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Posted
8 hours ago, B00M said:

You drawing the line somewhere or do you want central bank digital currency? 

I think we have been there since about 1980, which is the last time I was paid in cash. Since then there were a few jobs that I was paid with a check, but mostly it's been direct deposit. So the digital US dollar been around about 50 years, and that's just for me.

Posted
On 2/10/2025 at 7:54 AM, Nice Guy Eddie said:

Find it hard to get worked up over this. The decision should have been made 20 years ago but the rumor is the IL politicians didn’t want to get rid of it due to Lincoln being oh the penny. Given that so many payments are electronic, it won’t matter to for many consumers.

it also doesn’t ban the penny, we just won’t make more. As they become more scarce, just round the change down.

 

20 hours ago, CooterBrown said:

In Canada, prices that end in .01 or .02 round down to .00 and .03 & .04 round up to .05.

But we will do something stupid that makes no sense.

 

Got some ocean front property in Arizona to sell you if you think anyone in the US of A will be rounding anything down...lol



 

Posted (edited)

One aspect of this debate/order is how false or stupid arguments can easily resonate with the public. The fact that a penny costs 2 or 3 cents to mint does not mean it's a bad deal. A penny effectively lasts forever unless it's intentionally destroyed or lost. A dollar bill also costs 3 cents to print, but it has a short life if it has an average circulation.

If the minting/printing cost vs nominal value is the goal, then we should only print $100 bills if not bring back $1,000 bills. 

I'm not disagreeing that the penny should be retired but the main argument from Trump is for stupid people.

Edited by Nice Guy Eddie
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Posted
On 2/11/2025 at 7:17 PM, Covri said:

Looking at the production cost is stupid to begin with. A penny or any other coin gets exchanged multiple times more than its production cost. I’d like to see the use rate of all these coins and small denomination bills to see how much reuse they get. No, I’m not going to look it up, do the research for me. #DT

 

pennies don't get reused much because they spend so much time sitting in jars. other change somewhat less so.

Posted

When the US decided to make 1 cent coins, they were worth about a quarter dollar compared to now. As in other incredibly poor countries, they probably went farther than that.

But back then we barely had any coins compared to what we needed. Once you got a couple of days inland, trade would have died if not for IOUs, with all the chances of cascading failures if big creditors went under.

Back to the question, I have no idea why we use pennies anymore. If we were designing our currency now, we wouldn't invent them. They've inflated away.

For more fun:

https://foundinphiladelphia.com/money-its-not-what-you-think/

 

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Posted
27 minutes ago, RDCanecutter said:

When the US decided to make 1 cent coins, they were worth about a quarter dollar compared to now. As in other incredibly poor countries, they probably went farther than that.

But back then we barely had any coins compared to what we needed. Once you got a couple of days inland, trade would have died if not for IOUs, with all the chances of cascading failures if big creditors went under.

Back to the question, I have no idea why we use pennies anymore. If we were designing our currency now, we wouldn't invent them. They've inflated away.

For more fun:

https://foundinphiladelphia.com/money-its-not-what-you-think/

 

Good quick read. Neato!

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Posted
2 hours ago, RDCanecutter said:

When the US decided to make 1 cent coins, they were worth about a quarter dollar compared to now. As in other incredibly poor countries, they probably went farther than that.

But back then we barely had any coins compared to what we needed. Once you got a couple of days inland, trade would have died if not for IOUs, with all the chances of cascading failures if big creditors went under.

Back to the question, I have no idea why we use pennies anymore. If we were designing our currency now, we wouldn't invent them. They've inflated away.

For more fun:

https://foundinphiladelphia.com/money-its-not-what-you-think/

 

Pretty wild stuff there. Thanks for educating me. How much do you think of the move west was necessitated by the volatile nature of so many currencies? 

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Posted
10 hours ago, UpperWestside said:

Pretty wild stuff there. Thanks for educating me. How much do you think of the move west was necessitated by the volatile nature of so many currencies? 

Way outside my pay-grade. :)

I suspect the move west was due to people having eight extra kids who survived to adulthood, as well as a culture of asking for forgiveness instead of permission. Didn't hurt that the Crown had settled the back-country with Johnny Cash types.

I wonder if those different currencies even bothered anybody. We walk around with handfuls of apps, still can use checks, cards, or cash, and in a pinch I'd spin up the exchange rates in Euros if I needed to. Only time it's been simple in my life was back when I was a kid.

I do think a lack of usable currencies would stunt trade. There is a book by Harry Franck who walked across most of South America in 1912(?) (with gold Sovereigns sewed into his belt.) He crossed areas outside government control where it must have been mostly barter, hardly any coins, paper money was typically worth a penny on the dollar, small change was pins and buttons. Then once when he tried to cash a gold coin, they for some reason didn't trust the word of a strange hobo.

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Posted
23 hours ago, Nice Guy Eddie said:

One aspect of this debate/order is how false or stupid arguments can easily resonate with the public. The fact that a penny costs 2 or 3 cents to mint does not mean it's a bad deal. A penny effectively lasts forever unless it's intentionally destroyed or lost. A dollar bill also costs 3 cents to print, but it has a short life if it has an average circulation.

If the minting/printing cost vs nominal value is the goal, then we should only print $100 bills if not bring back $1,000 bills. 

I'm not disagreeing that the penny should be retired but the main argument from Trump is for stupid people.

Interesting, but not relevant. The average banknote lasts around 6 years before it needs to be reprinted.  It costs $3 to print 100 pennies which lasts more or less forever. You could print 100 $1 notes for the same cost, which if represented by $1 in board money M3 means it would take 600 years before printing a hundred pennies breaks even with printing $1 notes. 

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Posted

I'm no economist, but if it costs close to 3 cents per to manufacture, why not offer some sort of financial incentive to turn them in?  For every 50 cent roll you turn in, we will give you 1 dollar.  OK, maybe not 2:1, but something.  Three quarters for one roll of pennies.  There's plenty of people out there who would turn 'em in to get something for nothing.

Posted
17 minutes ago, SurlyGator said:

I'm no economist, but if it costs close to 3 cents per to manufacture, why not offer some sort of financial incentive to turn them in?  For every 50 cent roll you turn in, we will give you 1 dollar.  OK, maybe not 2:1, but something.  Three quarters for one roll of pennies.  There's plenty of people out there who would turn 'em in to get something for nothing.

Because it’s not about cost cutting. That’s just the excuse. It’s so every retailer in the country can round up and make more money. Every cash transaction going forward now has an increased profit of 1-4 cents. 

Posted (edited)
14 hours ago, SurlyGator said:

I'm no economist, but if it costs close to 3 cents per to manufacture, why not offer some sort of financial incentive to turn them in?  For every 50 cent roll you turn in, we will give you 1 dollar.  OK, maybe not 2:1, but something.  Three quarters for one roll of pennies.  There's plenty of people out there who would turn 'em in to get something for nothing.

Mainly because we don’t want them? The US banking system could not even store all the pennies sitting at peoples homes if they wanted to. 

18 hours ago, gsoda3 said:

Interesting, but not relevant. The average banknote lasts around 6 years before it needs to be reprinted.  It costs $3 to print 100 pennies which lasts more or less forever. You could print 100 $1 notes for the same cost, which if represented by $1 in board money M3 means it would take 600 years before printing a hundred pennies breaks even with printing $1 notes. 

It is relevant because the average penny doesn't get reused, you get it as change in a bank and then it goes into some jar. SO pennies have to be constantly minted to keep making change. 

The biggest winner in our country printing the penny is fucking coinstar, they charge 12.5% to basically recycle pennies back into banks. 

This is a long NYtimes article but it is a very good read. 

NYTimes America Must Free Itself from the Tyranny of the Penny

Quote

A conservative estimate holds that there are 240 billion pennies lying around the United States — about 724 ($7.24) for every man, woman and child there residing, and enough to hand two pennies to every bewildered human born since the dawn of man. (To distribute them all, in fact, we’d have to double back to the beginning and give our first six billion ancestors a third American penny.)…….Although pennies are almost never used for their ostensible purpose (to make purchases), right now one out of every two circulating coins minted in the United States has a face value of 1 cent. A majority of the ones that have not yet disappeared are, according to a 2022 report, “sitting in consumers’ coin jars in their homes.”

It’s crucial that they remain there. Five years ago, Mint officials conceded that if even a modest portion of these dormant pennies were suddenly to return to circulation, the resulting flow-back would be “logistically unmanageable.” There would be so unbelievably many pennies that there most likely would not be enough room to contain them inside government vaults. Moving them from place to place would be time-consuming, cumbersome and costly. (Just $100 worth of pennies weighs a touch over 55 pounds.) 

 

Edited by hornbri
Posted

In my house, all coins have a use-cycle resembling that of cents. And I'd call us pretty cash-friendly.

I'll carry paper cash to use instead of credit card, also to keep from buying too much. (And some places ring up a 3% discount if you don't make them give Square a cut.) Buy something, get various coins in change. Mrs. Canecutter collects coins, so she looks at them, rejects 99% as ordinary.

The rest go on a shelf in case I decide to swan about on a city bus that month. Usually don't. Every now and then I'll make a big cash sale so I'll take it (plus excess coin change) and deposit it in the Credit Union.

I never bought anything recently with the quarters, dimes, or nickels. They were useful, but no longer 100% currency the way they used to be in school when I'd gather up enough for a cheap burger before I'd leave the house.

Maybe that's the key. If you're broke, you use them more.

 

Posted

Pennies may have some use. Back in the early 90s a group of us were caravanning from one town bar to another (I lived in rural NY at the time) and the car I was in got pulled over. We told my buddy who was driving that if he put a bunch of pennies in his mouth, it would mess with the breathalyzer. He proceeds to take all the pennies from the ashtray and stuff them in his mouth. We never got a chance for him to test our theory because one of the guys with us was a cop and spoke with the officer who pulled us over. He ended up letting us proceed to the next bar. /csb

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Posted

Here's a radical notion. Get rid of all coins. Fuck all that shit. I haven't touched american coins in at least a decade. Smallest hard cash is $1 folding money.

Everything else can be stablecoin or digital, with unlimited digits to the right of the decimal. Stablecoins are about to replace all your credit card transactions anyway.

Posted

My buddy and I handed out pennies to everyone at our high school graduation to drop on the stage as we walked across to get our diplomas. The vice principal got wind of it about 20 minutes before the ceremony and made everyone hand them over. Fun sponge. 

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