Elimination Of The Cent And Nickel.

Seriously or are you joking? I think it would be pretty cool if they did.

Getting rid of the 1 cent is easy, indeed, inevitable as many have stated - inflation is an unavoidable fact of modern economics, the removal of low denomination coins is a symptom of inflation, not a cause. Most countries with currencies of similar value to the US dollar have already abolished their cent-equivalents.

Getting rid of the 5 cent piece is harder in America (and Canada) that it would be elsewhere, because of your 25 cent piece - it would be impossible to "make change" properly if the 10 cent and 25 cent were the smallest denominations. For a practical currency system, America and Canada would have to do one of two things:
- replace the 25 cent coin with a 20 cent coin, and round prices to the nearest 10 cents.
- abolish both the 5 cent and 10 cent, and round prices to the nearest 25 cents.

Introducing new lower denominations like a 2 cent or 3 cent coin would only delay the inevitable; such coins would only be issued for a few years before they too would be uneconomical to produce.

To those who say "the Mint is still making a profit on the other denominations, so why change it?", the obvious answer is: yes, the Mint is making a profit now. The Mint could make even more profit if it stopped wasting maney making negative-profit coins.

Suppose it costs 2 cents to make a 1 cent coin, and you make a billion 1 cent coins per year. That's a billion cents lost - $10,000,000 that the government could have spent somewhere else, instead of producing a loss-making coin that nobody ever actually wants to use as money any more. For most countries, deciding to stop making loss-making coins is a no-brainer.

We as a country are slow to change...but we need to deal with reality...get rid of the penny as we did 160 years ago with the half-Cent. Rounding on cash purchases can be alleviated for those below the poverty level with a tax credit of $XX dollars. How many cash purchases can one make in a day...a month...a year. Can't be more than 5...5 x 365 = 1,825 purchases x .04 cents maximum loss = $73 tax credit.

KK

It exists to make coins, but it is also required to show a profit. Why not maximize that profit?



Huge, that's why no one has really pushed to stop making hundred dollar notes.



Almost every business out there already uses electronic cash registers, and the already have the rounding software built into them. Flip a few switches and it will round up or down to the nearest $0.05 after the sales tax is applied. The up/down rounding will even out, and frankly the public will never even notice it. Probably 99.9% simply pay what the register/cashier tells them. I don't know anyone who after getting their total, adds it up themselves, adds the tax and then makes sure they haven't been overcharged one or Two Cents.



This would require NOT using the registers built in rounding, and then looking the customer in the eye and quoting them a price HIGHER than what the register shows they owe. Then having to explain to the customer why they are charging them more. Getting the customer to agree to it. And then repeating the whole process over again with the next customer. Then generates a lot of unhappy customers.

Meanwhile your competitor uses the automated rounding, their register lines move faster, and they have lower prices and happy customers.

Oh and by the way it is the SALES TAX that gets rounded up or down, and the register tracks and reports how much tax was collected and needs to be remitted to the state, so with the automated rounding the business doesn't make or lose anything. If the state audits the business it is going to be the register records it is checking.

Sap and Conder 101... Mic drop....

I do not think so. Electronic payment would still be to the cent and since that accounts for ~85% of retail transactions I doubt those pricing gimmicks will change.

Did the pricing gimmicks change in Canada? They have been sans cent several years now.

No problem with that . We are always having new members coming aboard that want to talk or ask about that subject .
After all if the U.S. does away with the Cent and Nickel it will effect every coin collector in the country .