A penny for your thoughts.

I don't necessarily like the penny but as long as they get the production costs on it down i'm fine with keeping it. And yeah like Merv Burger said we haven't been on the gold standard for so long it seems like ancient history... maybe you meant something else by this that i didn't understand?

There's nowhere I can't reach.

Crash, what I mean about not necessarily pricing things in multiples of 5 is as follows.

You gave the Snickers example at $.79

First of all you're forgetting taxes. In a state with an 8% sales tax the price will come out to $.85. If you factor in taxes when purchasing multiple items pricing things at multiples of 5 will not solve the penny problem.

Your gas example is pretty good, but the problem with it is that it doesn't apply to any other type of purchase. Gas is the only thing I can think of which is biased towards the next penny. Believe me when I tell you if you were to do a bell curve analysis of a large number of purchases the side of the curve with dollar endings at $.025 + endings will be damn near perfectly symmetric with the dollar endings at $.024 and less. What this means is that over a life time the rounding up and down will cancel each other out. Most people don't get just one thing when they go into a store so retailers trying to price things at $15.03 wouldn't work because it may have been my intention to also buy something that was $4.03 thus making them lose that penny. With the billions of purchases made there's no way to strategically win in a rounding scenario. It's going to come out to equillibrium.

For your last example no one says stocks stocks and such have to increase in $.05 incriments. Stocks are essentially electronic money which can be payed exactly.

This thing is sticky, and I don't like it. I don't appreciate it.

I like how the government isn't mentioning that the production of paper bills are far less of what they're actually worth, but get their panties in a twist because the pennies are losing them money.

There are far more disadvantages to losing the penny than there are advantages. I'm surprised more people aren't making a big fucking deal about this, probably because they dont' understand that essentially they will be paying more during the course of their lifetimes just because they wanted to lighten their wallets by a few ounces. Like Crash said, Americans are just being lazy.

I am a dolphin, do you want me on your body?

Eliminating it shouldn't be too much of a problem. Australia did it back in the early 90's, getting rid of the their one-cent and two-cent pieces. Only cash transactions were effected while interest/bills are earned/paid to the cent.

From a CNN article:

Quote:

At the time of the transition, according to Michael Skully, Professor of Banking at Monash University in Melbourne, the Australian government kept a close watch for profiteering associated with the elimination of the penny, while the nation's major retailers rounded totals down. The elimination of 1 and 2 cent pieces did not "disproportionately hurt the poor" as ACC asserts it would if rounding was imposed in the United States.

"I certainly don't recall any riots in the street when it happened," said Skully.

Also:

Quote:

"Americans overwhelmingly want the penny," said Weller (Executive Director of the pro-penny organization). "They also hate rounding."

In other words, Americans are just fucking lazy.

I was speaking idiomatically.

Originally Posted by Crash Landon

Unfortunately, the gold standard, the basis upon which our currency is given trade value, is based entirely upon the power of 1%. Internationally, the price of gold does not always remain rounded off to the nearest nickel. It rises and falls by pennies each day. In a given year, its value may experience, for pure example, a $0.23 gain.

Crash, are you really suggesting that people trading on international currency and commodity markets ever pay by cash?

Just because you get rid of penny coins, doesn't mean you're abolishing the concept of a penny completely. Electronic transactions can still be enacted to the nearest penny, all you're doing is cutting down on the amount of crap change people have to cart about.

Official statistics show there are 10,360,000,000 1p pieces in circulation in the UK but I don't know a single person who ever uses them. Everyone I know chucks them in a pot when they get home then horde them basically forever. The only danger in abolishing the penny would be if everyone changed theirs up at once, putting another £103 million of currency back into circulation creating some inflationary pressure (Although cash increases in actuality have little impact on a national economy).

England's economy is tiny compared to the US's, imagine how much raw material is floating about useless in pots in people's houses.

If nobody uses the damn things, why keep 'em? I barely use cash anymore as it is, it's only a matter of time before hard currency as a whole is a thing of the past in my opinion.

How ya doing, buddy?

Originally Posted by Crash Landon

"But gee, we eliminated the half-penny and did just fine." This is because the half-penny was a value that was, in fact, smaller than the lowest base increment that we use to measure the value of the gold reserve. We can safely eliminate those fractions and not jeopardize our system of representational values.

Actually the dollar is the base. The cent, nickel etc. are all subdivsions. We only keep them around because the dollar is worth quite a bit, in contrast to say the Japanese yen, which subdivision the sen is never used because the yen is worth so little. But as the value of the dollar decreases over time, these subdivisions will become obsolete and fall by the wayside. The half-cent went, and the mill, which is 1/1000 of a dollar, also went.

But I do agree with you that the penny's time is not up yet. Rounding up prices to the nearest multiple of five could still cost us in the long run. The cent still packs a punch. However, I also agree with Shin's sentiment about the penny as currency. I personally don't give two shits about what I do with my pennies. In fact I'll even throw them away if my pockets are overloaded with things. However little I care about pennies, though, as long as we have a paper economy then they will still have their uses.

FELIPE NO