't seem very important, unless the differential is much, much larger than it actually is.
Sorry Europe and Canada, $1 and $2 coins are just absolutely terrible. I never want to have to think about where my change is. Bills are much lighter than coins and stack with the rest of the bills.
Nickels and dimes certainly have predecent. When the US killed the half-penny in 1857, it had a purchasing power of somewhere around 19 cents from 2024.
Honestly I'd rather just not have coins at that point, rather than try to push $1 and $2 coins. Then I can just carry my wallet for bills and not have to worry about keeping track of coins separately.
Gotta do something to make the $2 bill popular though, no idea how.
I'd mourn the loss of the quarter. I use those quite often.
> (we have a $1 coin but nobody uses it)
Because they keep designing it in the stupidest way, making it easy to confuse with a quarter. I don't know why they do that.
That said, I do prefer paper $1 bills over coins. Paper is lighter and easier to carry. But I'd only slightly grumble if we replaced it with a reasonable coin.
It's not that keeping the penny around is (necessarily) a good idea, but that there are, you know, laws, and people (including the President and cabinet folks) should kind of follow those laws. So has the law been amended to not require the minting of the penny anymore?
Is there some 'new interpretation' that has been 'found' that allows Sec. Treasury to not mint pennies? Or is this change one made by fiat / executive order?
> Ensure rounding for cash customers does not violate terms of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). The SNAP program sensibly requires that SNAP customers cannot be treated differently than other customers.2 These provisions prohibit treating SNAP customers less favorably or more favorably than other customers. That means that rounding the price of food for a cash customer in either direction risks creating a violation of SNAP regulations for stores that participate in the SNAP program.
My understanding from something I read months ago - its a new interpretation. Specifically the law instructs the gov to make as many pennies as is necessary, but does not define what that is or how to calculate it. If the government deems necessary = 0, then you dont need to make any more.
Since the law is still on the books its still legal tender, and production may restart at any moment.
to my knowledge the legislation only says that the executive branch needs to make the "necessary" amount of pennies. the argument is that because they're losing money literally printing money that the "necessary" amount is zero and that therefore doing this follows the law because zero is an amount.
I'm a little worried this will encourage vendors to increases prices up to the next 5 cent mark, which will cause inflation that we really don't need more of right now.
In Canada, most prices still end in 99. You still pay to the cent if you're paying with a debit or credit card, which the vast majority of customers are these days.
I'd say screw it, get rid of nickles and dimes as well. Quarters can stay, for now.
It's a complete waste of money and time continuing to mint such low-value currency. It can't be used for just about anything.
Unfortunately, I do see the problem with part of this. For a handful of items where it does matter, it will force people to use cards more if they want to avoid rounding. And the card providers already have a choke-hold on retailers, and the whole thing is basically a scheme that funnels money from the poor to the wealthy via interest and fees on the consumer, interchange fees, and rewards programs.
I know you're referencing more than pennies, but to speak to pennies, I find the current rounding noise in the US to be weird. Likely, it's just more of the media, talking heads, and youtube personalities trying to turn a nothing into something, story.
Back when we did it in Canada, I don't recall a single person I knew concerned about penny rounding. Everyone was sick of pennies. No one cared. Everyone was happy. And the math seems fair enough:
https://www.budget.canada.ca/2012/themes/theme2-info-eng.htm...
Basically, if something is $1.01 or $1.02, you round down. If it's $1.03 or $1.04, you round up. Rounding is to be applied after all taxes are paid, etc.
Of course, there was also central guidance and, well, everyone just followed it. It's called "having a society".
People blathering on about stores fixing the rounding are morons, there's no way to do so if you buy more than one item. No one gets ripped off with the above method. In the end, it just works out.
And really, who cares?! It's a penny.
As the article points out, there are laws that say people who pay via SNAP debit cards "cannot be charged more than others".
If cash payments are rounded down, but debit card payments aren't, they are in violation of state law.
The article also points out that rollback of pennies in Canada and other places were planned, addressing these kinds of issues. USA is doing it with no such planning.
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There are already stores in the US that are rounding their transactions because of the penny shortage that is already happening. Many are just simply rounding all transactions down to the nearest $0.05.
When the US attempted to transition to the metric system, gas stations raised their prices per unit volume and the American consumer was convinced that the metric system was bad. I have family that think metric is bad because some fringe people thought there should be 10 hours in a day and 100 minutes in an hour, also something like 10 months a year, and the whole thing is bad because some awkward ideas were floated.
Here, it's a question of resolution, with a proven history that transitions screw the consumer, though maybe it won't be so. We're ok with arbitrary hundredths of a dollar, why were we not at thousandths? The American half cent disappeared a long time ago. You still need to include the cents in a tax bill that runs into the millions of dollars.
It's just an awkward stage in inflation. Eventually a US dollar will be worth what a Zimbabwean dollar was, and we won't have $100 bills anymore.
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> It's called "having a society".
That must be nice.
Rounding is such a weird boogeyman to me because people are like "the companies are just going to use it to get more money from the customers" but, they're doing that anyway. They don't need this excuse to raise prices they'll just do it anyway.
Same thing when people complain that raising minimum wage will increase prices, meanwhile prices have increased for 50 years completely separate from wages. They don't need the excuse to raise prices they're just gonna do it anyway.
If they want companies to not raise prices the only answer is regulation, but regulation is communism and therefore bad.
I'm so god damn tired.
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Media is just doing media things, ignore them. Nobody I know has even mentioned the penny thing, let alone expressed a strong opinion about it. From my perspective I have seen zero evidence of the American public caring one iota.
> Basically, if something is $1.01 or $1.02, you round down. If it's $1.03 or $1.04, you round up.
So everything's going to be $1.03 or $1.04. Not sure why you think retailers (or any sellers) would ever, ever, ever let this play into customers' advantage.
But apparently pointing out that obvious truth makes me a "moron," because you can think of some clever ways to get around it that retailers surely won't work around.
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The half-penny was discontinued in 1857. Adjusted for inflation it was worth 37 cents in todays money when it was discontinued.
But add a $3.50 coin so that we can strongly incentivize coffee to stay below a certain price.
I know this is supposed to be a joke but... businesses have pushed for this the other way around in the past, asking for a new coin to raise prices.
> The Coca-Cola Company sought ways to increase the five cent price, even approaching the U.S. Treasury Department in 1953 to ask that they mint a 7.5 cent coin. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fixed_price_of_Coca-Cola_from_...]
One of the things I admire most about Italy is how they have held the line on the price of an espresso.
It’s still just slightly over €1 if you drink it standing at the bar.
They really have their priorities straight when it comes to food and drink prices.
Just take a zero out of everything and change the name from dollar to something else!
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My local just went from $3.50 to $4 this week :(
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Also for the memes…
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The last time a coin was dropped was the half penny in the late 1850s, when I think it was worth about 25 cents today, so there is a precedent for what you are suggesting.
CCP Grey has a nice video and discusses the precedent: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y5UT04p5f7U
A noticeable number of places around me in an urban area in the USA already now have signs up saying they won't make any coin change at all! Pay with a card, or exact change, or they'll round up to the dollar keep the difference.
Sometimes the sign says "due to the penny shortage" and has been up for a year or whatever, I dunno. But they aren't just not giving you pennies in your change, they are refusing any coins in your change. I am curious as to the motivation, I could guess but it's not obvious to me. They will still take coins as payment, just not give them as change.
You can either put payments into the register or the safe.
If it goes into the safe, it's nearly impossible to steal because there's a time lock preventing the cashier from accessing it. But you can't make change.
This means you have a optimization problem to have the minimum possible cash in the register to meet all change needs.
Eliminating denominations makes the optimization problem easier, if nothing else.
Nickles are likely to go shortly after. You can do everything you can with nickles with dimes and quarters, nickles have worse economics than pennies, and have had their minting suppressed below the market needs for years. Once pennies leave circulation, the problems with nickles will become urgent and they'll quickly leave.
Dimes are small and cheap to make though, so they'll probably stick around.
If the Pennies go away, you can no longer get things for pennies on the dollar.
The famous little jingle "shave and a haircut, two bits"
Most people today have no clue what a "bit" is.
I imagine the future will hold something similar for the penny in all the idioms and cultural phrases we have. What the hell is a penny?
Soon one can no longer add 2 cents to a discussion.
Quick, someone file a trademark for “Take a Quarter, Leave a Quarter”
Only if the increased revenue from rounding doesn't go into retailers pockets but rather is redistributed somehow. i.e. to reduce sales tax
> It's a complete waste of money and time continuing to mint such low-value currency. It can't be used for just about anything.
The problem: the dollar is almost global in its usage. The penny may not be important to the US, but it dam well is every where else where dollars are still in use frequently, along side, or in place of the local/native currency.
Getting rid of the penny will have implications, getting rid of more coins would endanger the use of the dollar globally.
There is still a large portion of the world where 100 dollar bill and a Rolex will get you home safely.
Approximately nobody uses US coins outside the US. Even in countries where the dollar is widely accepted, trying to use coins will get you weird looks at best.
In what part of the world do they use US pennies?
The US currency system sure. But pennies, specifically?
> The penny may not be important to the US, but it dam well is every where else where dollars are still in use frequently
[citation needed]
And hell, put Bank of Zimbabwe on the bills.
I don't like inflation either. The fact that it's 'normal' or 'required for growth' to me sounds like economic bollocks and a lot of pretending that it doesn't cause issues in the long run.
But it's here to stay, nothing we can do about it.
Some interesting complications with rounding I had not heard about before were mentioned here, worth noting I think, especially given the prominence of SNAP in the news lately:
>Four states - Delaware, Connecticut, Michigan and Oregon - as well as numerous cities, including New York, Philadelphia, Miami and Washington, DC, require merchants to provide exact change, according to the National Association of Convenience Stores (NACS).
>In addition, the law covering the federal food assistance program known as SNAP requires that recipients not be charged more than other customers. Since SNAP recipients use a debit card that’s charged the precise amount, if merchants round down prices for cash purchases, they could be opening themselves to legal problems and fines, said Jeff Lenard, spokesperson for NACS.
>“Rounding down on all transactions presents several challenges beyond the loss of an average of 2 cents per transaction,” Lenard said. “We desperately need legislation that allows rounding so retailers can make change for these customers.”
They can round down the card transactions too if it’s really a problem to charge differing amounts.
For those that seriously think this would be a major problem there was a comedy skit circulating in Australia when this happened. A guy would push his car to the petrol pump, fill with 2c of petrol, rounded down to 0. The guy at the counter just laughed at it. You could in theory do this 1000 more times (would take hours) for $20 of free petrol. At least until the worker got sick of it and enforced the whole right to refuse service.
In the Netherlands cash payments get rounded to the nearest 5 cents, in both directions. Card payments are not rounded. If I’m not mistaken, you can still demand exact change according to the law and you’re allowed to pay the exact amount (cents are still legal tender). Most merchants wouldn’t be able to give you exact change, so it depends on the situation what would happen. I’ve never heard of such a situation happening, though.
For the SNAP law, could they just round down SNAP purchases in the same way to be compliant?
The SNAP equal treatment rule requirement works in both directions: Prices cannot be higher or lower for SNAP recipients. As a retailer, there is an option to request a waiver, though.
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They probably will, but that means a POS software update on a tight deadline.
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just make the price a multiple of five cents
State and local taxes make this infeasible
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Too early to say "ever", considering there has been no act of congress on this matter and the penny continues to be legal tender. The decision to stop minting it is a (legally debatable) executive order, and the next president or even the current one can change their mind about it tomorrow.
lets hope not. This is long overdue and should pose relatively little issue compared to most other recent questionable executive orders.
stop minting and stop accepting is commonly separated to allow adjustment. so likely a later president will just add the second phaseout step.
I agree it's time to follow Canada and the rest of the world but it needs to be done through congress, not executive orders. It needs to have a proper framework for migration and laws for how payments are rounded.
We eliminated pennies in Canada in 2012 and the transition was a non-issue. The vast majority of retailers would round cash transactions to the nearest $0.05, but a few would round down to the nearest $0.05 in favor of the customer. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Withdrawal_of_low-denomination...
Canadian cash is better than American cash in several ways: No penny, durable polymer banknotes (instead of dirty wrinkly cotton paper), colorful banknotes (instead of all green) that are easy to distinguish, $1 and $2 coins in wide circulation (instead of worn-out $1 bills).
I am suspicious of any claims about relative cleanliness. As with wooden vs plastic cutting boards, our intuitions are likely misleading.
To be an effective fomite the currency has to not kill the microbe, and it has to readily give up the microbe to the next recipient. Organic materials like cotton or linen seem more likely to simply absorb a viral envelope or bacterial cell wall, thereby rendering it ineffective. Furthermore, the porous nature makes it more difficult for the note to give up any microbe that isn't immediately killed before it naturally dies over time.
A brief search of the scientific literature doesn't seem to show any conclusive results, but it does seem like the relative performance is pathogen specific.
> the transition was a non-issue
I'm reminded of when Minnesota passed the Minnesota Clean Indoor Air Act (MCIAA) close to 20 years ago. (Some) restauranteurs - along with the GOP - made pronouncements about how this would destroy the economy. No one would go to out to eat or for a drink again. Doom and gloom.
Last I checked, there are plenty of restaurants open in the state, and things are going fine. In fact, just before the MCIAA went into effect, I had a newborn, and we went out to eat one time with him in tow. We asked for a non-smoking area but were placed immediately next to a family chain smoking. We decided to never go out to eat again until we could do so without risk of second-hand smoke.
My point is that there are frequently these predictions of things being impossible or even just incredibly difficult and not worth the effort, and in the end, it's not a big deal.
People overestimated the importance that smokers placed on being able to smoke in public.
A Japanese airline (Air Do) tried reintroducing the smoking section in the 1990s. It did not go well for them, and Japan's tobacco use rate was several times the US's.
I'll agree on all but one point. The cotton/linen notes feel so much better in the hand than the candy wrapper plastic of Canadian bills. I know it's a dumb reason, but I just hate the feeling.
Plus US dollars just have that smell to them. I wouldn't mind though if we rotated out some of the faces on the bills, e.g. Andrew Jackson
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I simply don’t like coins because they are heavy. I will continue to prefer $1 bills over $1 coins. Agree with the rest of your points though.
American banknotes have numbers on them to easily distinguish the different values!
> The United States is the only country that prints all denominations of currency in the same size. The US and Switzerland are the only two countries that use the same colors for all of their various bills. Needless to say, this sameness of size and color make it impossible for a blind person to locate the correct bills to make a purchase without some sort of assistance, or confirm that he or she has been given the correct change by the sales clerk. Even people with partial sight may have trouble distinguishing a $1 bill from a $10, especially if the bill is old and worn.
https://afb.org/blindness-and-low-vision/using-technology/ac...
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From dealing with Euro notes, I like being able to look down at the money in the wallet and pull the right notes out based on color. With USD I need to take the bills out of the wallet.
Which is great if you are fully abled! But for folks for whom sight isn't as strong, additional aids (different colors, different sized banknotes for different denominations) are super helpful.
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Not everyone can see.
Australian notes vary in size for this reason.
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And it would be even easier to distinguish them if they were different colors in addition to the printed numerals.
The linked article raises a few problems that the US could have with that solution:
> Four states - Delaware, Connecticut, Michigan and Oregon - as well as numerous cities, including New York, Philadelphia, Miami and Washington, DC, require merchants to provide exact change.
This seems like a non-issue as long as they round the price down. Because there's no law that the store can't discount their total by a small amount and then provide exact change.
"Congratulations customer, we have a special coupon today for $0.03 off your purchase. Here's your change :)"
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> require merchants to provide exact change
All the items in my dad's farm shop were priced so they came out to a round dollar amount after tax, and that was 40 years ago.
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How do they deal with sales tax? Connecticut has a 6.35% sales tax so if I buy something for $1, the total will be $1.0635.
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If the US properly got rid of pennies (instead of Trump just doing another end-run around congress, by ordering the Mint to stop making them, on shaky legal ground), the legislation could easily supersede those state laws.
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Paying by card doesn't round, the amount charged is exact cents, or at least that's the way it worked last time I was in Canada.
> $1 and $2 coins in wide circulation (instead of worn-out $1 bills).
This has its own pros/cons...
One advantage of $1 bill over coin is the majority of people in US don't need a wallet with zipper to hold coins. Five $1 bills is much less bulky and much lighter than five $1 CAD or five 1€ coins
All green notes are barely there anymore... the dollar bill itself. Even the five has some color now.
In my country they round up if you pay in cash but they keep the cents for electronic payments.
So for instance 1.69 in cash would be 1.70 but if you pay with your phone it stays at 1.69
There are several US states where, by law, retailers are not allowed to give preferential treatment to credit card paying customers over cash paying ones. Which means, in those states, retailers will be required to always round transactions to the cash paying customer's benefit, where in other states the retailer is allowed to round to the nearest 5 cents. This is going to cost large retailers millions.
Interestingly many of them had already put the work into updating the cash register software to allow for this due to the penny shortages during covid.
It doesn't cost anyone anything. They can just raise prices 3 cents or whatever.
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Canadian Tire Company should be the ones designing the bills, however…
Same in UK but we also size each face value differently.
Which helps partially sighted people and is a good visual check.
The US has been moving to colored denominations for awhile now.
Even though I never use cash, I’m really not a fan of coins, so I wish we did have $1 bills.
We do have $1 bills. And coins!
I honestly don't know why we don't get rid of nickels and dimes as well. What can you still buy that costs less than $0.25?
When we got rid of the half-penny, it was worth more in 2024 cents than the dime is now.
We waited so long past when we should have gotten rid of the penny that now a coin ten times as valuable is also worthless enough that we ought to get rid of it.
Yes, the quarter is pretty much the smallest useful unit of US currency and even that usefulness is shrinking pretty quickly.
If we would adopt a policy of including local sales tax in advertised prices, skipping to whole dollars would be pretty painless.
The main reason to keep at least quarters is all of the various coin-op machines that are still in service.
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So how would you propose paying for something that cost $0.40, or would you just like to see all prices be multiples of 25c?
BTW, the reason for wanting to get rid of the penny isn't so much the low purchasing value, but more that they cost more to make (~4c) than their face value, so the government loses money making them. The same is true of nickels.
My employer has a 55¢ vending machine with a dodgy bill validator.
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Bananas
> We eliminated pennies in Canada in 2012 and the transition was a non-issue.
That's because Canada had a plan, thought it through, and rolled it out.
In the US...
“We had a social media post (by Trump) during Super Bowl Sunday, but no real plan for what retailers would have to do,” he said, referring to the president’s February announcement.
We have a deranged old man posting random shit on social media determining federal policy, so of course it's a chaotic shitshow.
We elected a clown, we got a circus.
US notes also stink.
Better is very subjective here. I hate the colorful, plastic, canadian money. It feels toyish, like monopoly money. Whereas USD feels much more nice to deal with.
As a Canadian with kids who recently bought Monopoly, I can you tell you that American money objectively feels much more like Monopoly money...
The last ever American penny (as the article text clarifies). Don't any other countries with a "dollar" use the same name for their 1-cent pieces?
> The penny costs nearly four cents to mint, more than the coin’s worth.
Wow. I think it was only something like 1.5c (in the local market) when Canada gave up on them.
>But with 20 million customers a year, and 17% of them paying with cash, the policy will eventually cost Kwik Trip a couple of million dollars a year, McHugh said.
If we figure two-fifths of cash transactions need to be rounded up and the store is losing an average of 1.5 cents each time, their expected losses would be around $2,000, yeah?
> Kwik Trip, a family-owned convenience store chain that operates in the Midwest, decided to round down cash purchases in stores where it hasn’t been able to find pennies.
They're rounding all cash transactions down to the nearest nickel, so an average of 2 cents per transaction, 3.4 million customers, gives me $68,000 assuming each "customer" makes a single transaction per year. If they mean that there are 20 million unique customers, not 20m transactions, then the a long tail of customers who make frequent small transactions in cash could make their claim check out.
Whatever the total ends up being, it's basically a marketing expense that they're electing to make. Probably they do it for a year and then switch to rounding to the nearest nickel, which is what everyone else will be doing.
I would bet they have a way to write it off.
20 million customers doesn't mean 20 million transactions. Considering we are talking about a convenience store I'm sure a large chunk of their customers visit every day, some probably multiple times a day.
Assuming 3.4 million customers (cash users) and 2.5 cents average loss per transaction, it would only take one visit a month for them to cross a million dollars in losses.
Of course at that scale it's not like that million or two is really making a difference to their bottom line. Doing some quick Googling their annual revenue is estimated to be $6-7 billion.
If we make the maximally pessimistic assumption that every cash transaction would require rounding down four cents, that's 68,000 customers per year times four cents, which is $136,000 per year.
A more reasonable assumption that half of transactions require rounding down cuts that in half, I suppose.
20m customers * 17% * 4 cents * 'x' transactions per customer = $136,000 * x
I suppose this makes some sense. In a worst case situation, if every customer makes 10-20 transactions per year, and they always round down the maximum possible amount, they would lose millions per year.
They must mean unique customers, not customer transactions.
They have about 878 stores, according to Wikipedia, so if it was transactions, each store would only see about 62 transactions per day, which is way too low.
Sure. But multiply by whatever number you want and it is still the same percentage of revenue.
I get $20,400 (20m * 17% * 40% * 0.015). But that's still nothing for a company that does 20 million POS transactions a year.
It's cheaper than the credit card fees, that's for sure.
What's more contemptible: that CNN refused to spend the 30 seconds that it would take to do the math; or that it interviewed a "spokesman" that also didn't spend 30 seconds to do the math, and was sure that nobody would check?
This is the kind of article that should be written by AI (or not written, really.) If you completely fictionalized the empty interviews, nothing would be lost.
Maybe the "spokesman" has been told to angle for a government subsidy for the inconvenience of losing pennies? And from a gas station, which add that goofy fraction of a cent at the end of their pricing.
Hmm. I actually still like coins and paper money. However had in the EU, I don't like the 1 and 2 eurocent at all. These are just pointless really. I'd like a 5 euro coin and a 2 euro paper instead.
I watched a video on the demise of the penny and its predicament was so succinctly explained: everyone gets pennies as change but few carry them around let alone spend them, so we are stuck producing ever more. One news outlet even did an "experiment" where they threw hundreds of pennies on the ground in a city on a busy morning and not one person stopped to pick any up.
> everyone gets pennies as change but few carry them around let alone spend them
It's not just pennies, it's all coins. In a former life I worked in retail and almost nobody would fish around in their pockets for exact (or even near) change. They'd always hand me bills for their purchase even if they had just completed a transaction and had the coins in their pocket. That was in the 90's, and I still see it happening today, even though I'm no longer in the retail world.
I’d regularly use quarters in vending machines, but not waste time during a retail transaction.
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Nowadays I pay for everything with my phone but back in the day I too hated using coins. Having to calculate and fish out coins? Ain't nobody got time for that.
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That's incredibly bizarre. If I have coins my first instinct is to spend them ASAP so I don't have to carry them around.
Random anecdote: I go to a boulangerie almost daily (as one does here in France). There is one close to me that started charging 12 centimes for slicing the bread. I got annoyed with this and nowadays make a point to take lots of small change from the coin jar and use it. They don't seem to mind.
I remember moving out of a place (decades ago). I was the last roommate out, and so was stuck with some of the cleanup (wanted to get that deposit back!).
One of the things we had was a ton of pennies (no idea why). I had no room in my car, so I spend a few minutes late at night flinging pennies out onto the sidewalk after a long day of cleaning the place.
Would it not have been better/easier for all involved to have just set a container of all the pennies on the street on your way out? If someone really could use them, you're kind of a dick for making them picking them up one at a time, but if they were all together...
I use quarters in parking meters sometimes.
I actually do that for numismatic reasons now. After today they will only increase in scarcity.
Not that I imagine they'll ever be valuable mind you... I should really just go and get $5 worth somewhere. That would satiate my desires
> not one person stopped to pick any up.
Isn't that the old joke about the economist?
Like many people, I throw my change into a jar when I get home. One time I only kept pennies and used an old apple cider jug. Turns out that a gallon of pennies is worth almost $55 [0]. And that carrying a heavy glass jug filled with pennies to the Coinstar machine is very anxiety inducing.
Speaking of which - the Coinstar machines near me will give you several options for redemption. Some of which have been Amazon and Home Depot e-gift codes that have no redemption fee.
[0] A potential worthless interview question...
Do any other countries have/had “penny squish” souvenir machines? You put in 2 quarters + a penny, and it stamps a design onto the penny. My favorite souvenir, small, cheap, can keep in a booklet, and many landmarks have the machines. There are a few machines that take a $1 bill and use a fresh penny blank internally.
IMO:
1: The price posted should be the price you pay. (Include all taxes, fees, gratuities, ect.)
2: The price posted should be a multiple of $0.05, $0.10, or $0.25
Problem solved.
Can any coin collectors let me know what, if any, effect this may have on the collection of steel pennies I have secured in my bunker in the woods?
Our money is being depreciated at a rate of 3% per year and up to 25%-30% during the last inflationary cycle and is now to the point where coins are nearly useless. At the current trajectory, the one dollar note will also be obsolete in our lifetime.
I’m old enough to remember being able to scrounge around the house for pennies and heading down to Gracie’s corner store so I could buy some Swedish fish. They were 1 cent each. Gracie counted them out and put them in a small paper bag for you.
A major score was finding a dime or quarter on the street. When the Whatchamacallit first came out they were 25 cents!
As much as there's a lot of reasonable arguments for ending the minting of the penny, the method in which this president waves his hands and fundamentally changes things such as our White House, our currency, our trade policies, our universities leaves me with a bad taste in my mouth and it's hard to support even sensible decisions this authoritarian regime makes.
Step one: make all items cost an even five cents after tax. step two: when making price adjustments like discount, round the effect to the nearest five cents. Step three: charge everyone this amount
But if 99 cent stuff costs a dollar, sales will plummet.
The fact that you'd need to even mint them in 2025 is mind boggling. Why isn't there a law that stops minting coins that cost more than their values? You'd think they would have figured this out by now?
It's been useless baggage for decades. The even saner approach would be to fade-out an order of magnitude of currency every century. The math checks out.
Finally!
Here is a delightful article from NYT from last year on this topic. Truly fascinating and bewildering.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/01/magazine/worthless-pennie...
> Finally... NYT from last year... Truly fascinating and bewildering
Yeah, really bewildering, happiness inflated by inflation.
> When Robert Whaples, an economist at Wake Forest University, published an article in 2006 about the imperative to eliminate America’s 1-cent coin, he received a personal note: “Get it done, and you will deserve the Nobel Prize!”
Everything makes sense now...
I wonder how long of not minting new pennies it would take for the average collectible value of the existing stock to reach break-even again.
I feel like pennies fall out of circulation at a very high rate compared to other denominations.
Russia eliminated all kopeck coins years ago and anyone hardly noticed. Seemingly the only place you could still see any is a bank. Retailers usually round down to whole rubles if you're paying in cash.
Many countries eliminated their pennies without chaos or unfair burdens on shopkeepers. In Canada, the process was widely popular after the fact even though newspaper articles prior to the elimination intimated it wouldn't be due to their "both sides" style of reporting.
It's indicative of the current US administration that they managed to screw this up despite many examples world wide of how to do it properly.
Unfair burden?? I think you’re blowing this out of proportion..
Credit card fees are 2-4%. Rounding to the nearest nickel costs at most $0.02 (1,2 round to 0; 3,4 round to 5)
It is cheaper for the merchant to round to the nearest nickel for any transaction of one dollar or more than it is to pay CC merchant fees.
It costs on average 2 cents because without legislative authority to round to closest the retailer must round down and eat up to 4 cents of difference.
Cash costs retailers money too. Safely transporting it to the bank, et cetera. For many, cash is more expensive than credit cards.
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If you believe this is going to cause chaos or significant burdens on merchants I have got a bridge to sell you (but I don't take pennies). This quote tells you all you need to know.
> The government’s phasing out of the penny has been “a bit chaotic,” said Mark Weller, executive director of Americans for Common Cents. The pro-penny group is funded primarily by Artazn, the company that provides the blanks used to make pennies.
Nick Mullen should be the guest of honor at this event.
Many are reporting this as if failing to mint new pennies each year is going to produce some kind of shortage. There are billions of pennies sitting in drawers or jars in homes across the nation (I certainly have one with about a thousand pennies in it).
I doubt anyone who needs a penny will be unable to find one within the next 100 years.
There's a cash-heavy business I work with that's already having a hard time sourcing the pennies they need. I guess they're all in a jar under your desk.
It seems to me that if there was truly a shortage of pennies, banks could offer to pay 2 cents for every penny someone turned in (still far cheaper than minting a new one) and enough people would pull out their penny jars and cash them in.
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I have a hard time believing any business relies on access to Pennies when all cash transactions can be rounded to a nickel in some way amenable to both parties. I imagine most customers just don’t give a damn.
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> I doubt anyone who needs a penny will be unable to find one within the next 100 years.
Based on my experience with the universe, this ability of being able to find something whenever you need it, only happens until you start expecting it and when you really need it, you're not gonna be able to find it anywhere. Maybe "Murphy's law" isn't what I'm looking for but something similar? For when what you really need is no longer there, universe always works against you? Can't recall.
Selective attention or confirmation bias with a hint of cosmic irony?
I don't know how accurate this is, but someone posted on Reddit some Burger King is already having a hard time getting pennies from their bank: https://old.reddit.com/r/mildlyinteresting/comments/1opdlm2/...
Most of the stores in my area have started requiring people to pay with exact change or by card because they can't get pennies to make change.
Personally, I think stores should just start setting prices to avoid the need for pennies, but that would be too easy, I guess.
Setting prices to avoid the need for pennies is probably technically challenging given the combination of requirements to post prices and sales taxes that don't always round the same way.
If the effective tax rate is 7.432%, you can price single items so that the price plus tax ends up in a multiple of $0.05, but if you get a purchase with multiple items, you either need to round somewhere or post prices that are like $9.346263437.
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It isn't that simple. There are stacked tax jurisdictions that can change their fraction of the tax independently. Some of those taxes are conditional at point-of-sale so the exact rate varies from customer to customer.
It is a mess but also not easy to unwind or patch over.
If your sales tax rate is 8.875%, what do you price a banana at to avoid change?
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I'm now seeing signs in stores begging people for exact change due to a "penny shortage"
Seriously? You can't give up 4 cents per transaction to round to a nickel? Fuck, round it up for all I care, 5 cents is worth approximately nothing today.
Did anyone ever make a simulator for pennies hitting the floor like in the top video?
There's something about getting rid of Honest Abe on coinage that seems... sadly appropriate for the current climate.
At least he's still on fives.
Apropos: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F8R5QCPUqaI
Oo, I'd like to get a roll of these. But I live in Norway.
And the people rejoiced!
we don’t have “pennies” in the EU anymore
Finally, can we next stop making dollar bills and add a two dollar coin.
could get rid of dimes and nickels as well.
Yes. I used to work at a movie theater, where all transactions were to the nearest $0.25 because it made it easier for the kids like me behind the counter to count the change and not lose track... seemed sensible at the time and that was 20 years ago.
Honestly nickels and dimes, and maybe even quarters, should go too. It's ridiculous that we don't have $1 and $2 coins in widespread circulation in the US (we have a $1 coin but nobody uses it).
We also have a $2 bill that nobody uses for whatever reason.
I never understood the objections to the $1 coin, especially after the redesign to make it more distinct from a quarter. $1 coins are great for buying stuff out of vending machines since you don't have to fight with a dodgy bill acceptor or a mangled bill.
My only real objection I guess, and the reason I don't carry change of any sort, is because it's constantly falling out of my pockets. I'm rather tall, so many seating positions put my knees higher than my waist, which I think contributes to that.
Further, since I don't have enough pockets to have a dedicated change pocket, it's always getting caught up in my keys and/or pocket knife.
Nobody really gave us training on this stuff, do other countries use a coin purse or some such?
Lastly, they're just comparatively heavy.
I just carry cash around in either a clip or a "front pocket wallet" I think they're called, and it seems more convenient all around.
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Yeah. My proposal would be to have 10 cent, 50 cent, and $1 coins (rounding everything to the nearest 10 cents), with $2 the smallest bill. And probably you could drop the $5 bill at that point.
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> We also have a $2 bill that nobody uses for whatever reason.
It’s because retailers wont accept them - they think they’re counterfeit because no one uses them. A catch-22 situation, really.
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Quarters might be premature, but the half-cent was discontinued when it was worth a (modern equivalent) of $0.12-17. Even 20-30 years ago, when I was just starting to interact with money enough to have an opinion, I thought it was a hassle to deal with anything smaller than a quarter. The same logic behind getting rid of pennies (they cost more to make than the face value) also supports doing at least nickels.
> The same logic behind getting rid of pennies (they cost more to make than the face value)
I've honestly never understood why this is a valid reason to object to the coin. Coins aren't used only once, so that they cost most to make than their face value doesn't seem very important, unless the differential is much, much larger than it actually is.
Sorry Europe and Canada, $1 and $2 coins are just absolutely terrible. I never want to have to think about where my change is. Bills are much lighter than coins and stack with the rest of the bills.
I want to get rid of bills and move to only coins. We can carry coin pouches and act like a medieval/fantasy novel character.
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Nickels and dimes certainly have predecent. When the US killed the half-penny in 1857, it had a purchasing power of somewhere around 19 cents from 2024.
Used to use dollar coins at toll booths all the time. That was before ez pass
At least nickels should go so we can always round by one digit.
Honestly I'd rather just not have coins at that point, rather than try to push $1 and $2 coins. Then I can just carry my wallet for bills and not have to worry about keeping track of coins separately.
Gotta do something to make the $2 bill popular though, no idea how.
I'd mourn the loss of the quarter. I use those quite often.
> (we have a $1 coin but nobody uses it)
Because they keep designing it in the stupidest way, making it easy to confuse with a quarter. I don't know why they do that.
That said, I do prefer paper $1 bills over coins. Paper is lighter and easier to carry. But I'd only slightly grumble if we replaced it with a reasonable coin.
> That said, I do prefer paper $1 bills over coins. Paper is lighter and easier to carry.
Sure, but how many $1 bills do you typically carry around? If it's more than four, then you can trade them in for a $5 bill just about anywhere.
Bring back the Eisenhower dollar!
It's a completely different color than a quarter.
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So Obama wanted to wanted to ban the penny, but it was deemed illegal to do so and efforts to get rid of the law requiring it did not pass:
* https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2025/02/10/trump-us-mi...
* https://www.local3news.com/obama-wants-to-retire-the-penny-b...
It's not that keeping the penny around is (necessarily) a good idea, but that there are, you know, laws, and people (including the President and cabinet folks) should kind of follow those laws. So has the law been amended to not require the minting of the penny anymore?
* https://abcnews.go.com/US/trumps-order-scrap-penny-make-cent...
* https://www.npr.org/2025/02/10/nx-s1-5292082/trump-penny-min...
Is there some 'new interpretation' that has been 'found' that allows Sec. Treasury to not mint pennies? Or is this change one made by fiat / executive order?
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penny_debate_in_the_United_Sta...
There's only semi-consideration been given to this; the retailers want official rules passed on how round should be done
* https://www.rila.org/focus-areas/finance/main-street-busines...
For example, one subtly:
> Ensure rounding for cash customers does not violate terms of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). The SNAP program sensibly requires that SNAP customers cannot be treated differently than other customers.2 These provisions prohibit treating SNAP customers less favorably or more favorably than other customers. That means that rounding the price of food for a cash customer in either direction risks creating a violation of SNAP regulations for stores that participate in the SNAP program.
My understanding from something I read months ago - its a new interpretation. Specifically the law instructs the gov to make as many pennies as is necessary, but does not define what that is or how to calculate it. If the government deems necessary = 0, then you dont need to make any more.
Since the law is still on the books its still legal tender, and production may restart at any moment.
You already know the answer.
The president is now immune to obeying the law and can pardon all of his stooges.
to my knowledge the legislation only says that the executive branch needs to make the "necessary" amount of pennies. the argument is that because they're losing money literally printing money that the "necessary" amount is zero and that therefore doing this follows the law because zero is an amount.
I don’t understand why it costing more than face value to mint is such a bad thing
Well no, apparently ANY President now has almost ANY power
so the next President could order a new penny made with their face on it
sure they could, look at the east-wing and tell me what limits of power a President has
Any Republican president maybe. The Supreme Court and a Fox media circuit would never let the opposition ignore congress like this.
I'm a little worried this will encourage vendors to increases prices up to the next 5 cent mark, which will cause inflation that we really don't need more of right now.
Gas stations price to the tenth of a penny per gallon. There is no 1/10 cent coin. Works fine.
That's because the law requires them to charge that extra 9/10. It's silly.
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This has not been an issue in Canada. There is sales tax, which basically randomizes the last digit.
In Canada, most prices still end in 99. You still pay to the cent if you're paying with a debit or credit card, which the vast majority of customers are these days.