America Must Free Itself from the Tyranny of the Penny | Hacker News Reader

America Must Free Itself from the Tyranny of the Penny

nytimes.com

28 pointspseudolus16 comments

The € penny still exists but here in NL every cash transaction is rounded to the nearest €0.05. I make less than one cash transaction a month, so this whole conversation seems a bit silly.

http://archive.today/O31Wy

They author of this is Caity Weaver. She writes humor pieces, so there is alot of tongue in cheek here. You may know that name from her series of best date places to go in NYC (Like the American Doll store for tea) and her attempt at the Endless Fried Basket at TIGFriday's

Ten years ago I agreed. I also thought that the USA should stop making paper 1 dollar bills and just dollar coins.

Now? I use credit cards almost exclusively and I if I get $100 in cash out of an atm, I regularly go a couple months or more without having to get more cash.

On the anecdote subject, I use debit cards 60% of the time and cash 40% of the time. I am continually trying to use cash more to keep payment processors out of my commerce habits (or at least via that angle).

That said I think everything below the quarter is useless and just adds a ton to cash handling difficulty and expense. It'd be sad to see them go as they were/are staples of currency in the US, but functionally their purpose is so seemingly useless.

Cash is useful for tips and independent stores that prefer cash. I also noticed more restaurants offer lower cash price which is more than my cash back. Also gas stations.

Definitely useful and I go through 100 every week or two

I usually leave all coin change in a tip jar if it's present. Heavy coins aren't worth the effort of carrying especially when paying with cash is already an outlier. I will admit to being very confused when I got a bunch of $1 coins as change recently.

When I was younger I used to pay in odd amounts in order to maximize the number of quarters I got back in change; I'm sure that would just confuse people now.

I try to maximize small denomination coins, so that I have lots of material to entertain the kid at those (fiberglass?) coin collector things where you let it roll down a ramp and it noisily circles and circles, converging on the "drain".

All prices are (very roughly) ten times what they were a lifespan ago; the smallest coin should be the dime, the smallest paper money should be $10.

I'm afraid math doesn't with that way. You would need to replace the $1 and $5 with something.

With coins of that face value?

In the 1800s the US used to mint a half-cent coin. It was discontinued when it wasn’t worth enough to bother with. It was worth the equivalent of about 20 cents today.

I actually think that the smallest coin should be a quarter. my first job was at a movie theater, where all of the prices ended in either .00, .25, .50, or .75 because everyone who worked there was a kid and you needed to make it as easy as possible to make change fast and count the till at the end of the night. That was 20 years ago and back then I was convinced that was how the world ought to be if you were going to deal in cash

We used to have sales tax tokens that were 1/10 of a cent. So essentially another decimal.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sales_tax_token

A tenth of a cent is a "mill". As used in gasoline prices. I learned this after reading the cash value of S&H Green Stamps and of Plaid Stamps.

The last time I saw a department store with a sign outside saying "We give Green Stamps" was probably at the end of the 70s.

What's the current, average, electronic transaction fee again? Why not go lobby for legislation that caps these fees at something like .01%/$1k and then we can talk.

I understand the various arguments against the penny and $1 bill, but for all the virtue signaling that goes on around the homeless, I know several who would happily bring a cart to haul all of your poor, abandoned change to where a grocery store provides a change machine.

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