Hard Light Productions Forums
Off-Topic Discussion => General Discussion => Topic started by: Scourge of Ages on April 03, 2012, 01:58:50 pm
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Part 1: Why pennies should not exist. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y5UT04p5f7U
The same guy who explained what was up with the UK and England explains the problem with pennies. I couldn't agree more, and I have personally stopped accepting pennies as change.
Part 2: Canada discontinues pennies! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nU4E6SSy5Yg
Part 3: And it's not an April Fools' joke! http://edition.cnn.com/2012/03/30/business/canada-penny/index.html
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Oi, pennies rock.
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there goes the fashion of ££.99, hello ££.98
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I can get behind this.
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My only concern is that people forget that coins are not used only once. If the same penny is used in a hundred transactions, it has more than paid for itself.
Edit: To clarify, my concern is not so much the physical cost of producing a Penny coin as to it's relevance in modern day economics, where, once you have obtained one, it's practically impossible to get rid of it again. Even 'Penny Falls' games don't actually accept pennies any more.
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My only concern is that people forget that coins are not used only once. If the same penny is used in a hundred transactions, it has more than paid for itself.
Edit: To clarify, my concern is not so much the physical cost of producing a Penny coin as to it's relevance in modern day economics, where, once you have obtained one, it's practically impossible to get rid of it again. Even 'Penny Falls' games don't actually accept pennies any more.
no but the machines that convert your change into denominations more useful at the supermarket do
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no but the machines that convert your change into denominations more useful at the supermarket do
And Coinstar will charge you like 9.8% in the US to do it, if you want cash. Chances are, that'll be way more than the value of the pennies you turned in.
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can still turn £50+ from a tub collected over about a year. they are also usefull to give to my 4 year old atm
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dont get rid of pennies! then i would have to actually buy actual heatsinks for my voltage regulators!
they are also good ammunition to be used against annoying people.
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Also you can put them in those cool crank press souvenir machines.
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i honestly dont think ive ever used a penny as currency, now that i think about it.
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I melt them to harvest the zinc sometimes.
Don't tell my government. :nervous:
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I've probably 10$ in pennies
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I use them occasionally when buying small things and I have a pocket full of change
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To be clear, the penny is to remain legal tender in Canada indefinitely; the Mint is just going to stop making them, and if neither the merchant or vendor can give change in pennies, the transaction will be rounded to the nearest $0.05.
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From someone who does work in the retail industry, should pennies eventually be removed from primary circulation, I expect that businesses will change their prices so that "Ticket Price"+GST&PST (on a per-province basis) would always come out to the nearest $0.05, but then there are those who are exempt from paying PST, which will result in the afore-mentioned non-$0.05 final price. Rounding is fine, but as one who deals with consumers, if the price gets rounded down in their favor, they're all for it, but if the price is rounded up, they'll scream bloody murder and demand to speak with the head of the company, even if the law supports such rounding.
For better or worse, the removal of the penny from the mint lineup is the first step towards an economy without hard currency.
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i really don't get the point of removing pennies. i actually use them. if they are gone, now we just have the same problem with nickels. there has to be a lowest division. good luck getting the entire economy to stop using cent increments.
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One of the small joys of going to college in tax-free Delaware is that I could get a $3.99 meal combo from the one local pizzeria, pay $4, and still get that penny back. It was far more psychological than practical, but damn it felt good. :D
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i really don't get the point of removing pennies. i actually use them. if they are gone, now we just have the same problem with nickels. there has to be a lowest division. good luck getting the entire economy to stop using cent increments.
As CGPGrey points out, the US once had a 1/2 cent piece. When it was discontinued in 1857, it had more buying power than the dime does today. Also a nickel apparently costs 11.18 cents each to produce (http://news.coinupdate.com/cost-to-make-penny-and-nickel-rises-1139/), so yeah by this logic that should be discontinued as well.
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the cost to produce vs. what the denomination is irrelevant. we're not "losing money" by minting pennies at 1.5 cents each. i'm just saying trying to get rid of the smallest denomination because people don't like using it is dumb. all that makes is a NEW smallest denomination.
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Which people will actually use, thereby making your point moot.
(In theory.)
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Yeah, I never understood the cost argument either. I think some people have the idea that we're spending physical money to make that physical money.
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the cost to produce vs. what the denomination is irrelevant. we're not "losing money" by minting pennies at 1.5 cents each. i'm just saying trying to get rid of the smallest denomination because people don't like using it is dumb. all that makes is a NEW smallest denomination.
In the UK, the 5 pence piece is actually smaller in physical size than the penny. People hate them more than the penny!
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i really don't get the point of removing pennies. i actually use them. if they are gone, now we just have the same problem with nickels. there has to be a lowest division. good luck getting the entire economy to stop using cent increments.
The real issue is that the actual price of things has been steadily increasing, so the "purchase power" of a single penny has continued to decrease. Practically speaking, there's nothing you can get for a penny. You'll need a whole bunch of them to be useful, and that makes them painful to carry around and exchange at sale time. It's more granular than is practical, so you might as well get rid of it. As a side bonus, it makes checkout math a bit easier.
Also, you don't have to stop using cent increments in the economy, just for cash transactions.
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The Canadians are just doing what we did years ago (getting rid of one and two cent pieces - they're still technically legal, but banks I believe send them off to the mint when they get them, so they stopped circulating pretty quickly). And it didn't cause any real problems. Most stuff is rounded to 5 cents, or, if it's not the final bill is rounded (three 7 cent items become 20c, four become 30c etc. etc.).
And yeah, the 5 cent piece is now the annoying, useless piece of change that nobody uses.
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But there is a use for pennies!
Almost every time I visit the US I spend 50c to let one of those machines make a penny into a token with a picture of some landmark on it!!!
I have over a dozen (flattened) pennies with picture on them now and I want more next time I visit! :P
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See, Mikes knows what I'm talking about! Those things are (apparently) our greatest tourist attraction!
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Pennies are also useful for sneaking with you when you visit tall landmarks and then drop over the side and hope no-one's walking below. :lol:
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all hard currency should be power of 2. see we would have a 2 cent penny, a four cent nickle and an 8 cent dime. the quarter would be 16 cents. there would be a rarely used 32 cent half dollar and a dollar would be 64 cents. bring back the $2 bill and make the $5 bill a $4 bill. your $10 would be replaces with an $8 and your $20 would be replaced with a $16 bill. you would then have a denomination for $32, $64, and $128. after that point its all snob notes (money that normal people never get to see), like the $256, $512, $1024, $2048, $4096 and so on. it would be a much better system than we have now. if you ever want to eliminate a denomination, say the 2 cent penny, then the next denomination is only twice as big. and so theres less of a rounding gap.
also no one pointed out that only about 3% of all money is actually in hard currency, and that will change as more people move to electronic transactions.
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Pennies are also useful for sneaking with you when you visit tall landmarks and then drop over the side and hope no-one's walking below. :lol:
Unfortunately the Mythbusters proved that the person down below won't get more than a bruise. :p
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Pennies are also useful for sneaking with you when you visit tall landmarks and then drop over the side and hope no-one's walking below. :lol:
Unfortunately the Mythbusters proved that the person down below won't get more than a bruise. :p
I use penny rolls
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that might do it. especially if you can get it to stay vertical the whole way down.
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Rounding is fine, but as one who deals with consumers, if the price gets rounded down in their favor, they're all for it, but if the price is rounded up, they'll scream bloody murder and demand to speak with the head of the company, even if the law supports such rounding.
Round down the amounts, or round them up. Why not just round them up. Unfortunately, you know that's going to happen. Irate customers because that 3.99 deal is now 4.05 because stores won't like 3.95.
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Erm, that'd be 4.00. And stores do still use 3.95 - that psychological trickery ('It's less than 4 dollars!) is worth more than the 4c they're losing.
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Erm, that'd be 4.00. And stores do still use 3.95 - that psychological trickery ('It's less than 4 dollars!) is worth more than the 4c they're losing.
I can hardly believe it, but I actually fell for that one once. Somehow I read 4.99 instead of 9.99 :(.
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Except that's not at all the same as what he was talking about...
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pennying
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Erm, that'd be 4.00. And stores do still use 3.95 - that psychological trickery ('It's less than 4 dollars!) is worth more than the 4c they're losing.
I was talking about the stores that do 3.99 wont like doing 3.95 in the future. You know, because with stores with prices set in the x.99 range wont like rounding it down.
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So then they do 4.00. And gain a cent. Because it would round to the nearest, not down.
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Pennies still have their uses. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DO1Q7F23DxM)
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Erm, that'd be 4.00. And stores do still use 3.95 - that psychological trickery ('It's less than 4 dollars!) is worth more than the 4c they're losing.
I was talking about the stores that do 3.99 wont like doing 3.95 in the future. You know, because with stores with prices set in the x.99 range wont like rounding it down.
They only round down to .95 on some products - most stuff is still sold at .99. The rounding occurs at the checkout.