The Treasury unveils its plan to kill the penny | Hacker News Reader

The Treasury unveils its plan to kill the penny

cnn.com

12 pointshaunter19 comments

This seems silly.

How much does this save the government as a percentage of total spending?

How much will this cost the government vs. how much it saves?

How much will this cost businesses in the US in total compared to the amount saved by the government?

How much will this increase costs to consumers, given that businesses will (barring legislation) inevitably round up to the nearest $0.05?

It's not silly and is logical. Businesses and consumers will not be worse off. In 1978, the CPI was roughly a fifth of what it is now, and no one was complaining there wasn't a smaller denomination coin than the penny. Cash purchases as a percentage continue to decline.

It's not even worth your time to pick up a penny off the ground.

> Businesses and consumers will not be worse off.

What’s your calculation?

The costs aren’t zero. Businesses will need to re-tool. Consumers will spend more because purchases will be rounded up to the nearest nickel.

What’s going to offset those costs?

Register systems like Toast, Square, Shopify, etc. will have to issue a software update that rounds cash transactions to the nearest 5c. It will certainly be a cost, but not an very large one, and no business is likely to see it as a line item on their P&L beyond what they already pay to their POS vendor.

It seems like I've been hearing about a new plan to get rid of the penny every few years for my whole life, and I'm 55. Probably every administration spends a few million studying it and then either decides "Nah" or just never gets around to doing it. I don't care, personally, but I suppose it'd be better if they went ahead and did it so we could stop paying people to plan to.

I haven't touched cash or coins in awhile, so I'm not really sure what the big deal is anymore. Its like trying to polish a dying mode of payment in its waning days, rather than tackling what comes next for people who don't want to use debit/credit cards.

This is one of those PR "efficiency" things that I'm kinda skeptical about how much it even matters.

I'd like to see pennies and nickles go away. I wouldn't auger an entire nation into the ground for it but on it's own, I think it serves us.

Seeing compulsive $xx.99 marketers adapt to pennylessness could be amusing.

This is one of the very few things I agree with the administration. I d be fine with dimes going away, too.

Unlike pennies, I use dimes enough that I would prefer they be kept around. Rounding prices to the nearest penny is OK. Rounding to the nearest quarter, less so.

We did it in Norway, many years ago. Buy a few apples and something that costs x.99, the sum is then y.53 or z.17 and it's rounded to a sum that can be paid with coins. End of story.

Rounded up, I assume?

.00-.24 are rounded down to .00, .25-.74 are rounded to .50 and .75-.99 are rounded up to .00. Why would you assume anything else?

Because I’m from the US.

$xx.95. I already see that not-infrequently.

This is one of the small handful of things I actually agree with the administration about. We should have eliminated the penny years ago.

For what it's worth, from the article:

> Even if the Mint has to make only 850,000 additional nickels in 2025 to meet demand, that would wipe out any savings from eliminating the penny. If the Mint goes back up to making 1.4 million nickels a year, that would cost $78 million more than any savings from the pennies it stopped producing.

Yes, of course I read the article.

I would also be fine with killing the nickel and having the dime be the smallest denominator.

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