11 Comments

Are pennies a hinderance?

July 2, 2006 by in Random with 11 Comments

Are pennies on the way out? I for one personally detest little jingle of coins in my right pocket as chances are high that the sound is indeed a collection of the rusty colored pennies.

A penny bought a loaf of bread in early America, but it’s a loafer of a coin in an age of inflation and affluence, slowly sliding into monetary obsolescence.

For the first time, the U.S. Mint has said pennies are costing more than 1 cent to make this year, thanks to higher metal prices. “The penny is going to disappear soon unless something changes in the economics of commodities,” says Robert Hoge, an expert on North American coins at The American Numismatic Society.

Wouldn’t it be great if the economy magically accommodated for a penny-less market? Could you imagine is somehow, magically, the prices at your grocery store mathematically accounted for the fact that no one carried pennies?


  • Steven

    “Could you imagine is somehow, magically, the prices at your grocery store mathematically accounted for the fact that no one carried pennies?”

    Its not that magical! We haven’t had 1c coins in Australia for a long long time, 5c coins are our smallest, everything just gets rounded up or down. Pretty simple really.

  • http://5thirtyone.com Derek

    Rounding up and down… now that sounds more like it.

  • http://www.recompiled.org Joe

    Does anyone actually use cash at the grocery store?

    If pennies disappeared, a company would be smart to do this: Round everyone’s cash transactions up to the nearest 0.05, with the option to round up to the next whole dollar, and take the leftovers and donate it to charity, with a different charity each month.

    I’m going to sue the first company to do this for violating my patent pending idea. :P

  • http://www.dorksandlosers.com Tan The Man

    For godsakes, will someone please think of the children… and the poor!

  • http://www.progoth.com Steven

    I’ve been saying we should do this for a while now. free market eliminating them would be great, but i’d settle for government regulation. seriously, one cent pieces (the british have pennies, we don’t) are an obnoxious waste. we could go ahead and do away with nickles too, IMO….but that may be pushing it.

    i was just having this conversation with my girlfriend yesterday and she said that some band was starting to protest doing away with cents when it was suggested, further concreting my belief that people in the entertainment industry shouldn’t be allowed to express any opinions on anything.

  • Jerry

    When it costs more to make a penny than it’s worth, it’s time to move on…

  • http://www.jasonblogs.com Jason Schramm

    Imagine all the copper that would flood the market, making it cheaper to wire the world. Though apparently since 1982 they’ve been more zinc than copper (about 3% copper).

  • Andrew

    Joe: It’s already been done. You sue them, they sue you :).

    Once the penny leaves circulation everything will probably get rounded down to the nearest 2c or 5c – the “one-cent-off” is there to make sure that shop staff have to ring it up on the till to give you change, so things will probably get marginally cheaper :).

  • http://akatsuki.co.uk/ akatsuki

    Jerry: so what? A penny is used hundreds and thousands of times in the economy so it’s actual economic value is far more than a penny.

    It would be better to just wait for the next 10 years as we move to digital money. The real reason we haven’t? Credit card companies would almost become unnecessary if we had government issued money cards. The we could even move to more fractional pricing (just like the gas station).

  • http://indoloony.com Joy

    I personally feel that the 1c coins should be outmoded. Honestly, I don’t want pennies in my pocket weighing it down. That’s another reason I like using plastic. It saves me from the hassle of carrying cash and coinage around..

  • http://yahoo.com Brittney

    When I heard that pennies were going to be destroyed i took a view of what we would be throwing away.Take a look at all the coins and tell me whats different about all the other coins. by who is on the penny and what he did for them why he had the lowest value of money why is is faced left instead of right like all the other ones. Take a look at the front and look between the polls and tell me what you see. When it all come down black people were used a simile towords a penny how would the world be without black people.TAKE A GOOD LOOK PLEASE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Privacy Policy | About Us | Contact Us | Write for us