The Penny Is Finally Toast

The penny isn't toast.

It just became NCLT.

Would you hire someone at $16 an hour to produce $10 worth of product? Of course not!

The US has had a denomination called the mill for as long as we've had legally described denominations. We've never had a mill coin, and no one has claimed that the lack of one has caused rounding up.

If rounding up was an issue, gas would be $3.95 instead of $3.949, but if it's happened, it's a real oddity.

The real issue people should complain about is not whether gas is $3.95 instead of $3.949, but why it's $3.949 instead of the $0.249 of my youth.

The concern about rounding up happened 50 years ago, and no one has even mentioned it. That can of Pepsi increased in nickel to quarter increments. We still make cents, but have you ever seen a Pepsi machine that takes them?

Kroger's made a big deal in the 70's about not rounding up. While other stores sold cans of food at 2/57¢, if you only bought one of a product, you'd pay 29¢ for it. Kroger's spent millions of dollars promoting and programming registers so that in the same example, it rang up as 28.5¢.

How much did this actually save consumers? If you bought a single can of 20 different items, you'd pay $5.70, while other stores charged $5.80. Add it to the rest of your cart, and you saved a dime on $50-100 in groceries. Saving you that dime cost Kroger's millions.

Fast forward to today. The're still doing it, and you prolly didn't realize it!

Next time you buy a 3/$1 item, check the tape. They'll either ring as 33-33-33, or 34-33-33. 2/99¢ items ring as 49-50-49, etc. The register is rounding items and keeping track of the fractions of a cent for you. Whether you pay 34 or 33 depends on where in the three-number cycle your purchase fits. Actual savings? A dime a cartload.

quote: "I have a question what are they going to do with the pressed penny machines now that the penny is gone ? Would they make them pressed nickle machines instead ?"

in Oz, our cents were withdrawn in 1991.
I have seen a "pressed penny machine" recently. I was curious as to what it was loaded with, and on closer inspection, it was bright-shiny cent-sized planchets.

I'm just getting caught up on this conversation, but it is really interesting to be happening so close to home now.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toron...nny-faq.html

The part I find disturbing on this change, is the following:


What happens to all of the US cents that they pull out of circulation?

If they want to speed it up, just give 2 cents for each cent returned and people could easily double their money and remove the cent from circulation much faster.

I don't see why they can't keep the coin circulating? Yeah, it is worth more than a cent. Just make it illegal to melt and make it to have a license to sell copper/steel bullion. I guess it would be too tough to monitor and uphold as a law, so that is why they are going to remove them from circulation.


And talk about rounding up. What happened to the nickel machines, where you get a gumball? Now they are a quarter and have been for many, many years and kids still use them.


Does this mean Canadians are going to come to the USA and start getting boxes of cents to use in Canada, if that is even possible to do? I know Canadian cents are used here, so I would think US cents were used in Canada?

I'm glad Canada is eliminating the cent. Maybe the US Mint will finally see the light and do the same thing. I will miss the cent, but it has finally outlived its usefulness. If people don't want to circulate them and you can't buy anything with a few of them, then why bother to keep minting them at a loss?

It'll be interesting to see if Canada still makes the cent for their proof and uncirculated sets.

What I'm surprised no one has thought of yet, would be to just use the cent as a planchet and not put any design on it, but that might be too easy to counterfeit.

Luckily we would only have to round to the nearest nickel. There are some countries rounding to the nearest quarter (according to the Swedish rounding web site -- Denmark is doing it).




Great question. I hope the machines will still be around for some time, since I like elongated cents to collect as souvenirs from places I visit. I keep rolls of BU copper cents to use in them, since they come out much nicer.

Watch the movie In Time. It is a futuristic movie, where they don't use money anymore. Very interesting concept and a great movie.

I heard about that article too, but one thing I heard that they can't track all cash transactions, so it is just a guess to fine tune the real percentage. It is probably closer to 85-90%, but still very close to an electronic age of money. I could see it in 50 years, where physical money no longer exists and we are worried just about the one cent piece? I guess that is just the starting block for it. Then it'll be the nickel, dime, etc.