One of the reasons why I changed banks. My new bank has a coin counting machine in the lobby, you throw your coins in, it consumes them, and gives you a slip that you take to the teller.
As I understand it, coins are considered a government service. Banks and retailers pay to deal with them. Buying them from the public for face value actually saves them money.
It's so easy to use coins, pennies included, in day-to-day transactions I never accumulate any. Accumulating pennies or other coins is a concept I don't understand. You can spend up to 4 pennies in any purchase you do, and if you don't can't never receive more than 4. For nickels, dimes, and quarters, the maximum is smaller.
If a person has good basic arithmetic skills and it is a priority for them, then yes they can use coins easily. However, a lot of people either can't do the math or are unwilling to use change correctly.
For myself, it's such a priority that I'll get upset with myself if I have more than 4 pennies.
Japan has more coins (in regular use) than USA, so giving the correct amount is even more important or you'll end up carrying a lot of coins. 1000 yen is the smallest bill so... Example: 999 yen. 500,4x100,50,4x10,5,4x1 yen coins, 19 coins total.
When I used to use cash I used to do this all the time. I would nearly always overpay to minimise the number of coins in my pocket. For example I had a bill of £1.63 and I was paying with two £1 coins, I would get 37 pence in change, which would be a minimum of four coins (20p, 10p, 5p, 2p). So I would pay £2.13 to get a 50p or £2.03 to get two 20p coins.
95% of the time the person serving me would clock on to what I was doing but the other 6% it'd take some persuasion, and occasionally they would insist on giving me back my overpayment before ringing it up.
Most of our supermarkets have at least one self service machine that accepts change. Once a week I pour any loose change in then settle the rest with a card.
When I lived in Scotland there was a "loose change" machine at the local Tesco. You pour in your coins and it would give you a receipt you could take to a cashier to get cash back - but the downside was that it charged you something like 10% of the total as a fee. Which I wouldn't pay.
Edit: I just searched and the Tesco documentation says "There is a 25p transaction fee and an 11.5% processing fee on the total amount of coins you put in the Coinstar centre. For charity donations, this processing fee is reduced to 8.9%." (wow, how generous!)
Back in the day, I'd sift through my jar of change and keep the quarters, which were good for parking meters and laundry. The rest went into the Coinstar machine. The fee for counting dimes, nickles, and pennies seemed OK.
The machine always had some weird foreign coins or subway tokens left over by the previous customer in the reject bin, which was potentially interesting.
*You don't think I'd go into combat with loose change in my pocket, do you?"
But I must admit that I never formed the habit of bringing change with me when I go somewhere. So it piled up at home. The quarters were easy: They got saved for parking, laundry, etc. But I ended up with a sack of pennies that I finally cashed in at the bank.
It's odd how banks have largely stopped operating change counting machines.
In my childhood we'd hoard loose change then make a trip to the local po-dunk bank serving my neighborhood surrounded by corn fields, and even there they'd take our bucket of loose change and dump it into a counting machine for free.
It was a game to try guess the amount we'd get in paper cash...
Now you have to pay for this service at a grocery store using a cumbersome machine operated by Coinstar.
COVID happened. However, all three of the banks I visit regularly (over branch of a national bank, two branches of a local credit union) all have coin counting machines in the lobby, though it took awhile for them to be added back to the branches that took theirs out.
No doubt COVID kicked skimpflation into high gear, but this was already a pattern I noticed long before 2019.
It seemed to generally coincide with the demise of retail in general, and of course the elimination of bank-teller interactions and emergence of ATM machines. All of these things are a blurry mess from my past...
Average gift card has a discount of 8 to 20% built in. Looks like Coinstar is currently charging 12.9%, so a gift card could actually be more profitable for them.
Mine had the machines, then ripped them out, over the cost to them the regional bank they deal with imposed and other excuses. Coinstar (some) gift card is the only no-fee I've found in my area, but then you're stuck with a gift card instead of cash.
I have talked to my bank and was told not to roll them, they just throw them in a machine to count them and deposit the money in my count. It is not uncommon to see people bring in a box of coins and the bank takes care of them.
I have like 2 dollars in coins, not even a roll of pennies. I just thought I'd try depositing it while running a different bank errand and they were like "naw, go to coinstar with your poor person money"
In Canada, I've only ever seen these in grocery stores, operating for a fee (and they don't accept commissions) and a singular credit union branch (because they serve the underbanked at that particular location).
It seems more reasonable than the outright refusal of many businesses to accept cash at all, and plus this transaction isn't even a "debt" to which the penny would be legal tender.
As I understand it, more than X dollars worth of coins is not legal tender. I learned this due to an absurd case in Detroit, where someone stole bags of coins from an armored car, got caught, and claimed their crime was not a felony because it was below the dollar limit for a felony. Of course the judge treated their request with the disdain that it deserved.
There are multiple laws that could have been broken to make it a felony, but if the only reason it would have been a felony was the dollar amount, I'm actually less inclined to side with the judge.
This is all third-hand, through a game of internet-telephone, and my money (if you'll pardon the pun) is on there being additional factors though
I live in the Eurozone. We had 1 and 2 cent coins for a while. Where I live these were quickly deprecated and I think in most other Eurozone countries too by now.
I have thrown any of these coins straight in the bin soon as somebody gave them. Too much hassle and requires too big a wallet to drag along, for literally pennies.
When I first realized dealing with coins was inversely proportional to their denomination I threw out less than a Euros worth.
I do not understand anyone who doesn't throw out their pennies.
Throwing out cent coins doesn’t seem like an environmental waste to you, like throwing out aluminum cans?
Yes they’re impractical to carry and use but does anyone actually do that? Why not do the standard practice of accumulate them in a jar instead of throwing them in the trash like waste?
it’s easy to take them home and throw them in a jar until suddenly the jar is a Kg of metal that can be fed to whatever coinstar like machine is around.
Metals are separated here, but compared to all the other waste I generate, I'd say it's... pennies on the dollar. Storing and collecting things is by itself an expense too: space, energy (you probably store them in a controlled environment), and so on.
There are many things that will become collectibles. I don't want to spend the energy and time storing various items on the chance they might become valuable.
> Many Americans—and many people who, though not American, enjoy watching from a safe distance as predictable fiascoes unfold in this theoretical superpower from week to week—find themselves now pondering one question.
This is way too much spite for an article about coins. Lord.
If the author of the article had done a bit of searching, they might know that Canadians (the primary predictable American ficasco spectators) phased out pennies years ago. We also "had no plan" for the remaining pennies, and we didn't really need one. They get deposited, lost, and thrown away over time—that's why the mint had to keep printing them. Now they've gone the way of the 50-cent piece. It's not a big deal. Frankly I'm surprised the US didn't do it sooner.
The problem is not strictly the pennies themselves, but all of the prices that rely on being able to quantize things to a cent, and a number of different laws about not playing games with prices.
Most recently, a stick in the SNAP benefits laws is that you can't charge SNAP recipients different amounts from other people - which was presumably intended to ensure you can't play games like charging SNAP recipients more for things, but in practice, means that if you, hypothetically, wanted to charge SNAP and credit card holders exact amounts (which you would likely want to do to avoid weird effects where SNAP recipients, who tend to be very price sensitive, find their bills going up), and charge cash users rounded up or down, you would be in violation.
Those are the kinds of warts you would hope to see a plan for before these things were announced, rather than having to figure out one in the middle.
It's not acceptable to attack fellow community members like this on HN. Critiquing the article is fine, as is flagging it if you think it's unfit for HN. But personal attacks are not OK, no matter who it is or why you think it's justifiable. Please read the guidelines and make an effort to observe them if you want to keep participating here.
Since you're speaking as a moderator I'd like to ask for clarification on the official position:
Was that actually a personal attack, or was it a verifiable claim about the quantity and type of submissions by this user? Is the problem that it was labeled "propaganda", and would it have been ok without that word?
I thought it was useful context to have a look at the submission history. There is a slew of recent [dead] submissions. At what point is it fair to call that out? Or is it about the wording?
It's generally not OK to bring up someone's past activity, whether that activity be on HN or elsewhere, as way of attacking someone in a discussion on HN. It fits within the "generic tangents" guideline. We can never know if they still agree with what they said or posted in the past. The submitter's history, and indeed the submitter's identity, is not really relevant to the substance of the article, and we want the discussion to be about the substance of the article. (Of course it's relevant if the submitter is the author, because then they can engage in Q&A about the article's content.)
If users notice that someone is posting large volumes of low-quality content (i.e., spam, self-promotional content or articles that break the guidelines) they can email us and we'll investigate.
In this case the user in question just posts a lot of stuff from mainstream publications on either side of the ideological centre – i.e., lots from the NY Times, Washington Post and The Atlantic but also WSJ and Bloomberg. The articles that are [dead] are from sites like The Information that are only banned due to being hard-paywalled.
It's obviously inflammatory to describe their pattern of posting as "propaganda". (Sure it can be argued and debated in the right context, but this is not that.) But even without the word "propaganda", the guidelines still ask us to keep discussions on-topic and to avoid generic tangents.
This rounds physical currency to the nearest $0.05, effectively. Why not round everything to the nearest $0.1? The math and adjustments (changes to every printed price, etc.) would be simpler. How much for the wine? "$19.9". It seems much simpler to me, though I'm sure it's been discussed ...
Is there some item that would be problematic to round to $0.1? I suppose anything that is fractionally priced at ≤$0.05 is now would have a minimum purchase of 2. Items bought in bulk could be priced fractionally.
We already round off fractional pennies all the time, e.g. in securities market prices, tax calculations, gasoline prices, etc. That's not a problem. And any electronic purchase could be for fractional amounts - but why?
(Once upon a time, you probably could sell the idea to IT people by pointing out how much memory and bandwidth it would save.)
In Hong Kong, it's very common now to see prices with just a single digit after the decimal point. That said, they haven't had a 5c coin since 1989 and HK$0.1 isn't worth much more than US$0.01.
For me, one of the nicest currency units right now is the Taiwanese Dollar - 31 TWD to 1 USD and 40 TWD to 1 GBP. They don't have any smaller coins now, so it's nice that everything is in integer units, but the numbers aren't crazily large.
Things are still often priced in €xx.99 in Ireland, but since the 1 and 2 Eurocent coins are all MIA, if you pay in cash, you'll be paying the full €xy.00. Most of my transactions are by card, though, and thus not subject to rounding.
So why? Maybe the vendors reckon it will work out in their favor this way.
Haha, as a Brit, I have quite a few eurocent coins in my foreign loose change drawer.
Also, as a Brit, if I bought something for £9.99 and gave them a £10, I'd expect change. If they said they didn't have any 1p or 2p coins, I'd expect to receive a 5p coin instead. And when I say expect, I've been offered that a couple of times in the past in that situation, I've never had to ask for it.
Spend like an hour researching the most efficient way to sell six thousand metric tons of zinc for its scrap value, then do so. I don't need a bunch of zinc for anything I want to do and money is a generally-useful thing to have.
Interesting how cash money still elicits such emotions.
When the European Central Bank announced a new design for the euro bills nobody in my country really cared anymore because most payments are electronic.
The danger to that ofcourse is that you risk overspending but retailers approve.
It's already a system where unaccountable private monopolistic moralizing multinational middle men have the power to tell you what you can spend your money on.
Supposedly it cost gov 4 cents to mint 1. Does it have to be done with zinc tho? Why not plastic or some cheap material? Although you may be able to 3D print a penny at home (just like it being made from zinc can actually stop someone), but just like with a real one, its not like you will show up at your local bank with $1 million dollar worth to deposit.
Even if they were free to mint they're still effectively worthless trash to most of us. I've been waiting for the penny to die for decades, and it would be nice if we had a functioning government that could handle these nonpartisan issues smoothly, but we haven't had anything like that in a long time, so the rip the bandaid off I say
Zinc is the cheap material though. It replaced copper (except for the foil outer), when copper was too expensive.
If there was a suitable and even less expensive metal, I think it might be reasonable to switch again. But if we have to rebuild coin handling to use a plastic penny, I think it's necessary to consider the costs and benefits of a vastly different material versus the costs and benefits of abandoning pennies.
The other option would be to rebase the currency such that a single penny was a meaningful unit of money again. One potential such way would be to issue new paper notes which represent the old note with a decimal place move such that $10 becomes $100. This has been done before but might not be a great idea for the USA.
That would be a nightmare, you're basically bringing in a new currency at that point because now all cash, every bank account and every price in the whole country needs to change. That's going to be probably hundreds of thousands of times more effort and expense than phasing out pennies!
I guess a reason to discontinue the penny is that it supposedly costs 3+ cents to mint one. I guess a nickel costs like 13 cents, though. I thought it would've been a better move to discontinue printing the nickel then just make all pennies worth 5 cents.
At minimum they're useful as makeshift pie weights when blind-baking a pie crust. After shaping the dough in the baking dish, cover it in aluminum foil and then fill it with pennies. They conduct heat well, and prevent the dough from bubbling or shrinking.
First they are coated in copper, and second nobody bakes pie crusts at a temp that would cause zinc to offgas and third zinc fever is not a big deal unless you're breathing a bunch every day.
Using pennies has long been recommended by reputable cookbooks. Is there really a risk at 375 degrees F? I would think the everyday fumes from an unventilated gas oven are a much more significant problem, and that's fairly common in many parts of the US.
Anyway, I've done it a hundred times, and my brain and lungs still work good-ish?
Zinc boils at 1,180 K, so its vapor pressure should be negligible at room (300 K) or kitchen oven (500 K) temperatures. I suspect the GP comment is misapplying advice from a different context, like arc-welding.
(And a penny doesn't really have exposed zinc, I understand: its plating is pure copper).
I'd also note the combustion elements of stovetop gas burners are often brass (copper-zinc).
Maybe if you had clean uncirculated pennies and lots of them(why?) but using pennies from my local gas station in my pies? How about no..... And washing them seems not worth the effort when a bag of dry beans is 70 cents .
They're easy to clean, and they don't come in direct contact with the dough at any point. America's Test Kitchen found that pennies work better than beans due to how they conduct heat. If you don't like the idea, that's fine, no one's forcing you.
I've been listening to Marketplace less because of stories like this. The half cent went away, the penny went away, other countries have discontinued currencies. You keep accepting pennies and you round when people pay in cash. At some point, your register will do the rounding for you. There isn't really a story here.
There's a bunch of regulations that need tweaking. AIUI, it's illegal to charge SNAP more than other customers. someone who paid cash and gets rounded down technically pays less than what the government got charged. It's only on the order of pennies, I don't think the law cares about that at all.
That one is easy without regulatory changes: just round the SNAP transactions. The SNAP equal treatment rule only requires charging SNAP customers the same price as cash purchases, not the same price as credit or debit card purchases.
Is that a federal law or state law? Whichever jurisdiction it is, surely you'd only need a one-clause amendment to add an exception for rounding cash transactions by up to two cents to account for the discontinuation of pennies... I just can't imagine that taking more than a few weeks to resolve, surely your political systems in the US haven't become that dysfunctional where this couldn't be fixed that quickly?
I don't buy the SNAP argument because there's already rounding when taxes are applied, and half cents are still legal tender, so you could go into a store, tell them they should have charged half a cent less, and then they'd be in a similar trivial violation of SNAP.
Yeah this is the kind of objection dreamed up by an engineer, who thinks that law is mechanically applied. In reality, if there are no other factors this spends two seconds in front of a judge, who then throws it out with prejudice for wasting the court’s time.
"In Australia we got rid of our 1c and 2c coins more than 20 years ago."
Their disappearance was a damn nuisance for some. We used to drill a small hole in the centre of them and solder them onto semiconductor diode leads as heatsinks. At 1 and 2 cents each they were much cheaper than their commercial counterparts. Unlike the US cent both Oz coins were solid copper.
The Imperial Oz penny and halfpenny (currency before 14 February 1966) was always solid copper. Earlier 2/- (two shillings) used to contain silver but that was phased out sometime in the 1950s. If I recall correctly the first (the round) 50c also contained some silver whereas the current dodecagon one is mostly nickel (correct me if I'm wrong).
Several points: firstly i would assume every country has a process for disposing of bad and worn out notes and coins. If not i'm sure someone could work out how to profit from recycling dead pennies in true capitalist fashion. This leads on to my second point which is when the government has time they should get around to issuing a bill removing pennies (and maybe other smaller denominations) from legal tender.
But there is a wider point which i want to discuss. How long will physical cash last? I'm very fuzzy on this but i think in some of the Asian countries it is practically an endangered species. Tax people don't like large denomination notes. And virtually no legal big transactions take place in cash. America must profit massively from the fact that in many other countries dollars are the go to black market currency but that is a very singular advantage.
Only pennies before 1982 are worth scrapping as they are made of copper.
The newer pennies are not really worth the effort as they are mostly zinc.
Ironically if they are no longer illegal to melt down (IANAL but I would think this is true?) they actually would be more worth it to scrap because of the negated risk.
No law in relation to pennies has changed. The executive branch has simply took the law stating the mint should create as many pennies as necessary, and decided that the necessary amount is 0.
The practicalities of their illegality then comes down to enforcement. Given the current executive branch's behavior related to enforcement of laws, that can mean anything from "melt them all down", to "don't do it", to "if our friends start doing it, it'll be legal, if our enemies start doing it, we'll enforce".
I read this as a joke ($1/lb because 100 pennies weighs about a pound - although online sources make it sound like it's closer to 200 pennies for a pound)
I think however the problem would be the trouble in seperating the zinc from the copper, I think you would likely operate at a loss still but this is just a guess.
The reason the government isn't warning people or slowing the withdrawal is because nobody cares. Any amount of money they can get for recycling is better than the loss now. (though the current admin is known to "chicken out" which probably explains them preparing to spin production back up if they need to)
Honestly, GWBush was a pretty bad president. Started the war in Iraq on a pretext, wasted over a trillion US dollars on it and led to something like half a million dead Iraqis.
Australia's rules for how to round are summed up in four dot points here in a single page of info, with another two short paragraphs about how electronic/credit card and cheque transactions are handled (they are not rounded): https://www.accc.gov.au/media-release/rounding-and-eftpos-tr...
When the removal of one and two cent pieces actually happened in Australia (1991), all the details were distributed in a pamphlet of just four pages. That amount of information is probably about all people need, literally just a document with some guidelines!
Many issues probably don't need the lengthy deliberative processes that stall or delay change. But the problems with the penny have been apparent for years, maybe even decades. There was plenty of time to study the issue, observe how other economies have made similar transitions and figure out how to make it work in an orderly fashion. Instead, we have a change by executive decree, with no apparent planning. Will the mint start making pennies again in the next administration or the next year? It's certainly possible.
In some states, there's legal uncertainty for retailers that operate without pennies. Planning and forwarning likely would have encouraged states to amend laws to provide for penniless retailers. Uniform nationwide rounding could have been an option, interstate commerce and all that.
Some sort of plan for the pennies themselves might be nice, although maybe some sort of plan could have helped pennies circulate more, reducing the need to mint several billion pennies every year.
The issue with the lengthy deliberative process is that it provides multiple opportunities for motivated, but ultimately damaging to the public, operators to intervene. In this case, I present to you the Americans for Common Cents:
They care more to keep the cent than normal Americans, who ultimately pay for its cost of manufacturing, care to get rid of it. So they'll always win a careful, deliberative process; because they'll show up for the cent _every time_ this comes up. And everyone else gets mildly shafted for no reason.
You just need a clever advocacy group name. Something like Making Cents of our Currency or No Noncents. Or, something along the lines of If the Mint is losing money, it doesn't make cents.
But yes, our system is biased towards those with sustained focus. That does lead to some wrong decisions, but it's probably better than a system biased to action, or biased towards chaos.
Technically, it would have been better for the government to hand a tax on gross business revenue less labor costs, in order to give the Fed a lever to lower price levels inflation and raise household spending power so that the loss of pennies was of as little significance to households as it was to the Mint. Obviously, that would have required years of unpalatable and unsexy planning work that can’t be converted into political capital, but the outcome would have been that pennies become more relevant by lower prices and/or that pennies become less relevant by higher spending power. Oh well.
> Obviously, that would have required years of unpalatable and unsexy planning work that can’t be converted into political capital
It also probably wouldn't have resulted in any actual action. The problem proponents of "unpalatable and unsexy planning work" confront is that their approach is immobilized by its own weight. Analysis, bikeshedding, and litigation destroys the ability to actually do anything.
Discontinuing the penny is obviously an important thing (otherwise, we'd have been done talking about it by now).
It is always best that important government moves are done in public, with processes that are replete with discourse and understanding, instead of with surprises and confusion.
Ideally, the government would had resolved the (present-day, recently-introduced, inevitable, foreseeable) conflict with SNAP benefits and come up with a single-page, large-print summary that uniformly defined how rounding at the checkout counter works in ways that regular people conducting regular transactions would be able to comprehend and follow.
These details certainly all need to be figured out at some point, and sooner would be better than later: We should have started figuring it out years (perhaps even a decade) ago.
Unfortunately, we did not take that path.
Discontinuing the penny could have been a very orderly nothingburger wherein everyone (on all sides of the cash register) knew exactly what to expect, and exactly when to expect it. But but we didn't do it that way.
So instead, we now we have an element of surprise and confusion instead of simplicity.
For anyone who might point out that this lack of planning may lead to incredibly minor price rises for everyone, i'll add that this can be balanced by the very minor inconvenience that will no longer exist. This is inherently unquantifiable, but as people here love pointing out that doesn't mean it's not worth something.
Without planning and the resultant guidance, we stand to be inconvenienced every time one of the customers in front of us and the cashier have differences in their ideas for how rounding works.
(But that's OK, I guess: After all, that's just an aggregate of many millions of little inconveniences, instead of some somewhat larger inconveniences for a few people in advance. Their time is clearly more important than yours is, or mine is. All hail the chief.)
If dealing with the absence of the penny were straight-forward, then there would be no real discussion about it today. We'd already be moving along [mostly!] according to the new, published normal and things would be a snoozefest.
But there is no guidance provided. Accordingly, we get discussions.
I would like to present this indeterminable discussion (from several days ago) as evidence of the kinds of differing opinions that a lack of planning and guidance brings forth: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45901904
This is the kind of discussion that the dust should have settled on years ago.
I don't get it, what guidance do you really require? Do you think there will be some major cartel by the retailers to rip the costumers off, at maximum, 0.04 cents of a dollar per every purchase in the absolute worst case scenarios?
Will we have major lawsuits about it? "Latest news: Costumer sues Walmart for 1 billion USD for rounding a 157.01$ bill to 157.05$"
Last night, I paid $13.00 for a pizza that was priced at $12.99. This does not faze me at all.
But there absolutely are people who complain about this kind of thing. I don't have to understand it in order to recognize it, and nor do you: Neither of us were born yesterday, and we've both been in line behind people with these proclivities at the checkout counter ourselves -- observing them argue over literal pennies.
A lack of guidance cannot serve to quell these conflicts.
> Will we have major lawsuits about it? "Latest news: Costumer sues Walmart for 1 billion USD for rounding a 157.01$ bill to 157.05$"
Will we have a discussion that is free of superfluous and undue hyperbole?
But, that’s the thing. Hyperbole is the only way of doing this an issue. Like you said with your example, any minimally functional citizen won’t have any trouble with this.
It might be said that it is true that you can't reason a person out of a position that they didn't reason themselves into -- even with the use of hyperbole.
But I am not unreasonable. I arrived where I am rationally.
And hyperbole here simply injects misguided, disingenuous noise into our interactions where no noise is necessary at all.
Don't sell yourself short. If I can discuss it without going hyperbolic, then so can you.
It would be trivial to issue useful guidance, and that guidance would be beneficial even if it was incredibly stupid or misguided or even caused it's own problems, because it is a document that demonstrates that some thinking somewhere went into it, and someone has taken a minute to think through outcomes and effects.
But the premise of the current administration is that the world is radically simpler than "experts" and "bureaucrats" want you to believe, and they purposely and loudly eschew any thinking about 2nd, 3rd, or often even 1st order effects of their proposals because they want them to sound "simple" to rather simple people, and rely on trite soundbites or false "truisms" to keep them propped up, and also because even a surface level examination of most of their claims or proposals forces you to confront how stupid they usually are.
This administration and it's fiercest supporters view not thinking through things as a virtue. They view large proscriptions from the throne as good governance, because they want a king.
That is very explicitly why what they did was wrong, even if it's not a big deal to get rid of the penny, and very few people will have problems with it, and I think state governments and even the fed really shouldn't have a problem accommodating it.
Being purposely ignorant like that is stupid and wrong even when it doesn't have negative repercussions, because it WILL have negative repercussions somewhere, and they will be entirely preventable. See innocent citizens being deported and assaulted, and the extrajudicial murder of random drug mules driving cartel speedboats.
The federal government and current administration has a tiny army of professionals who are sufficiently well equipped and paid to wargame out exactly this kind of thing to discover some corner cases. We are still paying them even as they do nothing. The current admin is so incompetent and averse to actual governance that they reject working systems that could even help them make their agenda a reality, but the bureaucracy being good and effective at what it does is antithetical to their worldviews and hostile to their individualist philosophies, and it's more important to make the government look bad than actually succeed at what they were elected to do.
This is all a bit hyperbolic. Stopping minting pennies made sense and has precedent. There used to be half penny coins.
Also, pennies are still legal tender. Folks can take them to a bank or other venue and cash them in. They’re not “trash.”
> Folks can take them to a bank
FWIW my bank refuses to accept unrolled coins, long before this month's retirement of the penny.
One of the reasons why I changed banks. My new bank has a coin counting machine in the lobby, you throw your coins in, it consumes them, and gives you a slip that you take to the teller.
As I understand it, coins are considered a government service. Banks and retailers pay to deal with them. Buying them from the public for face value actually saves them money.
It's so easy to use coins, pennies included, in day-to-day transactions I never accumulate any. Accumulating pennies or other coins is a concept I don't understand. You can spend up to 4 pennies in any purchase you do, and if you don't can't never receive more than 4. For nickels, dimes, and quarters, the maximum is smaller.
If a person has good basic arithmetic skills and it is a priority for them, then yes they can use coins easily. However, a lot of people either can't do the math or are unwilling to use change correctly.
For myself, it's such a priority that I'll get upset with myself if I have more than 4 pennies.
Japan has more coins (in regular use) than USA, so giving the correct amount is even more important or you'll end up carrying a lot of coins. 1000 yen is the smallest bill so... Example: 999 yen. 500,4x100,50,4x10,5,4x1 yen coins, 19 coins total.
When I used to use cash I used to do this all the time. I would nearly always overpay to minimise the number of coins in my pocket. For example I had a bill of £1.63 and I was paying with two £1 coins, I would get 37 pence in change, which would be a minimum of four coins (20p, 10p, 5p, 2p). So I would pay £2.13 to get a 50p or £2.03 to get two 20p coins.
95% of the time the person serving me would clock on to what I was doing but the other 6% it'd take some persuasion, and occasionally they would insist on giving me back my overpayment before ringing it up.
Most of our supermarkets have at least one self service machine that accepts change. Once a week I pour any loose change in then settle the rest with a card.
I guess this might depend where you are.
When I lived in Scotland there was a "loose change" machine at the local Tesco. You pour in your coins and it would give you a receipt you could take to a cashier to get cash back - but the downside was that it charged you something like 10% of the total as a fee. Which I wouldn't pay.
Edit: I just searched and the Tesco documentation says "There is a 25p transaction fee and an 11.5% processing fee on the total amount of coins you put in the Coinstar centre. For charity donations, this processing fee is reduced to 8.9%." (wow, how generous!)
I meant self service machines where you pay for your shopping. There are usually one or two that accept change.
Ahh, somehow I misunderstood. Thanks for the clarification!
Same here in the US.
Back in the day, I'd sift through my jar of change and keep the quarters, which were good for parking meters and laundry. The rest went into the Coinstar machine. The fee for counting dimes, nickles, and pennies seemed OK.
The machine always had some weird foreign coins or subway tokens left over by the previous customer in the reject bin, which was potentially interesting.
FWIW in the US many of those machines offer to skip the fee if you take the money in the form of a gift card for Amazon or Walmart or similar.
That actually never occurred to me, I assumed they only took bills. Welp, problem solved and I'm no longer out of milk.
Obligatory Dr. Strangelove reference:
*You don't think I'd go into combat with loose change in my pocket, do you?"
But I must admit that I never formed the habit of bringing change with me when I go somewhere. So it piled up at home. The quarters were easy: They got saved for parking, laundry, etc. But I ended up with a sack of pennies that I finally cashed in at the bank.
It's odd how banks have largely stopped operating change counting machines.
In my childhood we'd hoard loose change then make a trip to the local po-dunk bank serving my neighborhood surrounded by corn fields, and even there they'd take our bucket of loose change and dump it into a counting machine for free.
It was a game to try guess the amount we'd get in paper cash...
Now you have to pay for this service at a grocery store using a cumbersome machine operated by Coinstar.
COVID happened. However, all three of the banks I visit regularly (over branch of a national bank, two branches of a local credit union) all have coin counting machines in the lobby, though it took awhile for them to be added back to the branches that took theirs out.
No doubt COVID kicked skimpflation into high gear, but this was already a pattern I noticed long before 2019.
It seemed to generally coincide with the demise of retail in general, and of course the elimination of bank-teller interactions and emergence of ATM machines. All of these things are a blurry mess from my past...
Fun fact: modern dimes, quarters, and half-dollars all have the same value by weight -- about $20 per pound.
This is true by design (silver coins had a weight chosen by value of silver), not coincidence. Also while nickels and pennies don’t match.
> FWIW my bank refuses to accept unrolled coins, long before this month's retirement of the penny.
My (edit: old) bank refused to accept unrolled coins back in the early 2000s.
A lot of banks just have one of those coin counting machine things (like Coinstar but not Coinstar).
Coinstar also often has zero commission options like gift cards that are an easy way to cash in extra change without paying fees.
Average gift card has a discount of 8 to 20% built in. Looks like Coinstar is currently charging 12.9%, so a gift card could actually be more profitable for them.
If you're feeding it pennies you can also just give it one penny at a time to avoid the fees.
A credit union local to me waives the fee if you are a member.
Mine had the machines, then ripped them out, over the cost to them the regional bank they deal with imposed and other excuses. Coinstar (some) gift card is the only no-fee I've found in my area, but then you're stuck with a gift card instead of cash.
I have talked to my bank and was told not to roll them, they just throw them in a machine to count them and deposit the money in my count. It is not uncommon to see people bring in a box of coins and the bank takes care of them.
So roll them?
I have like 2 dollars in coins, not even a roll of pennies. I just thought I'd try depositing it while running a different bank errand and they were like "naw, go to coinstar with your poor person money"
Coin counting machines exist for decades (and I hope still produced), why not all banks have them?
In Canada, I've only ever seen these in grocery stores, operating for a fee (and they don't accept commissions) and a singular credit union branch (because they serve the underbanked at that particular location).
My bank used to have one, but it merged with another bank and the machine got taken away "to serve a larger branch"
Is that legal?
It seems more reasonable than the outright refusal of many businesses to accept cash at all, and plus this transaction isn't even a "debt" to which the penny would be legal tender.
As I understand it, more than X dollars worth of coins is not legal tender. I learned this due to an absurd case in Detroit, where someone stole bags of coins from an armored car, got caught, and claimed their crime was not a felony because it was below the dollar limit for a felony. Of course the judge treated their request with the disdain that it deserved.
There are multiple laws that could have been broken to make it a felony, but if the only reason it would have been a felony was the dollar amount, I'm actually less inclined to side with the judge.
This is all third-hand, through a game of internet-telephone, and my money (if you'll pardon the pun) is on there being additional factors though
I think when the half penny was discontinued it had the same buying power as the dime does now or something like that.
So this is long overdue.
> They’re not “trash.”
I live in the Eurozone. We had 1 and 2 cent coins for a while. Where I live these were quickly deprecated and I think in most other Eurozone countries too by now.
I have thrown any of these coins straight in the bin soon as somebody gave them. Too much hassle and requires too big a wallet to drag along, for literally pennies.
When I first realized dealing with coins was inversely proportional to their denomination I threw out less than a Euros worth.
I do not understand anyone who doesn't throw out their pennies.
Throwing out cent coins doesn’t seem like an environmental waste to you, like throwing out aluminum cans?
Yes they’re impractical to carry and use but does anyone actually do that? Why not do the standard practice of accumulate them in a jar instead of throwing them in the trash like waste?
it’s easy to take them home and throw them in a jar until suddenly the jar is a Kg of metal that can be fed to whatever coinstar like machine is around.
Metals are separated here, but compared to all the other waste I generate, I'd say it's... pennies on the dollar. Storing and collecting things is by itself an expense too: space, energy (you probably store them in a controlled environment), and so on.
At least leave them on the counter, drop them in a charity box, or leave them somewhere else where someone will pick them up.
I refuse to accept them. I got them anyway. Never seen a charity box. The homeless person also doesnt want them.
I stored some 1 and 2 cent coins in 2005 betting they will become collectible in a few decades.
There are many things that will become collectibles. I don't want to spend the energy and time storing various items on the chance they might become valuable.
*precedent
Thanks and fixed. Darn autocorrect.
> Many Americans—and many people who, though not American, enjoy watching from a safe distance as predictable fiascoes unfold in this theoretical superpower from week to week—find themselves now pondering one question.
This is way too much spite for an article about coins. Lord.
If the author of the article had done a bit of searching, they might know that Canadians (the primary predictable American ficasco spectators) phased out pennies years ago. We also "had no plan" for the remaining pennies, and we didn't really need one. They get deposited, lost, and thrown away over time—that's why the mint had to keep printing them. Now they've gone the way of the 50-cent piece. It's not a big deal. Frankly I'm surprised the US didn't do it sooner.
The problem is not strictly the pennies themselves, but all of the prices that rely on being able to quantize things to a cent, and a number of different laws about not playing games with prices.
Most recently, a stick in the SNAP benefits laws is that you can't charge SNAP recipients different amounts from other people - which was presumably intended to ensure you can't play games like charging SNAP recipients more for things, but in practice, means that if you, hypothetically, wanted to charge SNAP and credit card holders exact amounts (which you would likely want to do to avoid weird effects where SNAP recipients, who tend to be very price sensitive, find their bills going up), and charge cash users rounded up or down, you would be in violation.
Those are the kinds of warts you would hope to see a plan for before these things were announced, rather than having to figure out one in the middle.
I took it at humorous rather than spiteful.
I fail to see the humor.
[flagged]
It's not acceptable to attack fellow community members like this on HN. Critiquing the article is fine, as is flagging it if you think it's unfit for HN. But personal attacks are not OK, no matter who it is or why you think it's justifiable. Please read the guidelines and make an effort to observe them if you want to keep participating here.
Since you're speaking as a moderator I'd like to ask for clarification on the official position:
Was that actually a personal attack, or was it a verifiable claim about the quantity and type of submissions by this user? Is the problem that it was labeled "propaganda", and would it have been ok without that word?
I thought it was useful context to have a look at the submission history. There is a slew of recent [dead] submissions. At what point is it fair to call that out? Or is it about the wording?
It's generally not OK to bring up someone's past activity, whether that activity be on HN or elsewhere, as way of attacking someone in a discussion on HN. It fits within the "generic tangents" guideline. We can never know if they still agree with what they said or posted in the past. The submitter's history, and indeed the submitter's identity, is not really relevant to the substance of the article, and we want the discussion to be about the substance of the article. (Of course it's relevant if the submitter is the author, because then they can engage in Q&A about the article's content.)
If users notice that someone is posting large volumes of low-quality content (i.e., spam, self-promotional content or articles that break the guidelines) they can email us and we'll investigate.
In this case the user in question just posts a lot of stuff from mainstream publications on either side of the ideological centre – i.e., lots from the NY Times, Washington Post and The Atlantic but also WSJ and Bloomberg. The articles that are [dead] are from sites like The Information that are only banned due to being hard-paywalled.
It's obviously inflammatory to describe their pattern of posting as "propaganda". (Sure it can be argued and debated in the right context, but this is not that.) But even without the word "propaganda", the guidelines still ask us to keep discussions on-topic and to avoid generic tangents.
Ok thanks, makes sense.
This rounds physical currency to the nearest $0.05, effectively. Why not round everything to the nearest $0.1? The math and adjustments (changes to every printed price, etc.) would be simpler. How much for the wine? "$19.9". It seems much simpler to me, though I'm sure it's been discussed ...
Is there some item that would be problematic to round to $0.1? I suppose anything that is fractionally priced at ≤$0.05 is now would have a minimum purchase of 2. Items bought in bulk could be priced fractionally.
We already round off fractional pennies all the time, e.g. in securities market prices, tax calculations, gasoline prices, etc. That's not a problem. And any electronic purchase could be for fractional amounts - but why?
(Once upon a time, you probably could sell the idea to IT people by pointing out how much memory and bandwidth it would save.)
In Hong Kong, it's very common now to see prices with just a single digit after the decimal point. That said, they haven't had a 5c coin since 1989 and HK$0.1 isn't worth much more than US$0.01.
For me, one of the nicest currency units right now is the Taiwanese Dollar - 31 TWD to 1 USD and 40 TWD to 1 GBP. They don't have any smaller coins now, so it's nice that everything is in integer units, but the numbers aren't crazily large.
Things are still often priced in €xx.99 in Ireland, but since the 1 and 2 Eurocent coins are all MIA, if you pay in cash, you'll be paying the full €xy.00. Most of my transactions are by card, though, and thus not subject to rounding.
So why? Maybe the vendors reckon it will work out in their favor this way.
Haha, as a Brit, I have quite a few eurocent coins in my foreign loose change drawer.
Also, as a Brit, if I bought something for £9.99 and gave them a £10, I'd expect change. If they said they didn't have any 1p or 2p coins, I'd expect to receive a 5p coin instead. And when I say expect, I've been offered that a couple of times in the past in that situation, I've never had to ask for it.
They don't call this "the rip-off republic" without reason
By far the most common coin in the USA is 25¢. Changing that would be much more disruptive.
Ask {some number of} engineers: You have just been made a free gift of six thousand metric tons of zinc. What do you do with it?
Spend like an hour researching the most efficient way to sell six thousand metric tons of zinc for its scrap value, then do so. I don't need a bunch of zinc for anything I want to do and money is a generally-useful thing to have.
Zinc is very useful! I wouldn't want to imagine a world without zinc.
Thank goodness we still live in a world of telephones, car batteries, handguns, and many things made of zinc.
Value the mineral and prove ownership, get financing, start a company and sell it by unit wholesale.
Sell it to someone who uses it to galvanize steel, I guess?
Interesting how cash money still elicits such emotions.
When the European Central Bank announced a new design for the euro bills nobody in my country really cared anymore because most payments are electronic. The danger to that ofcourse is that you risk overspending but retailers approve.
The actual danger is that you’re creating a system where the government will have the power to tell you what you can spend your money on.
The government already has the power to tell you where (local vs bank transfer) and what (taxes, fines) you must spend your money on.
Favors, trust, and reputation cannot be taxed.
“The government already has too much power, so let it take even more” is not convincing.
It's already a system where unaccountable private monopolistic moralizing multinational middle men have the power to tell you what you can spend your money on.
Exactly this, and track every last cent you've spent, and where.
Why do we need a plan for pennies?
Reporters et al always want 'a plan,' which is ironic because they have problems planning more than a week in advance.
Supposedly it cost gov 4 cents to mint 1. Does it have to be done with zinc tho? Why not plastic or some cheap material? Although you may be able to 3D print a penny at home (just like it being made from zinc can actually stop someone), but just like with a real one, its not like you will show up at your local bank with $1 million dollar worth to deposit.
Even if they were free to mint they're still effectively worthless trash to most of us. I've been waiting for the penny to die for decades, and it would be nice if we had a functioning government that could handle these nonpartisan issues smoothly, but we haven't had anything like that in a long time, so the rip the bandaid off I say
I have literally been throw them away for years, they’re annoying clutter
Zinc is the cheap material though. It replaced copper (except for the foil outer), when copper was too expensive.
If there was a suitable and even less expensive metal, I think it might be reasonable to switch again. But if we have to rebuild coin handling to use a plastic penny, I think it's necessary to consider the costs and benefits of a vastly different material versus the costs and benefits of abandoning pennies.
The other option would be to rebase the currency such that a single penny was a meaningful unit of money again. One potential such way would be to issue new paper notes which represent the old note with a decimal place move such that $10 becomes $100. This has been done before but might not be a great idea for the USA.
That would be a nightmare, you're basically bringing in a new currency at that point because now all cash, every bank account and every price in the whole country needs to change. That's going to be probably hundreds of thousands of times more effort and expense than phasing out pennies!
I guess a reason to discontinue the penny is that it supposedly costs 3+ cents to mint one. I guess a nickel costs like 13 cents, though. I thought it would've been a better move to discontinue printing the nickel then just make all pennies worth 5 cents.
Wouldn’t the decimal place have to move in the other direction for the penny to become useful again?
At minimum they're useful as makeshift pie weights when blind-baking a pie crust. After shaping the dough in the baking dish, cover it in aluminum foil and then fill it with pennies. They conduct heat well, and prevent the dough from bubbling or shrinking.
Oh my goodness please no one take this seriously. Heating pennies will result in harmful zinc off-gassing. You do not want to breathe this in.
Use dry beans for blind-baking. They are almost infinitely reusable with no harmful effects.
First they are coated in copper, and second nobody bakes pie crusts at a temp that would cause zinc to offgas and third zinc fever is not a big deal unless you're breathing a bunch every day.
Using pennies has long been recommended by reputable cookbooks. Is there really a risk at 375 degrees F? I would think the everyday fumes from an unventilated gas oven are a much more significant problem, and that's fairly common in many parts of the US.
Anyway, I've done it a hundred times, and my brain and lungs still work good-ish?
Zinc boils at 1,180 K, so its vapor pressure should be negligible at room (300 K) or kitchen oven (500 K) temperatures. I suspect the GP comment is misapplying advice from a different context, like arc-welding.
(And a penny doesn't really have exposed zinc, I understand: its plating is pure copper).
I'd also note the combustion elements of stovetop gas burners are often brass (copper-zinc).
Maybe if you had clean uncirculated pennies and lots of them(why?) but using pennies from my local gas station in my pies? How about no..... And washing them seems not worth the effort when a bag of dry beans is 70 cents .
They're easy to clean, and they don't come in direct contact with the dough at any point. America's Test Kitchen found that pennies work better than beans due to how they conduct heat. If you don't like the idea, that's fine, no one's forcing you.
The country is welcome to send me the 300 billion pennies. My bank will happily "dispose" of them with their "deposit to my account" service.
According to Marketplace.org, pennies are treasure for some businesses now because the regional Feds aren't distributing them.
https://www.marketplace.org/story/2025/11/13/businesses-face...
I've been listening to Marketplace less because of stories like this. The half cent went away, the penny went away, other countries have discontinued currencies. You keep accepting pennies and you round when people pay in cash. At some point, your register will do the rounding for you. There isn't really a story here.
The register might already do the rounding if it was designed to work in Canada, which got rid of the penny over a decade ago.
There's a bunch of regulations that need tweaking. AIUI, it's illegal to charge SNAP more than other customers. someone who paid cash and gets rounded down technically pays less than what the government got charged. It's only on the order of pennies, I don't think the law cares about that at all.
That one is easy without regulatory changes: just round the SNAP transactions. The SNAP equal treatment rule only requires charging SNAP customers the same price as cash purchases, not the same price as credit or debit card purchases.
Is that a federal law or state law? Whichever jurisdiction it is, surely you'd only need a one-clause amendment to add an exception for rounding cash transactions by up to two cents to account for the discontinuation of pennies... I just can't imagine that taking more than a few weeks to resolve, surely your political systems in the US haven't become that dysfunctional where this couldn't be fixed that quickly?
> surely your political systems in the US haven't become that dysfunctional where this couldn't be fixed that quickly?
In America this can be done - by 2028 or thereabouts :)
I don't buy the SNAP argument because there's already rounding when taxes are applied, and half cents are still legal tender, so you could go into a store, tell them they should have charged half a cent less, and then they'd be in a similar trivial violation of SNAP.
Yeah this is the kind of objection dreamed up by an engineer, who thinks that law is mechanically applied. In reality, if there are no other factors this spends two seconds in front of a judge, who then throws it out with prejudice for wasting the court’s time.
Why does the government need a plan for pennies? They stopped wasting money minting them, now the "problem" will sort itself out naturally.
Related:
The last-ever penny will be minted today in Philadelphia
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45901904
You can make really cool flooring with lots of pennies in grids.
If the cooper is worth more than the coin, would melting them down be profitable?
In Australia we got rid of our 1c and 2c coins more than 20 years ago.
"In Australia we got rid of our 1c and 2c coins more than 20 years ago."
Their disappearance was a damn nuisance for some. We used to drill a small hole in the centre of them and solder them onto semiconductor diode leads as heatsinks. At 1 and 2 cents each they were much cheaper than their commercial counterparts. Unlike the US cent both Oz coins were solid copper.
It already was, a long time ago with the copper pennies. Not sure with the modern Zinc ones, however.
The Imperial Oz penny and halfpenny (currency before 14 February 1966) was always solid copper. Earlier 2/- (two shillings) used to contain silver but that was phased out sometime in the 1950s. If I recall correctly the first (the round) 50c also contained some silver whereas the current dodecagon one is mostly nickel (correct me if I'm wrong).
Several points: firstly i would assume every country has a process for disposing of bad and worn out notes and coins. If not i'm sure someone could work out how to profit from recycling dead pennies in true capitalist fashion. This leads on to my second point which is when the government has time they should get around to issuing a bill removing pennies (and maybe other smaller denominations) from legal tender.
But there is a wider point which i want to discuss. How long will physical cash last? I'm very fuzzy on this but i think in some of the Asian countries it is practically an endangered species. Tax people don't like large denomination notes. And virtually no legal big transactions take place in cash. America must profit massively from the fact that in many other countries dollars are the go to black market currency but that is a very singular advantage.
Per the U.S. Mint, the life span of a coin is 30 years:
For paper money, depending on denomination, 5.7 to 24 years. (https://www.federalreserve.gov/faqs/how-long-is-the-life-spa...)> endangered species
You have a probably-unintentional pun here. I'm explaining it since many people won't know the obscure word.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/specie (see 2).
https://archive.is/uel4S
100 fuses for $1, awesome! ;-)
Most people under the age of 50 will not understand this.
[dead]
Do you not just shred them and send them to a scrap metal processor?
Only pennies before 1982 are worth scrapping as they are made of copper.
The newer pennies are not really worth the effort as they are mostly zinc.
Ironically if they are no longer illegal to melt down (IANAL but I would think this is true?) they actually would be more worth it to scrap because of the negated risk.
No law in relation to pennies has changed. The executive branch has simply took the law stating the mint should create as many pennies as necessary, and decided that the necessary amount is 0.
The practicalities of their illegality then comes down to enforcement. Given the current executive branch's behavior related to enforcement of laws, that can mean anything from "melt them all down", to "don't do it", to "if our friends start doing it, it'll be legal, if our enemies start doing it, we'll enforce".
> The newer pennies are not really worth the effort as they are mostly zinc.
They're still worth $1 per lb., and you have to destroy them, anyway.
It's their mix with copper I beleive that makes them less valuable than their raw value in zinc if thats what your number is based on...
because the cost of seperation from the copper is greater than simply sourcing other materials.
Someone producing brass (copper-zinc alloy) could presumably use them, as they only need to add extra copper.
I read this as a joke ($1/lb because 100 pennies weighs about a pound - although online sources make it sound like it's closer to 200 pennies for a pound)
We can turn them into suntan lotion!
hahah ok actually I love that.
I think however the problem would be the trouble in seperating the zinc from the copper, I think you would likely operate at a loss still but this is just a guess.
It's called Coppertone for a reason
The value of my wheat pennies and war pennies just went up
The reason the government isn't warning people or slowing the withdrawal is because nobody cares. Any amount of money they can get for recycling is better than the loss now. (though the current admin is known to "chicken out" which probably explains them preparing to spin production back up if they need to)
[dead]
[flagged]
Honestly, GWBush was a pretty bad president. Started the war in Iraq on a pretext, wasted over a trillion US dollars on it and led to something like half a million dead Iraqis.
[flagged]
Australia's rules for how to round are summed up in four dot points here in a single page of info, with another two short paragraphs about how electronic/credit card and cheque transactions are handled (they are not rounded): https://www.accc.gov.au/media-release/rounding-and-eftpos-tr...
When the removal of one and two cent pieces actually happened in Australia (1991), all the details were distributed in a pamphlet of just four pages. That amount of information is probably about all people need, literally just a document with some guidelines!
Many issues probably don't need the lengthy deliberative processes that stall or delay change. But the problems with the penny have been apparent for years, maybe even decades. There was plenty of time to study the issue, observe how other economies have made similar transitions and figure out how to make it work in an orderly fashion. Instead, we have a change by executive decree, with no apparent planning. Will the mint start making pennies again in the next administration or the next year? It's certainly possible.
In some states, there's legal uncertainty for retailers that operate without pennies. Planning and forwarning likely would have encouraged states to amend laws to provide for penniless retailers. Uniform nationwide rounding could have been an option, interstate commerce and all that.
Some sort of plan for the pennies themselves might be nice, although maybe some sort of plan could have helped pennies circulate more, reducing the need to mint several billion pennies every year.
The issue with the lengthy deliberative process is that it provides multiple opportunities for motivated, but ultimately damaging to the public, operators to intervene. In this case, I present to you the Americans for Common Cents:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Americans_for_Common_Cents
They care more to keep the cent than normal Americans, who ultimately pay for its cost of manufacturing, care to get rid of it. So they'll always win a careful, deliberative process; because they'll show up for the cent _every time_ this comes up. And everyone else gets mildly shafted for no reason.
You just need a clever advocacy group name. Something like Making Cents of our Currency or No Noncents. Or, something along the lines of If the Mint is losing money, it doesn't make cents.
But yes, our system is biased towards those with sustained focus. That does lead to some wrong decisions, but it's probably better than a system biased to action, or biased towards chaos.
Technically, it would have been better for the government to hand a tax on gross business revenue less labor costs, in order to give the Fed a lever to lower price levels inflation and raise household spending power so that the loss of pennies was of as little significance to households as it was to the Mint. Obviously, that would have required years of unpalatable and unsexy planning work that can’t be converted into political capital, but the outcome would have been that pennies become more relevant by lower prices and/or that pennies become less relevant by higher spending power. Oh well.
> Obviously, that would have required years of unpalatable and unsexy planning work that can’t be converted into political capital
It also probably wouldn't have resulted in any actual action. The problem proponents of "unpalatable and unsexy planning work" confront is that their approach is immobilized by its own weight. Analysis, bikeshedding, and litigation destroys the ability to actually do anything.
Discontinuing the penny is obviously an important thing (otherwise, we'd have been done talking about it by now).
It is always best that important government moves are done in public, with processes that are replete with discourse and understanding, instead of with surprises and confusion.
Ideally, the government would had resolved the (present-day, recently-introduced, inevitable, foreseeable) conflict with SNAP benefits and come up with a single-page, large-print summary that uniformly defined how rounding at the checkout counter works in ways that regular people conducting regular transactions would be able to comprehend and follow.
These details certainly all need to be figured out at some point, and sooner would be better than later: We should have started figuring it out years (perhaps even a decade) ago.
Unfortunately, we did not take that path.
Discontinuing the penny could have been a very orderly nothingburger wherein everyone (on all sides of the cash register) knew exactly what to expect, and exactly when to expect it. But but we didn't do it that way.
So instead, we now we have an element of surprise and confusion instead of simplicity.
For anyone who might point out that this lack of planning may lead to incredibly minor price rises for everyone, i'll add that this can be balanced by the very minor inconvenience that will no longer exist. This is inherently unquantifiable, but as people here love pointing out that doesn't mean it's not worth something.
Without planning and the resultant guidance, we stand to be inconvenienced every time one of the customers in front of us and the cashier have differences in their ideas for how rounding works.
(But that's OK, I guess: After all, that's just an aggregate of many millions of little inconveniences, instead of some somewhat larger inconveniences for a few people in advance. Their time is clearly more important than yours is, or mine is. All hail the chief.)
[flagged]
If dealing with the absence of the penny were straight-forward, then there would be no real discussion about it today. We'd already be moving along [mostly!] according to the new, published normal and things would be a snoozefest.
But there is no guidance provided. Accordingly, we get discussions.
I would like to present this indeterminable discussion (from several days ago) as evidence of the kinds of differing opinions that a lack of planning and guidance brings forth: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45901904
This is the kind of discussion that the dust should have settled on years ago.
We are talking about pennies here.
I don't get it, what guidance do you really require? Do you think there will be some major cartel by the retailers to rip the costumers off, at maximum, 0.04 cents of a dollar per every purchase in the absolute worst case scenarios?
Will we have major lawsuits about it? "Latest news: Costumer sues Walmart for 1 billion USD for rounding a 157.01$ bill to 157.05$"
Me? I don't care at all.
Last night, I paid $13.00 for a pizza that was priced at $12.99. This does not faze me at all.
But there absolutely are people who complain about this kind of thing. I don't have to understand it in order to recognize it, and nor do you: Neither of us were born yesterday, and we've both been in line behind people with these proclivities at the checkout counter ourselves -- observing them argue over literal pennies.
A lack of guidance cannot serve to quell these conflicts.
> Will we have major lawsuits about it? "Latest news: Costumer sues Walmart for 1 billion USD for rounding a 157.01$ bill to 157.05$"
Will we have a discussion that is free of superfluous and undue hyperbole?
But, that’s the thing. Hyperbole is the only way of doing this an issue. Like you said with your example, any minimally functional citizen won’t have any trouble with this.
It might be said that it is true that you can't reason a person out of a position that they didn't reason themselves into -- even with the use of hyperbole.
But I am not unreasonable. I arrived where I am rationally.
And hyperbole here simply injects misguided, disingenuous noise into our interactions where no noise is necessary at all.
Don't sell yourself short. If I can discuss it without going hyperbolic, then so can you.
Tbf it wouldn't take that much effort to issue guidance. It shouldn't require legislation. Doesn't mean the way they did things was wrong.
It would be trivial to issue useful guidance, and that guidance would be beneficial even if it was incredibly stupid or misguided or even caused it's own problems, because it is a document that demonstrates that some thinking somewhere went into it, and someone has taken a minute to think through outcomes and effects.
But the premise of the current administration is that the world is radically simpler than "experts" and "bureaucrats" want you to believe, and they purposely and loudly eschew any thinking about 2nd, 3rd, or often even 1st order effects of their proposals because they want them to sound "simple" to rather simple people, and rely on trite soundbites or false "truisms" to keep them propped up, and also because even a surface level examination of most of their claims or proposals forces you to confront how stupid they usually are.
This administration and it's fiercest supporters view not thinking through things as a virtue. They view large proscriptions from the throne as good governance, because they want a king.
That is very explicitly why what they did was wrong, even if it's not a big deal to get rid of the penny, and very few people will have problems with it, and I think state governments and even the fed really shouldn't have a problem accommodating it.
Being purposely ignorant like that is stupid and wrong even when it doesn't have negative repercussions, because it WILL have negative repercussions somewhere, and they will be entirely preventable. See innocent citizens being deported and assaulted, and the extrajudicial murder of random drug mules driving cartel speedboats.
The federal government and current administration has a tiny army of professionals who are sufficiently well equipped and paid to wargame out exactly this kind of thing to discover some corner cases. We are still paying them even as they do nothing. The current admin is so incompetent and averse to actual governance that they reject working systems that could even help them make their agenda a reality, but the bureaucracy being good and effective at what it does is antithetical to their worldviews and hostile to their individualist philosophies, and it's more important to make the government look bad than actually succeed at what they were elected to do.