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.
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.
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.
Dimes are small and cheap to make though, so they'll probably stick around.
Make a half-dollar coin, the size of the current quarter.
Make a quarter, the size of the current dime.
Get rid of all other coins. Also remove the $1.00 bill.
Start using $2.00 bills (as smallest cash) and stock ATMs with $50 and $10 bills.
Create a new $1000.00 note.
----
[not actually] fun fact: removal of the penny results in more nickels being minted, which will actually result in a net-cost for removing penny from circulation.
Cash is the way for small retailers to allow people who have very little money to stay away from the lure of easy credit. If you force them to use cards they will lose track of their spending completely and that will surely not help.
I wouldn’t mind having larger coin denominations though. Dollar and five dollar coins would be very convenient.
Counterpoint: Get rid of nickels and quarters. In the digital age, it's far more practical to round to the nearest $0.1 than $0.05.
I'd like to get a dollar coin that is distinctive enough to not be confused with the quarter. Last time I got change for cash, the cashier mistook a dollar coin for a quarter when giving me coins.
Let's do it like Japan does, only one type of currency. And that currency will be the penny. One dollar note? No buddy... that's a one hundred cent note now.
We may or may not continue to mint one dollar coins (previously one cent coins), but everything will make... cents.
(I guess this style of humor is better delivered verbally?)
I'd say just drop the second decimal place and have dimes and half-dollar coins.
I've read there's enough pennies in bank vaults to last for years.
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.
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'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.
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.
> 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.
I especially liked that the $2 coin breaks into 2 $1 coins if you drop it right. ;-)
(j/k, IIRC that was an early manufacturing defect)
Also has the polymer based colouful bank notes. Far easier to tell what you are handing over. Also given us some good names.
$5 (Pink) = Prawn/Piglet
$10 (Blue) = Bluey
$20 (Red) = Lobster/Red back
$50 (Yellow) = Pineapple/Banana
$100 (Green) = Avacado
So you get sentences like "They needed cash so I threw a pineapple at them".
So for instance 1.69 in cash would be 1.70 but if you pay with your phone it stays at 1.69
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.
Which helps partially sighted people and is a good visual check.
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
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.
>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.”
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.
The idea that this is complicated legally is an example of why so many Americans are so frustrated with their government. Common sense should rule the day, not mindless legalism.
stop minting and stop accepting is commonly separated to allow adjustment. so likely a later president will just add the second phaseout step.
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.
Even they've gotten the hint and simply leave a tray of pennies next to it so people can actually use it.
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.
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
Isn't that the old joke about the economist?
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
A more reasonable assumption that half of transactions require rounding down cuts that in half, I suppose.
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.
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...
By comparison, a silver dime (90% silver, 10% copper) is 2.268 grams, and silver is US$1486.77/kg https://www.metal.com/en/prices/201102250392, so the dime contains about US$3.03 worth of silver. From the point of view of an 18th- or 19th-century person, for whom the purpose of the mint was to certify the value of the precious metal in the coin by stamping it, the dollar has lost 29/30 (97%) of its value since minting of silver coins ended.
Was that the purpose of the mint? That would imply that the relative value of silver vs. copper was static.
Here's one for the FIRE folks: if it rounds up, use a CC and if it rounds down use cash. Use all those pennies you save using your CC to retire 3 minutes early.
https://economics.ubc.ca/news/penny-rounding-profitable-for-...
eliminating the penny would require producing more nickels to “fill the gap in small-value transactions.” But nickels suffer from a similar “seigniorage” problem: the 2024 U.S. Mint report said the five-cent coins have a unit cost of 13.78 cents each.
https://time.com/7215870/trump-us-penny-mint-costs-one-cent-...
For your first point, I would like to add the next sentence for context: "That means that a typical grocery store would receive an additional estimated $157 in revenue just from rounding." I feel like this is negligible.
Also, for the nickel, the seigniorage ratio is 2.something, isn't that lower than the penny? I think there's a decent chance that removing the penny would still be a net benefit for the mint.
A major score was finding a dime or quarter on the street. When the Whatchamacallit first came out they were 25 cents!
When they apply 7% sales tax to a $1.99 purchase, what do they charge you? $2.1293? Obviously not.
Just do whatever they already do.
Also, "whatever they do" currently is rounding to two decimal places - that doesn't help us here. I'm not saying the software changes required are challenging, but I'm sure there are lots of POS systems that are not properly maintained anymore that will cause issues for a lot of smaller merchants.
> 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.
A penny is not a single use item. The cost of production must be depreciated across the thousands of transactions in which it is used and then compared to the economic benefit of its existence.
It may be true that the economic benefit of a penny is less than the production cost but I don’t see anyone making that case.
What will it actually cost the US economy to stop minting these coins?
How long will they remain in circulation until they are no longer accepted for payment?
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...
Yeah, really bewildering, happiness inflated by inflation.
Everything makes sense now...
Recently, I read a post by an online musician friend that someone made a tip of 5 rubles with a banknote in Armenia - too low a sum to bother exchanging it in a foreign country. I was perplexed [1] because I don't recall ever [2] seeing such banknote - the lowest I remember seeing was 10 - and found that yes, it was introduced in 1998, discontinued and withdrawn from circulation in 2001 due to inflation and apparently reintroduced (maybe briefly?) in December 2022/January 2023.
I don't know why.
[1] https://www.perplexity.ai/search/in-post-soviet-russia-when-...
[2] I am Russian; born in 1977 and left the country in December, 2022.
So 1,200,000 Tiyins to the USD.
I feel like pennies fall out of circulation at a very high rate compared to other denominations.
Quote in German:
Aus unserer Sicht, das überrascht viele, wenn ich das sag, würde es Sinn machen, die 1 und 2 Cent Münzen abzuschaffen und durch eine 5 € Münze zu ersetzen. Lästig empfinden die meisten Menschen eigentlich nur diese braunen Münzen, weil die einfach keine Kaufkraft haben. Die liegen im Portemonnaie, aber man kann dafür nichts kaufen. Man kann bestenfalls die als Rückgeld nutzen. 1 und 2 € Münzen werden europaweit dieses Jahr [2025] so viele gemacht wie noch nie. Warum ist das so? Weil sie eine Kaufkraft haben, weil die verwendet werden und weil die nicht als lästig empfunden werden. Münzen sind für den Steuerzahler massiv günstiger. Ne 5 oder 10 € Banknote in der Herstellung oder in der Beschaffung für den Bund kostet in etwa so viel wie eine 2 € Münze, aber die 2 € Münze hält 20 Jahre und die 5 € Banknote hält 3 Monate. [...] Gerade die 5 und 10 € Banknoten sind extrem in Zirkulation; drei maximal sechs Monate, da sind die durch. Kann man sich ausrechnen, wie viel der Staat sparen würde, wenn man jetzt eine 5 € Münze einführen würde und die 5 € Banknote ersetzt.
Translation to English:
From our point of view, which surprises many when I say this, it would make sense to abolish the 1 and 2 cent coins and replace them with a 5 euro coin. Most people actually only find these brown coins annoying because they simply have no purchasing power. They lie in your wallet, but you can't buy anything with them. At best, they can be used as change. This year [2025], more 1 and 2 euro coins will be produced across Europe than ever before. Why is that? Because they have purchasing power, because they are used, and because they are not considered a nuisance. Coins are much cheaper for taxpayers. A €5 or €10 banknote costs about as much to produce or procure for the federal government as a €2 coin, but the €2 coin lasts 20 years and the €5 banknote lasts 3 months. [...] The €5 and €10 banknotes in particular are in extremely high circulation; they last three to six months at most. You can calculate how much the state would save if it introduced a €5 coin now to replace the €5 banknote.
Seems like this is a stunt to extract a bit of money from collectors. I kind of wonder if collectors really value coins/stamps/etc. that were specially made to target the collector market and didn't even exist in the natural world. Feels icky.
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.
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.
Personally, I think stores should just start setting prices to avoid the need for pennies, but that would be too easy, I guess.
For one, think of all the POS systems stuck on old firmware. These are the details.
Sure a lot of "easy" solutions come to mind.
If there are no pennies you round to the nearest 5 cents. If there were no coins, you would round to the nearest dollar.
But then as an Australian it also seems very weird to even have pennies in circulation. We ditched ours in the 80s.
Also in Australia, while no store would accept the old pennies, I had thought they were still legal tender in the sense that banks would still accept them and allow you to deposit the old pennies?
Rounding to whole numbers feels more natural to people than rounding to 5¢. But ultimately it's the same thing.
20 years later, I think some more zeroes are available to be removed :)
Prices should never have been set to this dumb #.99 pattern anyway. It's one of the most annoying things.
To be clear, coins and bills are used far more than once.
I would even go so far as to say they are re-used hundreds of times.
At least he's still on fives.
The money illusion fools many people into believing they've gained (ie real estate) when in reality, they've lost purchasing power.
INCLUDE TAX IN THE PRICE, then you won't have a rounding problem!
The common argument against that is "but there are so many tax jurisdictions"
One, Europe has a bunch too and has solved this, and two, it would only apply to in person cash transactions. You should be able to figure out the tax rules for the one specific place the transaction is taking place.
It's that it's easier to show a price of $0.99 and have the consumer pay $1.08 (for example) than either show a price of $1.08 and have the consumer pay it, or show a price of $0.99 and have the consumer pay $0.99 and "lose" 7 cents (because your price was $0.92 before taxes).
Pre-tax price is lower and sells better than post-tax price.
It's like the whole country is unwilling to calculate 1.065x=$2 or whatever.
And... why not include tax in the display price? I never did get a good explanation for that.
Middle school in the mid 70s: a penny rolls around the corner and I pick it up. A school bully and his friends taunted me at length. They'd launched it hoping I'd do exactly what I did. I just thought to myself, one day I'll be a fucking millionaire and you'll still be a squib. That came true. I am damaged enough to be smug about it to this day.
The next year that same kid and his friends beat me up, giving me a TBI, a permanent hole in my memory, and what apparently was a new personality. Twenty years later he was found dead in a dumpster. When I heard about it I did not weep for him. That is of course my defect. I am not proud of my perpetual grievance.
I saved spare change in jars until my 50s, and every once in a while took them to the bank and bought something cool, or just took them out and played with them with my kids.
So for me pennies are some kind of odd little vestige of control over my life. Completely inane, I get it. They're annoying af and too expensive to manufacture. Everything's electronic anyway these days. I'll miss them though.
It worked out just fine.
Everyone move on.
Untruths like that grind my gears. Especially in the US of 2025 where we are awash in a sea of lies, stressful incitement and hype (all by intent, by bad actors.)
Let that sink in…
* 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.
Since the law is still on the books its still legal tender, and production may restart at any moment.
It's a good start. Now let's do metric.
Pennies have more zinc in them than they are worth, right?
Did the penny have any sort of stabling force against inflation… a sort of "Zinc Standard" as it were?
Civil libertarians are always talking about how moving away from gold coins, and later moving away from the gold standard that backed the non-gold coins is the root of inflation.
If gold can have such an effect, why not zinc?
It strikes me as uniquely American (perhaps uniquely Trumpian) to just stop making them and let whatever happens happen with no detailed planning.
The "last-ever" penny will not be minted until that final coin has been minted by:
The United Kingdom
Gibraltar
Man
St Helena & Ascension Island
Guernsey
The Falklands
and probably a good few of others I've forgotten. Like Jersey.
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.
Because San Francisco sales tax is 8.63 and something the costs 1 dollar is really 1.083. And I would like 91.7 bach cents when I give 2 dollars.
> Trump announced via social media in February that he instructed the Mint to stop making the once-popular coin, citing the cost of production.
So between February and today, they just ignored the order?
What justified the pennies produced between February and November? Those pennies were necessary, and still cost-effective, but going forward, the penny as such is no longer necessary?
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
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.
