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.
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.
Better late than never. While the momentum is here, get rid of the nickel too.
Good, we should have done this 20 years ago.
Death to nickels!
Chad Kroeger and his fans have been through enough. LEAVE HIM ALONE! LEAVE CHAD ALONE!
Chad walks into a committee meeting to explain why we should end the production of our copper familiar. “LOOK AT THIS PENNY GRAPH, every time I do it makes me laugh”
Agreed, why just the penny, eliminate the whole decimal place.
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.
Replace the quarter with a 20¢ piece. Then you can keep getting rid of the lowest coin.
Just use dimes and half dollars
I think this is the way. And, in memoriam of the quarter and to celebrate the massive increase in half-dollar production, we open with a 50cents for 50states where we produce half-dollars with 50 alternative “tails”, one for each state.
I doubt it’ll happen in this administration, but at least we are getting rid of the penny, finally.
We’d need a massive public awareness campaign to let them know we’re even allowed to change this.
Unfortunately half dollars are comically large
They don’t have to be. The old silver dollar coin was huge, but the sacagawea dollar coin is no bigger than a quarter
Why do you need to be able to make every denomination from every other one?
That isn’t the specific problem. The problem is that you need a way to make up the difference between them. Example: If someone pays $1.00 for something that costs $0.35, how do you make change without a .05 denomination?
It’s the same issue with the penny, you round up or round down.
If you have no penny, when taxes on your item make the total equal to $5.03, you pay $5.05. if the total is $5.02 you pay $5.00.
Businesses will round up in both cases
Turn the dime into 12.5 cents.
Bring back the bit!
Sure, but the rounding errors become a lot bigger if you get rid of the nickel.
As long as there’s no collusion it should generally even out with random purchases. Unless you constantly buy the same order every day that ends in 3 cents and rounds up you might pay like $5 more every year.
Suppose you want to buy something that costs a quarter, and what you have is 3 dimes. If there isnt a 5 cent coin, this creates a situation where you have enough money, but making exact change isnt possible, which while not impossible to deal with is bothersome. If we moved to only dimes and no quarters or nickels, it would never make sense to make a price end in 5 cents, so any price would be a multiple of 10 cents and change can always be made. Alternatively, if you get rid of dimes and nickels but keep quarters, then it doesnt make sense to charge a price ending in something other than .00, .25, .50, or .75, and so you can always make change for those prices with the coins one would have.
Literally none of this matters anyways if pennies are going, because making prices end in certain amounts won’t work as nice in practice as it does here for the simple reason that US prices almost never include taxes.
I mean, presumably fractions of a dollar still exist as a concept even if the coins don’t, so if you’re selling something that someone might buy in cash, one could just set the sticker price so that the final price plus tax ends up as a round number, essentially including tax when deciding on price and then taking it out again when making the labels, if one wanted to do that.
Its just awkward if something costs 1.15 and you just have a dollar and two dimes. No way to make change for that despite it can be summed from coins (3 quarters 4 dimes) so it will for sure occur in a real world situation where nickels are gone.
Imo a funnier (unrealistic) solution would be to just change the value of the dime to 12.5 cents.
Why’s it a bad idea to get rid of coins at this point anyway. What can you still buy that is a fraction of a dollar that actually matters? Anything that cheap can just be sold in multiples that amount to even dollar amounts.
Getting rid of coins and rounding to nearest dollar sounds great to me but I don’t know what the drawbacks are.
There’s still some edge cases floating around. Some laundromats, parking meters, using a shopping cart at Aldi, older vending machines, bottle deposits, probably a few more but that’s off the top of my head.
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You are the truest bastion of peace and love for the poor, ever since Jesus himself. Your solution to poverty shall be resounded for millenia to come “let them keep their pennies!”.
You abject, fucking, imbecile.
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!
I assume you’re alluding to this - https://youtu.be/58SrtQNt4YE
deleted by creator
Indeed.
Canada got rid of the penny 12 years ago. Hardly raised an eyebrow.
half of them are still circulating in the U.S.
I love your polymer notes. Makes our greenbacks look like antiques.
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
And they put a black woman on it. Ooooooo scary!
I love the vertical $10 bill.
We Americans do occasionally get the dollar coin redesigned. Sometimes our leaders are forward thinking and recognize important historical figures. I have a few with Sacajawea on it.
I want the next one to be rotated, but still in portrait. Giant black bars on the sides, and the print is tiny. Like full screening a badly edited video.
I guess this is a good thing, but I can imagine some companies taking advantage of this
Great title
The one good executive order to come out of that bag of puss
If only he did it properly. The better way to do it would have been via Congress.
Canada has a law that allows cashiers to round up or down. Without this, the US is only making a penny shortage, and you better believe customers will be screaming at cashiers for “stealing their money” if they don’t get their cent back, or shrieking “it’s legal tender!” if cashiers don’t accept their Pennies.
IIRC, Canada had at least some period of time where while change provided was rounded to the nearest nickel, the penny was still legal tender. (Prices / totals were not rounded; non-cache payments were still denominated / accurate to the penny.)
And, yes, it would be better to get congress and the executive together and have an actual plan for discontinuing the penny and the nickel (and maybe the dime or quarter?). I think on this issue, the executive acting alone is better than doing nothing / maintaining the status quo.
We should also kill the nickel and paper dollar at this point.
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?
It would make counterfeiting harder, for one. It would also replace the quarter for coin op devices which are almost entirely impractical at this point.
Technically true, but it also carries a whole host of other issues.
A lot of people still use cash because they prefer it to card networks. As much as I like the convenience of paying for a $1-$2 item with my card, I also realize it’s costing my small local stores a pretty large amount of money in fees overall.
Not to mention there’s a lot of kids that are much more capable of learning the value of money when it physically leaves their hands, and they’re using smaller bills, since they don’t exactly have a ton of money in the first place. We know that psychologically, the experience of using cash hurts more than using cards mentally, which prevents overspending more compared to card payments, and it’s great for teaching kids good behaviors.
Besides, it’s also great for tipping street performers without having to make a million different accounts on PayPal, Venmo, Cash App, etc just to electronically transfer two bucks, it’s great for older people who are simply not easily able to understand how to properly use and manage cards, the list goes on.
A dollar in itself still has meaningful value. In many places, you can still buy, for example, a bag of chips, a coffee, a protein bar, items that people legitimately consume on a daily basis.
The same can’t be said for the penny or a nickel, hence why essentially nobody pays for any item, no matter how cheap, just using those coins, but very commonly does so with quarters, dollar bills, and I’ll admit, sometimes even dimes too, although I’d argue not frequently enough to justify much of their continued use in the coming years.
As long as a denomination of money can, on its own, or in small quantities, (i.e. something you could count out at a register without everyone in the line behind you getting angry at you) purchase a good, then that denomination should continue to exist, in my opinion.
Did you respond to the wrong post?
I said I use coin op shit. It takes way too many quarters to use that shit. I handle coins all the time but I want to handle LESS COINS. I still LIKE coins but the denominations below quarters AREN’T useful and paying 3 dollars in quarters is insane.
Cash machines jam all the time. This is why most pay machines now are credit card - I DO NOT LIKE PAYING WITH CREDIT CARDS. I do not want that. The current coin situation in the US is dumb.
The half penny was eliminated when it was worth more than a dime in todays money.
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
I really hope you’re not advocating for a cashless society.
I’m ready for that possibility
Monero
Great, so throw every homeless or vulnerable person, abuse victims, children, etc who do not have access to a bank account or phone into a completely worse state. Food? Busses? For any of these people they are just now off the table. Eliminate whole sects of the restaurant, service, and gig economy industry overnight and millions will lose their jobs. The amount of people who work under the table at restaurants is outstanding.
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.)
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.”
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!!!
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.
I mean… it’s been a while since I’ve even seen one
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.
Common cents
