Will Prices Go Up On All Lincoln Cents If It Is Eliminated?

carl: those coins would be ridiculous and how many people can even do their times tables that aren't factors of 1, 2, 5, or 10?

There's no such thing as rounding up or rounding down. Only "rounding" exists and this requires that the total goes to the nearest unit of change; the nickel. There is no net effect on costs except the decreased handling of the less than worthless cent. If a store were to only round up this would be called "overcharging" and is illegal (though this law probably is no longer enforced either). I would simply take items off until the total worked out even and then do my shopping elsewhere.

Nobody can gain or lose by proper rounding.

The short term effect on the cent market would be highly positive. All cents back to the first ones would enjoy more interest and demand. Nowhere would this be more keenly felt than in the zincolns since they've never really been widely collected. Many collectors would scramble to complete their sets. But the long term effect on the cent market will be highly negative. Fewer people will get into the hobby by collecting cents and fewer people will want to upgrade their cent sets in the future.

The short term effect of nickels will be nominal but the longer term will be positive since more people will start collecting nickels from change. The nickel too will need to be revamped to reflect inflation. The best bet is to demonetize it and make it out of aluminum. Since the old nickels aren't highly toxic like the pennies there is no need to remove them from circulation if their metallic value doesn't warrant a recall. The new nickel can simply be accepted by convention and rejected by machines. With the penny gone there will be a dollar coin that will make machines viable again.

Of course government doesn't always do things sensibly so don't expect any change anytime soon.

Eliminating the Lincoln Cent probably won't have any effect at all for at least several years. The reason being the key and semi key dates' values are already well established, the common dates will always be common for the pre 1959 issues but as time goes on and as new collectors begin to collect the Lincoln cents the common issues will show some small increase in value as the demand for them increases. The 1959 and newer cents will hardly ever have much value, there are just too many of them both uncirculated and circulated and with the exception of the errors, there aren't any dates that are low enough mintage to be worth saving.

Ed
ANA LM-3175

A lot of people like to say that the merchant will always round up in their favor. I wonder just how is he going do do that with today's modern electronic registers? He could just ring up their items, hit total, the register applies the tax, and then they can tell the customer a price higher than what they can see on the display. And then have to keep telling the customer why he is charging more than it says. (Great for business) Or he can total it all up on a calculator, apply the sales tax, determine how many cents he is going to have to add to one item so that the register after applying the tax will show the rounded up amount. (This means adding up every order twice, and having to have price tags on every thing instead of using the barcode scanners. Hard to add X number of cents to an item when it looks up the price from a barcode.)

I think the vast majority of businesses will simply set their registers to automatically adjust the total to the nearest $0.05 since this setting is already in the machines software. Trying to do anything else to always go in your favor will be more trouble and costly than you will get in the extra rounding up.

Frankly even though credit card and checks can still in theory be charged to the exact cent, in practice they will be rounded to the nearest five cent as well because the register will automatically round to the nearest five cent when you hit total to tell the customer how much it will be.

Did you miss the ?
And this entire question is sort of on the short lived side. As has been discussed many times, slowly all coinage will be gone. So will currency. Eventually all monitary exchanges will have to be done electronically. More and more due to intercontinental exchanges of merchandise. Also, one card instead of piles of metal and paper.
Even now many people seldom use anything but credit/debit cards. I find myself using those about 90% of the time already. My Som tells me he only uses credit cards due to having a buisness and being able to use those statements they send out. And my credit card company now pays out 1, 2 and 3 % cash back on many items.
So why use cash?

I do, and it is.

tmaring has a great point. I enjoy privacy and you should, too. To add to that, I often get steep discounts when I pay in cash because the storeowner doesn't have to wait to get his cash, and I don't have to accumulate percentages after about a year of hardcore shopping. This argument of "free cash" is just nuts - I save immediately with cash and the benefits outweigh anything else. Nothing is ever free, by the way - it's paid for.

Sel brings up something that I overlooked. Even today with silver coins many of them are BV because they are common dates and they are in rough condition. The same should also be true with pennies as they go the way of the dodo. Hoard them only in MS condition, treating them with the exact respect you do with other coins in your collection.