US Treasury to stop producing pennies next year | Hacker News Reader

US Treasury to stop producing pennies next year

bbc.com

36 pointsDarkContinent25 comments

It's about time.

Andy Rooney complained about pennies back in the 1980s. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A-zcWgXu4hg . "A penny saved is a waste of time."

In inflation-adjusted terms, a penny back then was worth almost 3 cents now.

I am such a cheapskate that I can't not bother with pennies. I will save so much time from this.

Australia stopped one and two cents coins decades ago. It's sad to have to live with a system where the numbers are just two or even five times larger than they should be, but I suppose worse things have happened.

I don’t think it’s sad. Just the reality of constant inflation. And the $1 and $2 notes were replaced with coins, which are much better.

I’m hoping the 5c coins will go soon, and we’ll get an $5 coin.

There was $5 coins at one point

https://www.australian-coins.com/investing-in-coins/australi...

Nice. I like the triangular one, but not sure how practical it would be in general circulation.

In high school, 17 years ago, I wrote a DBQ (document based question essay) for an AP test about why pennies were a huge waste to the economy. Both in cost to some, keep in circulation, and just dealing with for businesses/consumers.

It’s past time we did away with the penny and honestly the nickel shouldn’t be too far behind. Really anything less than a quarter seems like more trouble than it’s worth at this point. I would never carry change though, I barely carry cash as-is.

With Trump trying his very best to devalue the dollar, you think it's wise to do this now?

I don’t fully understand the question. How does removing the penny factor in? I honestly don’t get or I am missing the connection.

You very much don't understand how this works.

That would mean there would be even less need for pennies or even any coinage, right?

Here in Argentina we unofficially deprecate the coins/bills when they are worth approximately US$0.03 [1]. Now US$1=AR$1100 and you can find in the wild AR$100 and some AR$50, but AR$20 are very rare, AR$10 almost imposible to find, and lower denomination are just museum pieces.

Theoretically you can go to the supermarket with a big bag with a thousand of AR$1 coins, and they must accept them but it would be very weird.

[1] It's a personal opinion, there are no official threshold, don't ask how I made an statistic.

> The phasing out of the coins will mean businesses will need to round prices up or down…

Only when paying cash, and only the total.

If the penny bin (bucket?) of cash registers disappears, slide the rest over one slot and start minting 1$ coins like crazy.

a few things from experience with no pennys in Canada, 2¢ now rounds down to 0¢, along with your personal opinions, and if you want to make an impression on a date.....that is already going well, then keeping a vintage penny just in case you hit an awkward pause, may bring a smile.

Honestly inflation is such that any denomination less than a full dollar is almost worthless.

The only application of fractional currency in modern USA is in making every price end in 99 cents for stupid reasons. Everyone has been conditioned to mentally round up any price to the next dollar.

There's nearly nothing you can buy today for less than a dollar. There's no point in any smaller denominations.

Depends on your local cost of living

> There's nearly nothing you can buy today for less than a dollar.

Aren't most things in the fruits and veggies section under a dollar? What's a carrot or a lemon cost?

Looking at the weekly ad at Food4Less, tomatoes are 2lb/$3. I think that's like 50 cents each tomato. Onions are 89 cents/lb.

Doesn't it only practically matter if you're only buying ~one of those things? Who goes to a grocery store and buys one tomato? Feel like that could just round up or round random and it wouldn't be the end of the world.

Replace it with a 33 cent coin

Replace pennies, nickels, and dimes with a 12 1/2 cent coin. Eight to the dollar.

When I was a kid, a first-class stamp in the UK was 12.5 pence.

I remembered there was some kind of "more efficient" coin system. I searched for "ternary coins" and "radix coins". Both are some crypto scams. Fun times.

Apparently I misremembered how it worked and it's actually 1, 5, 18 and 25 (or 29) for a 4 coin system: https://cs.uwaterloo.ca/~shallit/Papers/change2.pdf

As mentioned in the article, we dropped the 1-cent coin in Canada over a decade ago. Nobody cares. We also dropped the $1 and $2 bills, years back. I'm guessing there will be a $5 coin soon ... but none of this matters much anymore, since people pay for so many things with contactless money transfers.

Cool, now work on the dollar next. Think we can get a dollar coin that lasts more than a year or two? Found a Sacagawea dollar in one of my cupholders just the other day, took me a hot minute to recognize what it even was.

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