Speculation On What The New Penny And Nickel Will Be Made Of

@JSH, I'm not sure what he means either, and ironically, personally in my area, dimes are the smallest denomination that can actually buy something [a single penny candy, yes, penny].

Absolute bull.

Many states have sales tax rates like 6.125%. We've NEVER had a 0.125¢ piece, but they didn't jump from 5 to 10¢.

Property taxes are often numbers like 3.9 mills. There is legally a mill ($0.001), but no 0.9 mill.

If they had any sense, they'd eliminate the cent, nickel and dime. Paper and plastic payments would continue to the cent, coin transactions would be rounded.

I got a nice Siam chicken curry lunch for the animal and I (one of her favorites). The total was $7.77, I handed over a ten and got back two ones and a quarter. She could have given exact change, but why bother?

@wquinn pure steel would be even cheaper today, that'd be quite a retro trip to 1943! As long as nobody confused them with dimes [i.e was careful] and understood the copper was a necessary victim of budget cuts and the coin itself would eventually follow.

Also, the problem with getting rid of the nickel guys, is the quarter...

going from $ .10 to $ .25 is problematic because a 5 cent difference still exists in one coin, and remember, the Canadian nickel only costs about 3 cents to produce [it is a little thinner though] so it can still be profitable for the time being.

I mean, I think steel costs about $15 a pound.

And cheap steel with no plating would have a real problem with rust.

And say steel is 40 cents a pound. one pound of steel will make 165 cents. So the material cost per cent would be .24 cents per coin. So with the 2 cent per coin manufacturing cost that would make each cent cost 2.24 cents. A savings of .16 cents per coin over the current cost of 2.4 cents apiece and still a loss of 1.24 cents per coin. I don't see steel as being an answer.

As I have said before the ONLY way to make the cent profitable again would be to sell advertising space on them. A business could look at it this way. For $10M their ad is on a billion coins that would be in consumers pockets for the next ten to twenty years. Doesn't sound like a bad deal.

By using stainless steel, you will have actually increased the cost of the cent.

Evidently no one likes the real answer. Zinc is already in the coin, they just have to stop plating it. If you want to see how to make coinage on the cheap look at history. During World War II a lot of countries were occupied by the greedy Axis powers and their coinage was made of........wait for it..........ZINC! Check out the coins from Bohemia & Moravia, France, French-Indo China, Netherlands, Serbia, Tunisia, and heck even Germany itself to name a few. Japan mixed it with tin, and we plated steel with it. The only other material that I can think of is pop cans, I mean aluminum. I haven't done the math on that, but even that is probably too expensive.