Steel Coin Bill Gets Hearing In House.

True but so what? It also comes up on many other coin forums and again, so what? Just how many people do you think read such items? We have well over 300,000,000 people in the USA and if you forget about the ones that can't read, don't know English, don't care abou what a penny is worth or how much it cost to make one, your left with a hand full of people. This is why the government can and do whatever they want.


Picture that. Each new Steel Penny being DIPPED in Copper. I suspect DIPPING coin in Copper would cost way, way more than what we spend on them now. And just who holds them?


Please note that STEEL is a term used for a mixture of materials, not just one item. We could make STEEL mixtures of so many different types that no one can say STEEL weighs XXX or XX or XXXX. In reality, even many batches of the same type of STEEL has different weights from different kettles pending on the Quality controls. And STEELS made from different processes for ths same purposes may tend to weigh differently. A BOF Furnace produces far less impurities than an Open Harth Furnace creating different weights.
As an example of the massive differences in STEELS today, look up STAINLESS STEELS. You'll see the massive differences in just that catagory.
Did a lot of work at Steel Mills.

On the subject of weights vs. savings and the dollar coin:

I read an article a couple of years back (this isn't the same article, but it touches on the same points about cost vs longevity: http://www.coinnews.net/2012/02/03/...or-1-coins/) about how changing bills for coins would save money. I think we can all say the "25 years" is someone playing on the safe side; I routinely take in SABs from 1979 that, to the average (read: not coin-collector) citizen, look just about untouched, and we've all got stories about the coins from the 1940s (and earlier!) that we find in our change. Compare to my usual take of $1 bills: anything earlier than 2003-issue is almost nonexistent, and even bills as late as 2006 routinely come in tatty, creased, dirty, and ready for the monetary wastebin.


Speaking as someone who works in retail, I can see where the savings would be great and pile up fast--and the concept in everyday commerce isn't as dour as news articles often make it out to be. My store has three main "chunks" of customers (immigrant laborers, elderly folks, and high-schoolers) along with its less-dense groups of professionals and vacationers, and all three of those main chunks are mostly receptive to a dollar coin: the laborers find them harder to destroy while on the job, the elderly folks almost without variation will tell me stories about when they spent silver dollars at the corner store as kids when I include coins in their change, and the high-schoolers are either in it for the "cool factor" or are aware of what we're discussing here: that this is a cost they'll soon be shouldering when they get jobs, if they're not doing it already.


I say we should take a two-pronged approach: stop production on the $1 bill and introduce coin-only--but don't demonetize the bill. Let them make their rounds, get worn out and destroyed, similar to the way silver certificates are redeemable for reserve notes but are then destroyed by the bank. In five years we'll be on a coin-only system, without (as much) screaming about how coins are unamerican, inconvenient, etc.--people will just get used to them and move on.


As for getting rid of the penny and nickel, my question is this: what is that going to do to prices? I don't think most stores that charge $2.94 for something will round it down to $2.90--they'll bump it up to $3, blame the government, and everybody loses. Those "three scents here, four cents there" purchases can and do add up.

This is a great point--they do. I know some vending machines won't even take older currency because it doesn't have the electronic "footstamp" of newer currency.

My comments on the weight of the steel were based on the assumption that a mild steel similar to that used in 1943 would be core of the plated coins. Specific gravity of 7.8 compared to the 7.2 of the current cent. Or the 8.92 of the copper nickel clad coins.

They must have forgotten about the Henning Nickel.

The Penny should be eliminated simply because it does not circulate... Or should I say "re-circulate." I know you may say "Steve how can you say that?" but hear me out.

Who is the largest consumer of pennies? Businesses.

Businesses are the ones who order them and keep them in their cash registers. Fewer and fewer people are paying with exact change, and as a result businesses give pennies to their customers in change who use higher-denomination coinage, and those customers take them home and never re-circulate them.

Now, the only reason that businesses stock them (if the latest studies by Canada and the US are to be believed) is because they believe that their customers want them (as customers do indeed want exact change). And the polls show that where businesses want them because their customers want them, businesses would ultimately like to do without them.

So this one-ended cycle continues and it's the reason why so many pennies simply "disappear" from circulation. They're given in change by a business to a customer and they're either lost or stuck in a jar at home, never to be thought of for months or years at a time.

The number of times they change hands is ultimately smaller than any other "circulating" denomination.

It's a nasty cycle.

So, steel isn't going to be enough. They're still virtually one-hit-wonders at this point and that's an expensive habit to continue.

I agree.

You get two dimes back, making your purchase $4.80. They should have no problem doing this, considering that paying with credit card would cost them ten to fifteen cents. As I have posted more than once, a lot of places around me round their cash transactions down knowing that they are still coming out ahead.