Should pennies be removed from the currency system?

[TakeyB0y2]

The last Canadian penny to be made was popped outta the machine (or whatever they use to make them) on my birthday this month. Canada's on it's way.

Didn't pick a bad time to do it either, they're changing our paper money right now too. Now it's all plastic and stuff.

I don't mind the pennies being taken out of circulation. I'm just curious about how they're gonna adjust prices. They're most likely going to round prices UP to the nearest .10, .05 or .00, and since I work in retail and hear people whine about how our department store charges 5 cents for bags (big freakin' deal. Everytime I hear someone complain and then follow it up with "Hey, ever bit counts" I just mentally roll my eyes and think "Yeah, keep telling yourself that."), I just KNOW people are gonna complain about that.

 

[Dethenger]

I can tell this is a difficult topic to make cents of.


Ahem.


I don't see why not, they're basically useless as far as actual transactions go; Australia's already done it, and Canada if I'm not mistaken (reading the thread, I'm not). While we're at it, I'm fairly certain that coins are more economic than bills, as they last longer, so I'm not against phasing out paper money too.

 

[Tanis]

I'd say...yes.

Then, just make the nickel the 'base' unit.

 

[Dularn]

We havn't had 1 or 2 cent coins in Australia since 1992, our smallest coin is 5c.

Prices are rounded to the nearest 5 cents. eg; $0.98-99 becomes $1 and $0.96-97 becomes $0.95. Prices are still displayed to the nearest cent, the rounding occurs when you pay. eg, if you buy 3 $0.99 items the final cost of $2.97 becomes $2.95.

Tax is also almost always included in the displayed price here (and is a flat 10% for most goods).

It doesn't really cost you anything as it rounds down as often as it does up. The most it will ever cost you is two cents which is nothing.

It saves the government in minting costs and is more convenient for customers. There is even talk of scrapping the 5c coin, most people find it inconvenient anyway.

 

[BENZOOKA]

Sure. It's not like you can't increase the value of the lowest physical unit of currency.

We used to have the Finnish Mark, and the lowest used unit was 10 penniä (pennies).

The value of that was 0,02 USD.

Now we've had the Euro for over a decade, and the smallest used unit is 5 cents.

The value of that is 0,06 USD.

And some time in the early 20th century we even made a drastic change of practically removing two zeros from the face value of currency, 100 becoming 1, and so on.

A country can adjust to a currency change, so it sure can make an, subjectively abysmal, adjustment as removing the pennies, that have no use and if their production and distribution is actually counterproductive.

 

[Wicky_42]

No. Precisely because regardless of £0.99 or $0.99 or whatever sales, pennies are needed, purely to serve as base units. Without a base unit, mathematically speaking, you're going to be screwed when it comes to adding or subtracting values. There's no feasible way of standardising prices everywhere so that every single transaction will result in more than a single penny difference between other currency values, meaning that when dealing with multiple transactions you are pretty damn likely to need a penny somewhere down the line. This doesn't just apply to single penny difference either. In the UK the next size denomination is 2p, then 5p, then 10p. In the US, isn't it straight up to 5 cents, then 10 cents? You'll thus have the same problem when dealing with 2p, 3p, 4p, etc. differences.

Simply put, base units are essential, and thus getting rid of the penny would cause more problems than it solves.

The solution is to either not give pennies in change and let the business keep it, or donate the left over pennies to charity automatically as part of the transaction. I for one don't need to carry around that copper with me all day after not having exact change, and with so many transactions being made digitally these days and with inflation having long since made the value of a single penny too small to actually purchase anything with, manufacturing such small currency denominations are an expense that's just unnecessary. It would save governments significant money to no longer offer these small denominations - there was some guy who made a pretty good video laying it all out - you can probably find it googling the subject.