The penny has practically no value and should be taken out of circulation just as other coins have been in US history.
You can’t buy anything for a penny; vending machines and parking meters won’t accept them
In 2022, it cost 2.72 cents to mint a penny.
With a 2022 production of an estimated 6,359,600,000 pennies, this results in an annual loss for the U.S. government of around $110 million.
With the median wage at $20.17 it takes less than two seconds to earn one cent.
The problem isn’t the penny, it’s deliberate inflation.
I vote for slow deflation target of 1% until the penny is worth something
That could take quite a while…. Perhaps in the mean time we stop it, then celebrate its return once it’s needed again.
[If the penny was pure copper then it would be useful?]
I’ve been a huge fan of this idea since the 90s. Not only because of the penny’s irrelevance and manufacturing cost, but especially because of the calculation complexity and its consequences.
It would increase productivity. The cumulative man hours wasted calculating and handling pennies is difficult to estimate but likely staggering.
It would save energy. Pennies have a high weight/value ratio and therefore high cost of handling and transportation, whether in your pocket or on an armored truck, which results in wasted energy.
It would encourage more readable pricing. Oddly priced products and services are more difficult to process mentally and can lead to impulsive or thoughtless shopping habits.
It would be relatively painless to implement. Much like gas stations using 9/10 of a cent, finer increments can still be used when necessary and rounding can happen whenever.
How about start dropping the pennies after a bill reaches a dollar, dropping nickels after 5, dimes after ten, and dropping the change entirely after $25 in a charge.
That’s approximately a 1-4% cut, but retailers forfeit that much for credit card fees anyway. Call it a cash discount.
Say you bought something, cashier rings up $1.09. Now that full price is charged with credit or a check. But if you pay cash it drops to $1.05.
If the bill was $3.97 it drops to $3.95, $5.35 stays at $5.35 but $5.43 drops to $5.35, etc. Anything over $25 gets rounded to full bills.
Cool Idea certainly. This rounding would need to happen if the penny isn’t produced at all
If you remove the penny from circulation today, tomorrow they’ll be removing the nickle, then the dime, then the quarter.
From there it’s a hop, skip, and a jump to just doing away with physical currency so that everyone can be forced to accept all digital payments.
There might be validity to decreasing the number of pennies printed each year, but to do away with it entirely is a bad idea, especially when the real problem is inflation.
All you’re doing here is proposing a bad solution so a symptom of a larger problem.
You come from a fair enough direction here.
Inflation is an issue that needs real solutions.
This is not a solution to inflation, and not meant to be.
The issue (that we’re making pennies) is a by product of inflation in the very long term sure , and in my opinion it’s an issue long over due its resolution.
There are currencies all over the world that start denominations over .01, though im no global economist so couldn’t tell you the pros and cons. They seem to function just fine without burning >$100m a year on a worthless commodity….
Fyi - if i’m not mistaken there used to be a half penny produced in the US. Not sure anyone misses that.
The penny is ridiculous!