It's Time To Kill The Penny: Fmr US Mint Director

You know, fellow CCF members, you must realize that it doesn't matter what a former mint director or the whole lot of us think. It is in the hands of the US government, and it does not seem that they are pushing anywhere in that direction.

In Canada and the Netherlands, they've dropped the 1c for years. Everybody rounds and nobody cares. Let Hollywood continue to make movies about people accumulating millions in rounding errors. Nobody still cares.

All the money the gov't wastes I think the cent is not going to solve the national debt. If they can pay 1 time Senators and congressmen Life time retirement checks they can certainly keep the cent for collectors and especially young coin collectors!

But payments made digitally (e.g. credit card) wouldn't be rounded. It's only tangible cash payments that would be because there would be no cent coins.

Business owners would most likely pay their tax to the state digitally, by direct transfer or by check. None of those would be rounded. Even if they were to pay with cash, I'd expect that they would total the tax amounts for all of their transactions and round that.

You are way off. Every Walmart price ends in 8 and K-mart (remember them?) ends in 7.

I get what you are saying on the rounding of less than 1%.

I get that anything 1 and 2 would round down and 3 and 4 would round up. It is simple, agreed.

I understand how it would work.

The only thing I am saying is that I believe over time there would be upward pressure on the rounding for convenience sake. I've seen Lombra's studies (paraphrased) and I've seen summaries of arguments against his studies. I think that most Americans would be suspicious of the move still as likely being regressive those that tend to pay cash for most transactions.

I honestly don't understand the fuss. Like Lembafc mentioned the situation in South Korea, here in Sweden, and even Norway and New Zealand, we don't even have a 5c equivalent. And it works just fine! I hear nobody complaining about it here, probably because its the norm. Our smallest denomination, worth slightly more than a dime, is definitely small change but can be spend somewhat easily because of the fact that is isn't worthless. Less weight in your pockets, wallets, purses, whatever you prefer. No money is lost through negative seigniorage.

I definitely feel the convenience of having such a high smallest denomination when traveling to places where these scraps of coinage remains, especially the UK where the the 1p and 2p are not only (practically) worthless, but also very large, weighing down your pockets and all that.

Also, regarding shop's prices and rounding, I can definitely confirm that prices almost immediately go down. Before we lost our 50 Öre (0.5 SEK) coin, prices were typically written at xx9.50, now it's very common to see xx9.00. Despite that, prices such as xx9.90 are common, especially at supermarkets, though it's an accepted fact that it is in practice rounded up.

I too would love to see the US 1c as an NCLT issued coin, distributed the same way as US 50cs, but as long as they become alien to circulation everything's fine with me.

As for everything, I can be wrong, this is from my knowledge and experiences, don't quote me on this, no guarantees, no refunds, no return policy, I'm not liable for possible injuries, all that.