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Canada To Stop Making Pennies
New submitter butilikethecookie writes with news that the 2012 federal budget for Canada calls for the Royal Canadian Mint to stop producing pennies. "The budget calls the lowly penny a 'burden to the economy.' 'It costs the government 1.6 cents to produce each new penny,' the budget says, adding the government will save about $11 million a year with its elimination (PDF). Some Canadians, it says, consider the penny more of a nuisance than a useful coin. ... Rounding prices will become the norm as the penny is gradually removed from circulation, the budget says. If consumers find themselves without pennies, cash transactions should be rounded to the nearest five-cent increment 'in a fair and transparent manner,' it says. Noncash payments such as checks and credit cards will continue to be settled by the cent, however."
Are they still copper in the US? If they are I believe they would be worth more as metal than as money. I believe Canadian $0.01 are an alloy cheaper than copper.
Some enterprising guy figured this out about the Canadian dime in the 1960's - the silver was worth more than $0.10 so he would take armored cars full of dimes to New York and sell them for the silver - iirc he made quite a nice little profit for it too!
The tyrant will always find a pretext for his tyranny - Aesop
The new federal budget included a lot of nasties. As much as I'm glad to see the penny go away, I can't help but think it's a ploy by the conservatives to deflect attention away from all the nasties they included in the budget.
I'm god, but it's a bit of a drag really...
That seems like a lot of inconvenience to go through for such a tiny return.
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Now all they need to do is get rid of daylight saving time and they will REALLY make the US look silly... come on fed, the Canadians are making us look like idiots here.... THEY can get rid of pennies....
When I was deployed to Iraq in '05 the smallest unit of change the PX would give was $0.25, and we all got by with that just fine. When the smallest coin a bubble gum machine will accept is a quarter there's no need for even my children to want any denomination smaller than that. The cost of manufacturing pennies, nickels, and dimes isn't worth the benefit. Add the cost banks and vendors incur in transporting these too-heavy-for-their-worth slabs of metal to the cost of their original manufacture and it's clearly a drain on the economy.
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If it's worthless, why are electronic transactions going to continue to be done to the penny?
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
The Senators from the states that mine zinc are the only thing preventing the US from getting rid of the penny.
The problem here is that the article claimed that they are eliminating the penny for cash transactions and still using it for non-cash transactions. This means that paying cash in a transaction can legally save up to 2.49 cents over the same non-cash transaction.
Doesn't sound like much, but when you're in a business that handles hundreds of thousands of transactions a day, that kind of difference can add up fast. 500K transactions = ~$12,500 a day, ~$4.5m a year. Some companies will gain that much, and other companies are going to lose it...
If they want to eliminate the penny, they should do it for all transactions, at the same time.
All they would do is get rid of denominations that inflation has caused to cost more to produce than they are worth.
In other words, curing the symptoms, not the actual problem. (Which is inflation.) And in the process, introducing all kinds of second order effects which will inconvenience many.
What else do we expect from the government?