Cost Of A Nickel Is Surging

20,000,000 Nickels!

Just another tax token. No other purpose.

Given today's prices, couldn't we all get along just fine with a quarter being the smallest denomination? For the few items out there that retail for, say, 5 cents each, I'm sure most people could splurge and buy five of those items all at once! Keep the half dollar and do a dollar coin. Three metal denominations including a dollar that lasts far longer than now makes more sense to me. Inflation should be reflected in the denominations being created.

We could just have the dollar as the smallest denomination. If anything at all costs less than a dollar, we could just consider the change we should be receiving as a donation to the retailer.

Tongue in cheek, but that's what ridding ourselves of the smaller denominations amounts to in the long run. We've had this discussion before and there are several opinions as to what works best. I agree that the cent should go, and maybe the 1/20 coin could be made from a copper alloy. But, if we have a dime we need to have a 1/20 coin as well or the donations will start...

The person who bought $1,000,000 worth of nickels seems to have wasted a lot of time and money. According to that graph, now the metal value is less than the face value. And, just think of the storage costs for 8 years...

more likely such items would then come packaged 2 or 3 for a dollar, whatever was needed so there wouldn't be any change.

The writer seems to have missed the fact that the government has been losing money making nickels for many years now. He is only considering the material cost and not the manufacturing/distribution expenses. The cost of making nickels has been in the 8 to 10 cent range for years.



He would have to sell them for $1.3 million just to break even due to loss of purchasing power, and that is without considering 8 years of storage costs.



The government has been funding studies (millions of dollars) to try and find a substitute for today's expensive coinage metals, especially for the cent and five cent for something like 8 years now. Their biannual reports are available and it seems they keep studying the same materials over and over again and keep deciding they won't work. the real joke is they are trying to find a material for the cent that will allow it to be made at a cost of less than a cent, when the manufacturing and distribution cost is already more than 1 cent. So they need to have a material available in thousands of tons, that has a price of less than zero.

or, they could, make less of them? Do we really need millions of coins dumped into circulation EVERY YEAR when we still have coins from the 1940s in circulation (nickels, pennies) and the only reason the others are out of circ is the silver?

Nickels are minted in quantity every year because this is how many are needed to make change.

Almost every year the economy grows a little so a few more coins are needed. In this modern age of credit card and electronic transfers this isn't as large a factor but it still exists many years. More importantly though hundreds of millions of nickels are "lost" every year. Five cents is so little money many are intentionally tossed in the trash or vacuumed up by a "housewife" with no desire to bend over and pick it up. Every car that goes to be recycled has dozens of coins lost in it and most of these will end up being recycled with the car.

Nickels are rarely spent by consumers and many are simply lost on their round trip from store to consumer, to bank, to store. Even Brinks now days appears quite adept at leaving a trail of coin everywhere they go. Houses full of coins burn or flood and the same happens to warehouses. Back when a nickel had real purchasing power people would work to retrieve one. Now they walk away. The Chinese make pants pockets that dump their contents so many end up on the ground or in sofa cushions.

While nickels are almost worthless and should be transitioned to small aluminum coins through large nickel sized aluminum coins they are still necessary to the economy because they are required to bridge the gap between the dime and quarter. In other words how do you get $5.15 change if there are no nickels. Would we be required to take four singles, one quarter, and nine dimes. What if the hot dog vendor doesn't have nine dimes or is poor at math? Who wants a fistful of change from every purchase?

Of course nickels as they currently exist are stupid but don't get me started on pennies.