by Night_Thastus
32 subcomments
- I'd say screw it, get rid of nickles and dimes as well. Quarters can stay, for now.
It's a complete waste of money and time continuing to mint such low-value currency. It can't be used for just about anything.
Unfortunately, I do see the problem with part of this. For a handful of items where it does matter, it will force people to use cards more if they want to avoid rounding. And the card providers already have a choke-hold on retailers, and the whole thing is basically a scheme that funnels money from the poor to the wealthy via interest and fees on the consumer, interchange fees, and rewards programs.
- We eliminated pennies in Canada in 2012 and the transition was a non-issue. The vast majority of retailers would round cash transactions to the nearest $0.05, but a few would round down to the nearest $0.05 in favor of the customer. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Withdrawal_of_low-denomination...
Canadian cash is better than American cash in several ways: No penny, durable polymer banknotes (instead of dirty wrinkly cotton paper), colorful banknotes (instead of all green) that are easy to distinguish, $1 and $2 coins in wide circulation (instead of worn-out $1 bills).
by Amorymeltzer
7 subcomments
- Some interesting complications with rounding I had not heard about before were mentioned here, worth noting I think, especially given the prominence of SNAP in the news lately:
>Four states - Delaware, Connecticut, Michigan and Oregon - as well as numerous cities, including New York, Philadelphia, Miami and Washington, DC, require merchants to provide exact change, according to the National Association of Convenience Stores (NACS).
>In addition, the law covering the federal food assistance program known as SNAP requires that recipients not be charged more than other customers. Since SNAP recipients use a debit card that’s charged the precise amount, if merchants round down prices for cash purchases, they could be opening themselves to legal problems and fines, said Jeff Lenard, spokesperson for NACS.
>“Rounding down on all transactions presents several challenges beyond the loss of an average of 2 cents per transaction,” Lenard said. “We desperately need legislation that allows rounding so retailers can make change for these customers.”
- Too early to say "ever", considering there has been no act of congress on this matter and the penny continues to be legal tender. The decision to stop minting it is a (legally debatable) executive order, and the next president or even the current one can change their mind about it tomorrow.
- I watched a video on the demise of the penny and its predicament was so succinctly explained: everyone gets pennies as change but few carry them around let alone spend them, so we are stuck producing ever more. One news outlet even did an "experiment" where they threw hundreds of pennies on the ground in a city on a busy morning and not one person stopped to pick any up.
by MrHeather
7 subcomments
- >But with 20 million customers a year, and 17% of them paying with cash, the policy will eventually cost Kwik Trip a couple of million dollars a year, McHugh said.
If we figure two-fifths of cash transactions need to be rounded up and the store is losing an average of 1.5 cents each time, their expected losses would be around $2,000, yeah?
- Like many people, I throw my change into a jar when I get home. One time I only kept pennies and used an old apple cider jug. Turns out that a gallon of pennies is worth almost $55 [0]. And that carrying a heavy glass jug filled with pennies to the Coinstar machine is very anxiety inducing.
Speaking of which - the Coinstar machines near me will give you several options for redemption. Some of which have been Amazon and Home Depot e-gift codes that have no redemption fee.
[0] A potential worthless interview question...
by tppiotrowski
0 subcomment
- I remember thinking there's a small arbitrage opportunity in countries that don't have pennies and nickels. In NZ I believe stores round to the nearest decimal (.02, .01 => .00 and .03, .04 => .05). They lose on some sales but gain on others. However, they don't round if you use a CC.
Here's one for the FIRE folks: if it rounds up, use a CC and if it rounds down use cash. Use all those pennies you save using your CC to retire 3 minutes early.
- Copper pennies weigh 3.11 grams. Copper is currently US$10987 per tonne https://www.metal.com/en/prices/LME_CA_3M so a copper penny is worth 3.4¢. This is a surprisingly low number to me; I would have expected it to be closer to 10¢ or 20¢, since presumably it was about 1¢ of copper when it was still copper.
By comparison, a silver dime (90% silver, 10% copper) is 2.268 grams, and silver is US$1486.77/kg https://www.metal.com/en/prices/201102250392, so the dime contains about US$3.03 worth of silver. From the point of view of an 18th- or 19th-century person, for whom the purpose of the mint was to certify the value of the precious metal in the coin by stamping it, the dollar has lost 29/30 (97%) of its value since minting of silver coins ended.
- Gas prices are frequently in fractions of a penny. This never matters because they round. Yep, rounding, in the real world, and the nation has not imploded. As pointed out by others Canada does this already and it's no issue.
- Do any other countries have/had “penny squish” souvenir machines? You put in 2 quarters + a penny, and it stamps a design onto the penny. My favorite souvenir, small, cheap, can keep in a booklet, and many landmarks have the machines. There are a few machines that take a $1 bill and use a fresh penny blank internally.
- penny-rounding “imposes a tax of $3.27 million Canadian dollars from consumers to grocery stores on a yearly basis in aggregate
https://economics.ubc.ca/news/penny-rounding-profitable-for-...
eliminating the penny would require producing more nickels to “fill the gap in small-value transactions.” But nickels suffer from a similar “seigniorage” problem: the 2024 U.S. Mint report said the five-cent coins have a unit cost of 13.78 cents each.
https://time.com/7215870/trump-us-penny-mint-costs-one-cent-...
- I’m old enough to remember being able to scrounge around the house for pennies and heading down to Gracie’s corner store so I could buy some Swedish fish. They were 1 cent each. Gracie counted them out and put them in a small paper bag for you.
A major score was finding a dime or quarter on the street. When the Whatchamacallit first came out they were 25 cents!
by WorkingDead
0 subcomment
- Our money is being depreciated at a rate of 3% per year and up to 25%-30% during the last inflationary cycle and is now to the point where coins are nearly useless. At the current trajectory, the one dollar note will also be obsolete in our lifetime.
- Can any coin collectors let me know what, if any, effect this may have on the collection of steel pennies I have secured in my bunker in the woods?
- So what you're telling me is that pennies are the new bitcoin. Fixed supply.
by randyrand
2 subcomments
- I'm not sure why the article says this is so hard for retailers to figure out. They already round.
When they apply 7% sales tax to a $1.99 purchase, what do they charge you? $2.1293? Obviously not.
Just do whatever they already do.
- Sometimes, they return.
Recently, I read a post by an online musician friend that someone made a tip of 5 rubles with a banknote in Armenia - too low a sum to bother exchanging it in a foreign country. I was perplexed [1] because I don't recall ever [2] seeing such banknote - the lowest I remember seeing was 10 - and found that yes, it was introduced in 1998, discontinued and withdrawn from circulation in 2001 due to inflation and apparently reintroduced (maybe briefly?) in December 2022/January 2023.
I don't know why.
[1] https://www.perplexity.ai/search/in-post-soviet-russia-when-...
[2] I am Russian; born in 1977 and left the country in December, 2022.
by FarmerPotato
0 subcomment
- Removing pennies from retail is a software job at least as time-consuming as: Y2K or converting to Euro (yes, as a US programmer, it gave me a lot of work and missed holidays.)
For one, think of all the POS systems stuck on old firmware. These are the details.
Sure a lot of "easy" solutions come to mind.
- Finally!
Here is a delightful article from NYT from last year on this topic. Truly fascinating and bewildering.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/01/magazine/worthless-pennie...
- The last ever American penny (as the article text clarifies). Don't any other countries with a "dollar" use the same name for their 1-cent pieces?
> The penny costs nearly four cents to mint, more than the coin’s worth.
Wow. I think it was only something like 1.5c (in the local market) when Canada gave up on them.
by balderdash
2 subcomments
- Why can’t we do a reverse split of our currency? Print new dollars and change and on some date new dollar is the effective currency and you can trade in 10 old dollars for one new dollar?
by shevy-java
1 subcomments
- Hmm. I actually still like coins and paper money. However had
in the EU, I don't like the 1 and 2 eurocent at all. These are
just pointless really. I'd like a 5 euro coin and a 2 euro
paper instead.
- I wonder how long of not minting new pennies it would take for the average collectible value of the existing stock to reach break-even again.
I feel like pennies fall out of circulation at a very high rate compared to other denominations.
by techblueberry
1 subcomments
- I think we should issue a new dollar that’s 10x the value of the current dollar, and / 10 the value of everything. I mean it wouldn’t make a substantive difference, but psychologically, I think it would feel better if the mean value of the house in the US was 52k instead of 522k, and I could start carrying cash again and have 100 bucks not go by in like 2 fast food orders.
by paulmooreparks
0 subcomment
- What I've seen in places that eliminated .01 coins is that the .05 coin begins to be the one that everyone hates. I remember walking around Amsterdam several years ago with pockets full of .05 coins, and the same thing happens now in Singapore. They tend to get dumped into self-checkout machines in grocery stores.
- I'm surprised nobody has mentioned Banker's Rounding in here: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/45223778/is-bankers-roun...
- If they're stopping production of the penny because it costs more to mint each one than each is worth, that's a stupid reason. Why does everything have to be about making money? Can't we just have useful things without worrying about how profitable they are?
- It's so strange to start with "stop minting pennies" but not "stop pennies being legal tender".
But then as an Australian it also seems very weird to even have pennies in circulation. We ditched ours in the 80s.
- Rounding seems to be a non issue to me. We already round: a 5% tax on something that costs $5.99 is technically $0.2995 which will be rounded to $0.30.
If there are no pennies you round to the nearest 5 cents. If there were no coins, you would round to the nearest dollar.
by didgetmaster
4 subcomments
- Many are reporting this as if failing to mint new pennies each year is going to produce some kind of shortage. There are billions of pennies sitting in drawers or jars in homes across the nation (I certainly have one with about a thousand pennies in it).
I doubt anyone who needs a penny will be unable to find one within the next 100 years.
- At this point I'm surprised our president doesn't force the exclusive use of cryptocurrencies.
- What would it take to shift the balance of inflation to restore the purchasing power of the penny? Just out of curiosity how does a government and a people and their economy go the other direction?
by WalterBright
0 subcomment
- I remember going to the drugstore and buying two pieces of candy for a penny each. I added a third for sales tax. The cashier handed back the penny because the tax didn't kick in until 10 cents.
- Step one: make all items cost an even five cents after tax.
step two: when making price adjustments like discount, round the effect to the nearest five cents.
Step three: charge everyone this amount
- Russia eliminated all kopeck coins years ago and anyone hardly noticed. Seemingly the only place you could still see any is a bank. Retailers usually round down to whole rubles if you're paying in cash.
by mikhailfranco
0 subcomment
- The lowest value coin still in use is the Uzbek Tiyin (0.01 UZS).
So 1,200,000 Tiyins to the USD.
by thordenmark
0 subcomment
- Can't retailers just price everything to the nearest $.05 to begin with so there is nothing to round? I guess tax percentages screw that up. Nevermind.
by 1970-01-01
0 subcomment
- It's been useless baggage for decades. The even saner approach would be to fade-out an order of magnitude of currency every century. The math checks out.
- IMO:
1: The price posted should be the price you pay. (Include all taxes, fees, gratuities, ect.)
2: The price posted should be a multiple of $0.05, $0.10, or $0.25
Problem solved.
by abstractspoon
0 subcomment
- A classic example of - the less important something is, the more people will have an opinion
- Debasement through inflation steals from workers, pensioners, and savers. On the other hand, its great for big business and big government.
The money illusion fools many people into believing they've gained (ie real estate) when in reality, they've lost purchasing power.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Money_illusion
- I am uneasy about it for no logical reason. I have an emotional attachment to pennies because as a not rich kid in the 60s, even finding a penny brightened my day. Back then they sold "penny candy", for example a roll of Smarties, and it was actually a penny. There were maybe half a dozen options. You absolutely could bring a buck in and get hundred pieces of candy, modulo the 6% sales tax in SoCal.
Middle school in the mid 70s: a penny rolls around the corner and I pick it up. A school bully and his friends taunted me at length. They'd launched it hoping I'd do exactly what I did. I just thought to myself, one day I'll be a fucking millionaire and you'll still be a squib. That came true. I am damaged enough to be smug about it to this day.
The next year that same kid and his friends beat me up, giving me a TBI, a permanent hole in my memory, and what apparently was a new personality. Twenty years later he was found dead in a dumpster. When I heard about it I did not weep for him. That is of course my defect. I am not proud of my perpetual grievance.
I saved spare change in jars until my 50s, and every once in a while took them to the bank and bought something cool, or just took them out and played with them with my kids.
So for me pennies are some kind of odd little vestige of control over my life. Completely inane, I get it. They're annoying af and too expensive to manufacture. Everything's electronic anyway these days. I'll miss them though.
- My country quit using our (then) lowest denomination coin 32 years ago. Also worth 1/100 of a USD.
by WalterBright
0 subcomment
- I have a couple glass jars full of pennies. I think I'll just give them to the thrift store.
by arlattimore
0 subcomment
- In 1990, Australia stopped minting 1c and 2c coins & rounding to 5c.
It worked out just fine.
Everyone move on.
- As much as there's a lot of reasonable arguments for ending the minting of the penny, the method in which this president waves his hands and fundamentally changes things such as our White House, our currency, our trade policies, our universities leaves me with a bad taste in my mouth and it's hard to support even sensible decisions this authoritarian regime makes.
- in a certain timeline this would be our warning inflation is getting out of hand...
by BobbyTables2
0 subcomment
- Even the IRS doesn’t mind rounding to the nearest dollar.
Let that sink in…
by CheeseFromLidl
0 subcomment
- Did anyone ever make a simulator for pennies hitting the floor like in the top video?
- The fact that you'd need to even mint them in 2025 is mind boggling. Why isn't there a law that stops minting coins that cost more than their values? You'd think they would have figured this out by now?
- Oo, I'd like to get a roll of these. But I live in Norway.
by I_dream_of_Geni
0 subcomment
- The mighty penny is dead. Long live the penny!!
- Oh no! What will DIY-people use now to make the ugliest floors known to man?
by OwlGoesHoot
0 subcomment
- Finally, something I can get behind
by cjwilliams
0 subcomment
- Dimes and 50 cents only please
- Salami slicing stimulus package
- This is a very minor but pleasant surprise. An action like this is beyond what I thought the US government (my government, sadly) was capable of. It is kind of puzzling to me that this issue, like every other one, didn't get politicized, with right wing talking heads bemoaning progress of any sort, appealing to the good old days, when America was great, the days that MAGAs want to return to.
It's a good start. Now let's do metric.
- I've got a ridiculous question, but hear me out.
Pennies have more zinc in them than they are worth, right?
Did the penny have any sort of stabling force against inflation… a sort of "Zinc Standard" as it were?
Civil libertarians are always talking about how moving away from gold coins, and later moving away from the gold standard that backed the non-gold coins is the root of inflation.
If gold can have such an effect, why not zinc?
by throw0101d
5 subcomments
- So Obama wanted to wanted to ban the penny, but it was deemed illegal to do so and efforts to get rid of the law requiring it did not pass:
* https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2025/02/10/trump-us-mi...
* https://www.local3news.com/obama-wants-to-retire-the-penny-b...
It's not that keeping the penny around is (necessarily) a good idea, but that there are, you know, laws, and people (including the President and cabinet folks) should kind of follow those laws. So has the law been amended to not require the minting of the penny anymore?
* https://abcnews.go.com/US/trumps-order-scrap-penny-make-cent...
* https://www.npr.org/2025/02/10/nx-s1-5292082/trump-penny-min...
Is there some 'new interpretation' that has been 'found' that allows Sec. Treasury to not mint pennies? Or is this change one made by fiat / executive order?
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penny_debate_in_the_United_Sta...
There's only semi-consideration been given to this; the retailers want official rules passed on how round should be done
* https://www.rila.org/focus-areas/finance/main-street-busines...
For example, one subtly:
> Ensure rounding for cash customers does not violate terms of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). The SNAP program sensibly requires that SNAP customers cannot be treated differently than other customers.2 These provisions prohibit treating SNAP customers less favorably or more favorably than other customers. That means that rounding the price of food for a cash customer in either direction risks creating a violation of SNAP regulations for stores that participate in the SNAP program.
- Penny-wise and pound-foolish.
- The argument that we should stop minting them because they cost more to produce than their face value falls flat for me.
A penny is not a single use item. The cost of production must be depreciated across the thousands of transactions in which it is used and then compared to the economic benefit of its existence.
It may be true that the economic benefit of a penny is less than the production cost but I don’t see anyone making that case.
What will it actually cost the US economy to stop minting these coins?
How long will they remain in circulation until they are no longer accepted for payment?
by more_corn
1 subcomments
- I’d give you my 2c on the matter but now with the scarcity of a penny I’m not sure how to calculate the value.
- And the people rejoiced!
- Absolute bullshit title. The USA has stopped making one-cent coins, and they don't even call them pennies in any meaningful way.
The "last-ever" penny will not be minted until that final coin has been minted by:
The United Kingdom
Gibraltar
Man
St Helena & Ascension Island
Guernsey
The Falklands
and probably a good few of others I've forgotten. Like Jersey.
- In other countries that have eliminated pennies, was it done with more planning and advice from the government?
It strikes me as uniquely American (perhaps uniquely Trumpian) to just stop making them and let whatever happens happen with no detailed planning.
by ycombigrator
0 subcomment
- *American
- I, for one, favor having a .1 cent piece, a third the size of a penny about the size of a shirt button.
Because San Francisco sales tax is 8.63 and something the costs 1 dollar is really 1.083. And I would like 91.7 bach cents when I give 2 dollars.
by estimator7292
0 subcomment
- I'm now seeing signs in stores begging people for exact change due to a "penny shortage"
Seriously? You can't give up 4 cents per transaction to round to a nickel? Fuck, round it up for all I care, 5 cents is worth approximately nothing today.
- Dangit, now I’ll have to start buying fuses for my electrical panel.
- Nick Mullen should be the guest of honor at this event.
- > Some merchants plan to round prices to the nearest nickel, often a penny or two more
Prices should never have been set to this dumb #.99 pattern anyway. It's one of the most annoying things.
by insane_dreamer
0 subcomment
- It's absolutely bonkers how long it took the US to get rid of the penny.
by jonstewart
0 subcomment
- 10 for 1 split on USD.
- That seems weird. I mean, if you decide to abolish the penny, you just do it cold turkey. You don't set a date in the future and the continue making them, so that the last penny is accompanied by fanfare.
> Trump announced via social media in February that he instructed the Mint to stop making the once-popular coin, citing the cost of production.
So between February and today, they just ignored the order?
What justified the pennies produced between February and November? Those pennies were necessary, and still cost-effective, but going forward, the penny as such is no longer necessary?
- "Last-ever" seems premature to me. I don't think the odds that there's a redomination or Trump decides he likes pennies are that low
- A penny contains about .6 cents worth of zinc, so this was going to happen sooner or later.
by paulddraper
0 subcomment
- > The penny costs nearly four cents to mint, more than the coin’s worth.
To be clear, coins and bills are used far more than once.
I would even go so far as to say they are re-used hundreds of times.
- Finally, can we next stop making dollar bills and add a two dollar coin.
- We should mint ₥ills. Really lean into useless currency.
https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Mill_(currency)
by foxglacier
0 subcomment
- > the final coins pressed will be auctioned off and that the actual last pennies put into circulation from the US Mint were struck in June.
Seems like this is a stunt to extract a bit of money from collectors. I kind of wonder if collectors really value coins/stamps/etc. that were specially made to target the collector market and didn't even exist in the natural world. Feels icky.
- When will they create a $200 bill or bring back the 500? I feel like the 50s is the new 20.
by lenerdenator
0 subcomment
- There's something about getting rid of Honest Abe on coinage that seems... sadly appropriate for the current climate.
At least he's still on fives.
- Apropos: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F8R5QCPUqaI
by clarkmoody
0 subcomment
- Can we stop changing our clocks twice a year as well?
- We should stop printing physical money and just start making payments digitally everywhere.
- We do NOT know it will be the last-ever penny minted.
Untruths like that grind my gears. Especially in the US of 2025 where we are awash in a sea of lies, stressful incitement and hype (all by intent, by bad actors.)
by nickpinkston
0 subcomment
- If only Trump could get the daylight savings and the metrics system updates done too.
- so its an NFT now???
by deafpolygon
0 subcomment
- we don’t have “pennies” in the EU anymore
by UltraSane
2 subcomments
- could get rid of dimes and nickels as well.
by chuckreynolds
1 subcomments
- Good. BYE. lol.
by Analemma_
8 subcomments
- Honestly nickels and dimes, and maybe even quarters, should go too. It's ridiculous that we don't have $1 and $2 coins in widespread circulation in the US (we have a $1 coin but nobody uses it).
by alvinveroy
0 subcomment
- [dead]
- [dead]
by oldpersonintx2
0 subcomment
- [dead]
by onetokeoverthe
0 subcomment
- [dead]
by zechariahwhite
2 subcomments
- [flagged]
- Well no, apparently ANY President now has almost ANY power
so the next President could order a new penny made with their face on it
sure they could, look at the east-wing and tell me what limits of power a President has
- I'm a little worried this will encourage vendors to increases prices up to the next 5 cent mark, which will cause inflation that we really don't need more of right now.
- This sounds it will be a milestone recorded in the history books in the chapter of the accelerating downfall of the US empire into hyperinflation...
by bryanlarsen
3 subcomments
- Many countries eliminated their pennies without chaos or unfair burdens on shopkeepers. In Canada, the process was widely popular after the fact even though newspaper articles prior to the elimination intimated it wouldn't be due to their "both sides" style of reporting.
It's indicative of the current US administration that they managed to screw this up despite many examples world wide of how to do it properly.
- "What are we going to do about the rounding problem?!"
INCLUDE TAX IN THE PRICE, then you won't have a rounding problem!
The common argument against that is "but there are so many tax jurisdictions"
One, Europe has a bunch too and has solved this, and two, it would only apply to in person cash transactions. You should be able to figure out the tax rules for the one specific place the transaction is taking place.
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