Stop making cents: US Mint moves forward with plans to kill the penny

Great title

The one good executive order to come out of that bag of puss

We should also kill the nickel and paper dollar at this point.
- Nickels and dimes sure. Not sure why you'd ditch the dollar yet, it still has buying power. And dropping paper dollars for dollar coins is pants on head levels of stupid
- Nickel I agree with, but I feel like the the paper dollar is a bit much. Why do you want to get rid of the paper dollar too?
  
  You don't want an eagleydoo?
- I really hope you're not advocating for a cashless society.
  
  I'm ready for that possibility
  Monero

I'm all for it. Real talk though: at what point do we consider re-basing the dollar? I get that we're nowhere near that now, but I'm guessing it's at the "kill the $1 bill" mark?
- I'd answer this with 'we rebase the dollar when a coin can't buy a thing.' It should have happened decades ago. Here's my worked example.
  A penny used to be a lot of money. You could buy actual things with a penny. I'm sure our oldest contributors can point to the day that a penny would get you a piece of candy. In my earliest days, I could get that same piece of candy with a nickel, but by my teens, that piece of candy would be a dime or even quarter. I remember when a bag of M&Ms cost $0.50, That became $1.00 around the 2000s, and is now $2.00.
  A penny sitting on the ground was 'good luck' back in the day. I think that's because you could bend down, pick up that penny, head to the store, and plink that penny down and get something in exchange for it. Today, you can't plink down a single penny for anything. You can't even plink down 10 of these pennies or a dime and expect to get something today, with the cheapest things requiring 25 of these coins (or a single quarter). Not much luck if you need 25 of them to get a burst of sweetness.
  If we did away with the penny, would anyone lose anything? That's 5 seconds at Federal Minimum Wage, and about 2 seconds at my city's minimum wage. It takes more time to reach down and pick up the penny than you'd earn working a minimum wage job, so arguments about 'Oh, prices will go higher if we eliminate the penny' ring hollow to me. There is functionally no difference between $7.99 and $8.00 pricewise. Even a hike of a $7.9 priced item to $8 isn't a bunch of money. We're almost to the point where you can't buy something with a single dollar bill. The time for the hundredth of that dollar bill passed a LONG time ago.
  
  Inspired by your comment, I decided to look up when the U.S. stopped minting the half penny, as well as what a “half penny” of that time would’ve been worth when accounting for modern inflation.
  The U.S. half penny was abandoned in 1857. The inflation calculators I checked don’t allow for division by half-cents, but when $0.01 from 1857 is inflated to today’s value, it comes out to somewhere between 37¢ and 38¢. If I did the math correctly, that means a U.S. half cent was worth a modern equivalent of about 19¢ at the time it was discontinued.
  
  I recall the gumball machine at my childhood barber being a penny in the mid 1980s. I don't recall when it went up exactly, but it was around then. I was born in 80 so I was pretty young when it happened. But yeah, even then the convenience store in the middle of town had a candy aisle with lots of 5 cent candy that made picking up pennies worthwhile.
  I also remember in the later 80s when I began reading them, comics were $0.75 each. Over the next 15 years they went to $3, until I was in college and my comic habit was just too expensive, so I stopped the monthlies completely.

It’s really not a big deal. Canada did this ages ago and the world didn’t explode.
- But Canadian money isn't real money
  
  yeah, we're all a little loony up here
  
  Proof! Canadian quarter in a vending machine: rejected!
  Completely fake money! (/s obv. Border states often interchange Canadian/US currency, vending machines reject currency they don't know.)

US slowly working its way to a Japan style monetary system where the fractional unit ceases to be used as the buying power of the main unit dwindles.
Did you know Japan had a coin called 'sen' which was 1/100 of a yen? They aren't made anymore. They'd be near useless if they were because a cup of ramen is ~¥200, or 20000 sen. Although, it would be pretty funny in a show to see some ancient Japanese guy paying for his lunch with his sen collection while some uptight salaryman loses his mind in line behind him.
- Anyone would lose their mind in that situation. I had ti leave a store once without buying anything because the guy in front of me was trying to buy his things with coins and I had to go to work.

Good, we should have done this 20 years ago.
- Death to nickels!
  
  The problem is you can't get rid of nickles without getting rid of either quarters or dimes too. Without nickles you would have a denomination (25c) that has no way to be made by lower coins (10c dimes can't equal 25c). So you either need to get rid of every coin, every coin except the quarter, or nuke the quarter and nickle concurrently and only use dimes, forcing prices to be multiples of 10.
  
  Agreed, why just the penny, eliminate the whole decimal place.
  
  I've got a great business idea: I'll collect a few million dollars worth of nickels and sell them back to the government for 10 cents each. That's about a 28% discount to the manufacturing cost, and I'll double my money. Win-win!
  
  Chad Kroeger and his fans have been through enough. LEAVE HIM ALONE! LEAVE CHAD ALONE!
  
  I assume you’re alluding to this - https://youtu.be/58SrtQNt4YE

So is this one of those things where Americans do the common sense thing and agree?
Or is this the another classic case of a few very loud and emotional Americans screaming with passion and zero logic?
Or is it one of those situations where everything seems to go smoothly. And then you figure out that they didn't add the correct rounding regulations, so you'll be paying a little extra on every single transaction the store puts at .96?
- It's going to be 2 and 3.
  First 3. Then 2 because yokels will complain that "them walmarts is stealin my money!"
  I do have a funny story about someone determined to get his .01 cent.
  USAF. We were leaving after a month long TDY (not a deployment, but you do go to a different place, stands for Temporary Duty Assignment) to England. The crew and us maintenance guys all stayed at the same hotel off base. We spent this month meeting with them in the morning in front of the fire place, and usually finding out the mission got canceled for the day. We were all ready to go home.
  The head maintenance guy was a penny pincher. He had like 8 kids, so he kind of had to. This is a guy that went around base picking fruit off the trees. He left Saudi with a large bag of free MREs. We all joked that that was the only way he could eat at home because no one else wanted to eat them.
  Anyway, we're leaving finally. We're all on the bus. Air crew and maintenance. Maintenance usually has to show up about 45 mins prior so we can inspect and get everything ready. So this was going to be a quick turn and out. We stopped by the base gas station to pick up snacks for the flight home. Everyone but the head maintenance guy is back on the bus. 5 mins. 10 mins. 15 mins. The pilot finally had enough. "WTF is taking him so long?"
  He goes in and comes back out almost right away with the guy in tow. Why was he in there so long? He was arguing with the cashier over his change....1 penny. The pilot went in, found out what the hold up was, and told him, "I'll give you the damned penny. lets go!" while dragging his ass out.
- Here in Canada we got rid of the penny years ago.
  When paying in cash, we round to the nearest 0.05 but with card payments it's still the exact price.
  Also, the amount of money you'd lose by rounding in a cash transaction is pretty minimal.

Common cents

Kill the nickel and dime while we're at it.
https://youtu.be/58SrtQNt4YE
- Why would you want to get economic analysis from a non-expert/complete amateur?
  I promise you there would be significant fallout to this that Grey, who has no economics degrees nor any experience at all in economics, is not going to catch because Grey is only good at the very basic stuff that amatuers like myself can explain competently.
  
  What fallout? Their worth is negative. Other countries and the us have done this when the impact was theoretically higher.
  I’ll admit I’m not an economist but this easily passes the smell test without further explanation of the negative.

Canada got rid of the penny 12 years ago. Hardly raised an eyebrow.
- Probably cause Canadians aren’t weird about their currency.
  All Canadian bills keep getting redesigned.
  
  one time they made the 10$ bill vertical and no one gave a shit
- half of them are still circulating in the U.S.
- I love your polymer notes. Makes our greenbacks look like antiques.

frankly they might aswell cut the 5 cent piece too while theyre at it.
- Make a 20¢ piece instead of the quarter and everything can go to the nearest 10¢. Then eventually we can get rid of the dime too and everything can go to the nearest 20¢.
  
  Please do not put the idea in Trump's head that he can mint new denominations. They will all have his face.
  
  This is the forward thinking we need right now.
  
  If we actually optimized the cost of production beforehand this could work
- Just scrap anything less than $1. Then make coins $1 $5 $10 $20 that look and feel similar to the penny, nickel, dime, & quarter but are really replacing these paper bills.
  
  Why would you want coins instead of paper bills?

It's going to be harder to ask people what they're thinking 🤔
- Got a nickel for your thoughts?

Just have a $1 coin that can snap into 10 pieces like a chocolate bar. And a $100 note that tears into 10 pieces like a book if stamps.

Cool. Do the dollar bill next. Go buck and doublebuck coin like Canadia did.
If I can't buy a gallon of milk or gasoline with it, it should be a coin.

Guarantee Walmart starts pricing things at $xx.96 and milking $0.04 on every transaction.
- This means pennies will stop being made, but the concept of 1 cent will still exist.
  Most payments are digital, anyways. This won't have any meaningful effect.
- If they do it they way we did in Canada, that would round down to 95¢ and you’d get a nickel back
  
  That would be great, but… Murica and all that. If they can fuck us without lube, they will.

Better late than never. While the momentum is here, get rid of the nickel too.

So what happens when someone pays cash at the supermarket? Who rounds up?
- I saw an interview with an economist years ago where he said that if we just followed the accepted rules of rounding (1-4 rounds to 0, 5-10 rounds to 10) then it would work out about the same. In reality I’m sure companies would just pocket the extra money
  
  They already do with sales tax. ( If the tax works out to a fraction of a cent, almost every register or POS system will round up...it's a tiny amount per transaction, but it does happen and adds up over daily, weekly and monthly transactions)
- We follow normal rounding rules in Canada. 1, 2 round down to 0. 3, 4 round up to 5. 6, 7 round down to 5. 8, 9 round up to 10.
  Can you game the system? Yes!
  As a business, make sure all your prices (plus tax) come to a price ending in 3, 4, 8, or 9. When consumers buy a single item you'll get the rounding up (edit: if they pay cash) and make sweet, sweet profit. But if they buy more than one item, you're SOL on controlling the rounding.
  As a consumer, you have way more control. First, pay with cash whenever the price will round down and you can probably "profit" 5 or so dollars a year. (Assuming you pay with cash on or two times a day, saving 1 to 2 cents each time.) Pay with credit or debit each time the price ~~will~~ would round up.
  Second, you can get real fancy. You can learn tax rules in depth so you know what items will or won't be taxed and at what rate (we have federal and provincial taxes but they don't apply to everything and they don't follow the same rules on what is taxed.) But, you can use this info to always know what the final bill will be and always buy combinations of items that end in 2 or 7 (or 1 and 6 if you're lazy) and always pay cash. You can profit like $20 a year or something doing this.
  In reality? No one gives a shit until that one rare time you're paying with cash and it rounds down. It's your lucky day and you do the Six Flags Man dance. It's like finding a penny and picking it up.
  
  Pay with credit or debit each time the price will round up.
  I don’t think it matters with credit or debit. The exact amount is paid.
- There's still a fuck ton of pennies in circulation and on the ground, unless they consider them no longer legal tender we'll have plenty.
  However, if we end up following how Brazil does it, in my experience, it depends on the person/vendor and the amount. If you buy something that's like R$3,99 you'll usually get give them R$4 and that's it. I've also had it where I'll pay for something that's say R$4,89, give them R$5 and get 15 or 25 centavos back. Could also depend on what's in the drawer at that time.
  Corporations will 100% pocket the difference at first, but once it becomes a normal thing to do the rounding I'll wager it'll fall to the Brazilian method, especially with local businesses or vendors.
  
  In other words, no register will ever come out balanced.

Oddly reminiscent of the Roman empire.

They should keep pennies and put Trump's face on them so I can throw them in the trash
- I literally throw them in the trash. I don't see many of them because my cash transactions tend to be decimaless.

- If you're gonna flex with an ancient Greek quote, at least use Greek letters!
  
  I don't know that the label gun does Greek. :)
  
  *brag, the word is brag.

I guess this is a good thing, but I can imagine some companies taking advantage of this

Canada did this thirteen years ago.

nice, we need to kill our fucking euro cents too!!!
- In NL we rounded off before the euro, only had 5, 10 and 25ct coins (and 1 and 2,5 guilder); after the euro came we all of a sudden had more coins (1, 2 , 5, 10, 20, 50) but within a few years collectively stopped using the 1 and 2 cent coins. Don't know who started, but I'm always a bit surprised when I'm in another eu country and get a single cent as change. I mean they eventually add up to something but it takes forever until you could theoretically buy something with it.

I heard a rumour that if everyone just gather around politicians and keep throwing pennies at them, the corruption in the government will be gone.
I mean like... dump an entire box of pennies from a skyscraper onto a politican down below FOR SCIENCE 😏

Don’t nickels cost like 14 cents each, and won’t we need a lot more of them?
- We reuse these coins so the cost to produce them is unimportant.
  
  Oh for sure, but if the justification is that the penny costs more to make than it is worth then isn’t the nickel in that same boat?

I mean... it's been a while since I've even seen one

This is the slow banning of cash.
Step 1: Eliminate penny
Step 2: Some stores stop accepting cash because of rounding
Step 3: Second wave of other stores join
Step 4: Fewer people carry cash as a result
Step 5: Cash Becomes More Difficult to Withdraw From Banks since less cash on hand means they need justification for any withdrawal over 500 in a day
Step 6: Wait 3 Years, but strengthen ID requirements while implementing behind the scenes biometric collection and AI identification for the purposes of "catching illegal immigrants"
During step 6, conservative Christians, normally fearful of the Antichrist and a universal mark for being able to be a part of society, accept this development because MAGA good, immigrants bad
Step 7: Regime change. The lower classes, upon having the little wealth they have and labor stolen even more, with increases in poverty and death, realize they have been screwed and elect pro-regulation big-government Democrats to save them.
The democrats ban privacy coins in a new comprehensive crypto bill. There is little protest.
Step 8: American New Deal. In an effort to "save America," Democrats pass a bill with a huge amount of spending for the poor, as well as expansive banking regulations to ensure banks are "safe." The public safety means more than 100 can't be withdrawn in a day.
Step 9: 3 years pass, almost no one uses cash. The destruction caused by Trump's actions and the changes caused by AI lead Democrats to enact UBI for all, a card with 800 a month for everyone. Each person gets a card. Additionally, all financial transactions must be linked to the card, and cash is banned. Rural maggats, many reeling from greater poverty, are happy to get UBI.
Step 10: AntiChrist arrives, wowing all before killing nearly everyone. Cashless MAGA Christians are impressed... Before they all are killed.
Yep... It's just a penny. Nothing to worry about folks!
- Kooky answer to a real question.
  
  You are now my archenemy on Lemmy, so called "thehiddencatboy."
- About Step 10.....
  https://www.benjaminlcorey.com/could-american-evangelicals-spot-the-antichrist-heres-the-biblical-predictions/
  
  That's some crazy ass shit. More proof that reality is simulated!
  I don't believe in religious stuff and Step 10 was mostly a joke, although that link is shocking.
  To everyone who downvoted me, screw you!!!!!!
  (Edited, and the down votes keep coming. You can all go to Lemmy hell! ... which is possibly the hexbear instance, although I'm not sure.)

So this is what it's like to fully embrace the death of the USD?
- Well, getting rid of the penny was always kinda a good idea. It costs more to make one than it's actually worth.
  Here in Canada we killed our penny years ago.
  The US used to have a half penny, but it was killed over 100 years ago.
  Minting such a small amount of change that sees almost no practical use is pointless.
  
  Remember when u could buy penny candies? The dollar ain't worth shit anymore
  
  Honestly, I'd be fine with killing the nickel too. Just start pricing everything in tenths of a dollar instead of hundredths.
- This doesn't have much to do with international use of the dollar.
  
  I'm kind of commenting on how bad our inflation has gotten ...