Should we get rid of pennies?

[bulbasaur]

Asking since I just found out that Canada's going to be eliminating pennies from circulation.

National Post:

What will we do without them?
As per the 2010 senate recommendations, Canadians will simply be asked to round prices up or down to the nearest nickel. Credit card users, however, will still be required to pay to pay to the cent. Does that discrepancy leave Canada vulnerable to small-scale fraud, like the Richard Pryor character in Superman III who scams his employer by filling a dummy account with the fractions of cents left over from financial transactions? Maybe, but so far nobody else seems to have had a problem with ditching low-denomination coins. Like most currency-related issues, Canada is way behind the times on this one. More than a dozen countries including Israel, Switzerland and Brazil have successfully eliminated single-unit coins. Not to mention the iconic British half-penny, which was phased out under Margaret Thatcher.

While we’re tossing out coins, why not the nickel?
Soon enough. Nickels are already relatively useless – and like all coins they’re dropping in value each year. New Zealand phased out its one-cent coin in the 1980s and then its five-cent coin in 2009. It’s a strategy Desjardins strongly recommends, since eliminating more than one coin at a time could cause unneeded confusion and economic damage. Once the penny is successfully gone, “the federal government should consider, a few years later, the relevance of removing the five-cent coin,” stated Desjardins in 2007.

Vancouver Sun:

Garth Whyte, president and CEO of the Canadian Restaurant and Foodservices Association said the change will have real implications.

While getting rid of the penny may seem like a simple solution, he said "there will be major transitional challenges for restaurateurs, such as reprogramming cash registers, pricing and employee training issues" for the restaurant industry.

As for me, I love pennies and hate to see them go, but the country's budget (1.5 cents per penny produced = $130 million / year!) comes before sentimental value.

 

[Cerberus87]

Pennies are useless. They just make everything more complicated, and people even try to avoid using them anyway.

BTW I'm from Brazil and I used to have a penny until recently!

 

[Tarvos]

Netherlands phased out the 1/2 eurocents a long while back and stopped minting them. They're legal tender though.

 

[Ether's Bane]

And you can add Malaysia as another country who phased out its 0.01 coin (a few years ago).

 

[Tailsy]

that wouldn't even work here!! the backs of our small change coins come together to make up the shield, we'd have to change EVERYTHING GEEZ.

see how sugoi is that shit.

 

[ultraviolet]

^ that is so cool I wish our coins did that

uhhh yeah I'm always surprised when other countries still have pennies? We haven't had them for ages, our smallest denomination is 5c, and some people think we should be rid of those, too.

 

[Dar]

Pennies should not be made but should still be considered legal tender. That is all.

 

[CJBlazer]

Pennies are really useless. I am from America and even here, they need to go. They are the only copper coin still being made and not very good at much. So yeah, pennies go bye-bye!!

 

[Superbird]

Practically, they're pretty useless and I wouldn't mind losing them.

However, I still want a chance to walk up to the dollar store and buy a $4 item and then pay for it in pennies alone, meticulously counting up...when I'm at like 372 I'll make a mistake and start over, and then I'll eventually come up one cent short.

 

[Phantom]

Practically, they're pretty useless and I wouldn't mind losing them.

However, I still want a chance to walk up to the dollar store and buy a $4 item and then pay for it in pennies alone, meticulously counting up...when I'm at like 372 I'll make a mistake and start over, and then I'll eventually come up one cent short.

You are absolute evil.

It would be a lot of work to get rid of it, like reprograming stuff and altering prices... it will get rid of that annoying insert dollar amount-.99 thing though.

 

[K'yoril]

bulbasaur, if your country rids it self of pennies, won't the sentimental value increase, since there will eventually be less of them to go around?

Either way, I think they should go, simply because of how much more they cost to make than they're worth, and how annoying it is to pay with them.

 

[Datura]

Why not get rid of cash entirely?

 

[Vipera Magnifica]

Practically, they're pretty useless and I wouldn't mind losing them.

However, I still want a chance to walk up to the dollar store and buy a $4 item and then pay for it in pennies alone, meticulously counting up...when I'm at like 372 I'll make a mistake and start over, and then I'll eventually come up one cent short.

Read this.

 

[Coroxn]

I, for one, like pennies. What harm are they doing anyone? I mean, they were awesome for crafts and stuff, and I like having a walletful of pennies that I can bring into a bank and get turned into big money. Though technically we have cents.

 

[ultraviolet]

Practically, they're pretty useless and I wouldn't mind losing them.

However, I still want a chance to walk up to the dollar store and buy a $4 item and then pay for it in pennies alone, meticulously counting up...when I'm at like 372 I'll make a mistake and start over, and then I'll eventually come up one cent short.

hi congratulations for being the least-liked customer for everyone who works in retail ever. this is kind of a rude thing to do because naturally a checkout operator has to either a) sit there and watch you count it to make sure you get it correct or b) count it again ourselves. both of these things hold up other customers and it also holds up the checkout operator from getting any other work done. sure, they will probably act as amused as you when you dump a fistful of coins on the counter, but they're probably seething under that façade. I mean go ahead and do it - it's legal tender after all - but just because you can, doesn't mean you should!

I, for one, like pennies. What harm are they doing anyone? I mean, they were awesome for crafts and stuff, and I like having a walletful of pennies that I can bring into a bank and get turned into big money. Though technically we have cents.

I think the general gist of the argument is that a penny costs more to produce than $0.01 (resulting in an overall loss), and that they're pretty superfluous anyway. if your argument for keeping pennies is 'I like them', then you can kind of see why a lot of governments are pretty keen on getting rid of them: there really isn't much of a reason to keep them other than sentimentality, which will increase anyway when pennies are phased out.

 

[Blastoise Fortooate]

Ideally, we'd be able to make everything cost less, and also remove the equivalent amount of money from circulation, in order to make pennies more useful. Not gonna happen though, so.

Let's just stop making pennies and let nature take its course?

 

[Jason-Kun]

No. Pennies are useful for when stuff comes out to ridiculous prices and you don't want to break a five, ten, etc.

 

[Cerberus87]

Why not get rid of cash entirely?

Hi, I want to buy a gallon of wine from you. I have a cow and a bag of apples. How can we sort it out?

 

[Tarvos]

Use a debit card that directly withdraws the money from your bank account. Over here cash transactions are used less and less in favour of just swiping your debit card through a little machine that allows you to wire the money directly from your bank account. No more fuss with having cash.

We've been doing this for years.

 

[Dannichu]

hi congratulations for being the least-liked customer for everyone who works in retail ever. this is kind of a rude thing to do because naturally a checkout operator has to either a) sit there and watch you count it to make sure you get it correct or b) count it again ourselves. both of these things hold up other customers and it also holds up the checkout operator from getting any other work done. sure, they will probably act as amused as you when you dump a fistful of coins on the counter, but they're probably seething under that façade. I mean go ahead and do it - it's legal tender after all - but just because you can, doesn't mean you should!

In the UK at least, a shop owner (not sure about someone just working a till) has the right to refuse to accept payment in the form of ludicrous change.

I'm all for abolition of the UK penny, and the continued existence of the American penny blows my mind. While we're rearranging currency, we need a circulating £5 coin (less environmentally friendly short-term, but stays in circulation for far longer), the US needs a $1 coin and probably a $5 coin - at the very least, the US needs more note differentiation! That they're all the same colour is irritating, but the same size? How do blind people pay for things? - and the Euro needs to stop having notes that go up to insanely high denominations.