This is all a bit hyperbolic. Stopping minting pennies made sense and has precedent. There used to be half penny coins.
Also, pennies are still legal tender. Folks can take them to a bank or other venue and cash them in. They’re not “trash.”
Also, pennies are still legal tender. Folks can take them to a bank or other venue and cash them in. They’re not “trash.”
FWIW my bank refuses to accept unrolled coins, long before this month's retirement of the penny.
This is all third-hand, through a game of internet-telephone, and my money (if you'll pardon the pun) is on there being additional factors though
As I understand it, coins are considered a government service. Banks and retailers pay to deal with them. Buying them from the public for face value actually saves them money.
*You don't think I'd go into combat with loose change in my pocket, do you?"
But I must admit that I never formed the habit of bringing change with me when I go somewhere. So it piled up at home. The quarters were easy: They got saved for parking, laundry, etc. But I ended up with a sack of pennies that I finally cashed in at the bank.
When I lived in Scotland there was a "loose change" machine at the local Tesco. You pour in your coins and it would give you a receipt you could take to a cashier to get cash back - but the downside was that it charged you something like 10% of the total as a fee. Which I wouldn't pay.
Edit: I just searched and the Tesco documentation says "There is a 25p transaction fee and an 11.5% processing fee on the total amount of coins you put in the Coinstar centre. For charity donations, this processing fee is reduced to 8.9%." (wow, how generous!)
Back in the day, I'd sift through my jar of change and keep the quarters, which were good for parking meters and laundry. The rest went into the Coinstar machine. The fee for counting dimes, nickles, and pennies seemed OK.
The machine always had some weird foreign coins or subway tokens left over by the previous customer in the reject bin, which was potentially interesting.
For myself, it's such a priority that I'll get upset with myself if I have more than 4 pennies.
Japan has more coins (in regular use) than USA, so giving the correct amount is even more important or you'll end up carrying a lot of coins. 1000 yen is the smallest bill so... Example: 999 yen. 500,4x100,50,4x10,5,4x1 yen coins, 19 coins total.
95% of the time the person serving me would clock on to what I was doing but the other 6% it'd take some persuasion, and occasionally they would insist on giving me back my overpayment before ringing it up.
Coinstar also often has zero commission options like gift cards that are an easy way to cash in extra change without paying fees.
In my childhood we'd hoard loose change then make a trip to the local po-dunk bank serving my neighborhood surrounded by corn fields, and even there they'd take our bucket of loose change and dump it into a counting machine for free.
It was a game to try guess the amount we'd get in paper cash...
Now you have to pay for this service at a grocery store using a cumbersome machine operated by Coinstar.
It seemed to generally coincide with the demise of retail in general, and of course the elimination of bank-teller interactions and emergence of ATM machines. All of these things are a blurry mess from my past...
My (edit: old) bank refused to accept unrolled coins back in the early 2000s.
So this is long overdue.
I live in the Eurozone. We had 1 and 2 cent coins for a while. Where I live these were quickly deprecated and I think in most other Eurozone countries too by now.
I have thrown any of these coins straight in the bin soon as somebody gave them. Too much hassle and requires too big a wallet to drag along, for literally pennies.
When I first realized dealing with coins was inversely proportional to their denomination I threw out less than a Euros worth.
I do not understand anyone who doesn't throw out their pennies.
Yes they’re impractical to carry and use but does anyone actually do that? Why not do the standard practice of accumulate them in a jar instead of throwing them in the trash like waste?
it’s easy to take them home and throw them in a jar until suddenly the jar is a Kg of metal that can be fed to whatever coinstar like machine is around.