Or even just go straight to quarters being the only change at all. A penny CPI adjusted from when they got rid of the half penny in the US (1857) is already worth $0.35 today.
It'll go quicker, but it won't save space! Unless we make smaller half dollars, just as the gold colored dollar coins took over after the large dollar coins we had previously. Perhaps something with a diameter similar to a nickel but a thickness similar to a penny or quarter.
Pennies and nickels definitely should go. They’re not even worth picking up off the ground.
Swedish coin, year taken out of circulation:
0.1 cents, 1972
0.2 cents, 1972
0.5 cents, 1985
1 cent (penny), 1992
2.5 cents, 1985
5 cents (nickel), 2010In the distant past when I still named computers, I'd always make sure to have a zloty and a kopek somewhere in the zoo; typically they'd be NIS servers or recursive DNS servers or other similarly important task trivially serviced by an antiquated server I had fondness for and wanted an excuse to not retire. "You can't turn off those SLCs; they're the NIS servers for the statistics department..."
The sender can elect to round them to the nearest crown, but that is optional.
Cash based commerce should just be rounded to the 1/10th dollar not the 1/100th dollar; there's just no need for such precision.
I'd just announce that while still legal tender, the penny, nickle, and quarter won't be minted any longer except in low volumes for collectors, and that cash transactions may be rounded down to the nearest 10th dollar if proper change is not available.
IE a cup of coffee costing $4.17 would cost $4.10 if paying cash. I suspect vendors would just update the cost of everything to land on the 1/10th increment.
I guess you may need to worry about people playing arbitrage games with metered things like gasoline, but even there it's probably just a marginal problem.
Dime is a weird word; it doesn't convey that it's a tenth of a dollar, does it?
[edited to add examples and digression on gasoline]
There were also jokes about buying one grape at a time so the whole bag got rounded to 0, but I worked at a grocery store for two years and never saw anyone try to exploit the rounding, even to a lesser extent :)
Imagine you own a gas station. Your actual cost to fill your tanks is some multiple of the price you can charge per gallon. Requiring 10 cent-rounded prices kneecaps your ability to efficiently price your product.
Flipping it around, if you think $1/10 increments are good enough for a gas station owner, why aren’t they good enough for Microsoft when its shares are traded? Decimalization in equity markets has been widely seen as a success because more precise prices communicate information about the relative interests of buyers and sellers more accurately.
Given the predominance of digital transactions, it’s hard to argue that the transactional efficiency gains of less precise prices are worth the downsides.