Is it about time, or is it still useful? If you think its time has passed, what about the nickel/dime/quarter?

  • NineMileTower@lemmy.world
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    6 days ago

    I say get rid of money completely. Everything should be free for everyone. Except for my neighbor, Ron. He’s still gotta pay.

  • 0ops@lemm.ee
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    6 days ago

    Lose 'em. Nickels too, gone. Honestly if we ditched dimes too I wouldn’t shed a tear. Quarters are cool though, they can stay.

  • dance_ninja@lemmy.world
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    6 days ago

    I think I remember hearing that the cost to make a penny is now more than one cent. Considering you can’t really do anything with them, I’d say it’s time to discontinue the penny at the very least.

  • JackbyDev@programming.dev
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    6 days ago

    I don’t think anyone ever gets excited about finding anything less than a quarter. Hell, even today I don’t know if quarters are worthwhile. We should definitely get rid of everything besides quarters. I don’t think any machines even take anything other than quarters. Maybe some drink machines do, but that’s it. Like, two dimes and a nickel is objectively less useful than a quarter. And not just because of the mild inconvenience of carrying two additional coins lol.

    I think there are enough places that use quarters that we shouldn’t get rid of them.

  • Yawweee877h444@lemmy.world
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    6 days ago

    Can we just round everything to the nearest dollar? If something is still cheap enough to be 25 cents then it should only be sold in a pack of 4.

  • bradd@lemmy.world
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    7 days ago

    Currently you can just get rid of all change, or increase the value of the dollar, by a lot.

  • BmeBenji@lemm.ee
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    7 days ago

    Sure. Fuck it. I wouldn’t waste any brain power on it when the *gestures wildly at everything* is still happening

      • wolfpack86@lemmy.world
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        6 days ago

        That doesn’t mean we need to mint more. Especially when it costs more than $0.01 to produce a penny.

        You’re only pointing to why we don’t invalidate the coin.

        • ReadMoreBooks@lemmy.zip
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          6 days ago

          You’re only pointing to why we don’t invalidate the coin.

          Correct.

          That doesn’t mean we need to mint more.

          The question wasn’t if we should mint more. It was if we should do away with what we have.

          • wolfpack86@lemmy.world
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            5 days ago

            Sure, but functionally stopping the production is the main benefit of the decision. It means banks can’t order more and the usage will naturally wane away.

            I guess I’m saying there’s a middle ground that doesn’t require invalidating the currency

  • Rob Bos@lemmy.ca
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    7 days ago

    Canada got rid of pennjes like ten years ago. We barely noticed after the first few months.

  • cyrano@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    7 days ago

    https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2020/07/14/890435359/is-it-time-to-kill-the-penny

    By the 1990s, Kolbe says, he was introducing new legislation to kill the penny with every new session of Congress. But he kept facing resistance — for example, from the speaker of the House at the time, Dennis Hastert, who represented a district in Illinois, the home state of Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln, of course, is on the penny, and Kolbe says that proved to be a major roadblock. So were special interests such as zinc miners and the company that supplies the “penny blanks” used to mint the penny.

    Penny defenders’ strongest argument was that eliminating it would hurt consumers. All those $9.99 products? The prices would be jacked up to an even $10! They called it the “rounding tax.” But Whaples, that penny-researching economist at Wake Forest University, conducted a study of convenience stores and found that the final digit of purchases, which usually involve multiple products and a sales tax, was pretty much random. “And so if you round it to the nearest nickel, the customer wouldn’t get gouged,” Whaples says. Sometimes you’d round up; other times you’d round down. In the end, it would basically be a wash.

    • atrielienz@lemmy.world
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      7 days ago

      Yeah. But the penny allows salespeople to provide a price that is enticing to the consumer because it’s basically taking advantage of the psychology of how we round things. So it’s good for businesses, and that’s exactly why it still exists.

      • Rob Bos@lemmy.ca
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        7 days ago

        I don’t follow. We have .99 prices in Canada. Debit and credit pays exact, and the change is just rounded.

        The penny just fails as a currency. You can’t buy anything with it. When we had them ten years ago, I would just dump them into recycling bins if i wasn’t at home near the penny bucket.

        • atrielienz@lemmy.world
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          5 days ago

          With the 99 cent thing, if you sell a billion small items for $9.99 because our brains don’t equate $9.99 to $10.00, you’ve made $10 BN. If you sell 500 items for $799.99 instead of $800 you’ve made $399,995. So you take a more noticeable hit in sales if you don’t sell as many small items because they’re now a $1.00 and people don’t think they’re worth a $1.00, but people are more likely to still buy an item that was $799.99 for $800. So you’re less likely to lose sales.

          In the US, that extra cent offsets tax which isn’t included in shelf price which is part of the problem. But our prices are also rounded I believe. You did used to be able to buy things with pennies and it’s still a legal currency. But it’s been a long time since I’ve seen penny candy or similar and I couldn’t tell you what they’re used for now except exact change in the event that the seller is using psychological tactics to sell you more things by tricking your brain into believing you’re paying less than you are.

        • Strykker@programming.dev
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          7 days ago

          First, no the shelf price is not altered.

          Second the final price at the register is rounded to the closest 5 cent.

          Some times you’ll go up, sometimes you’ll go down. It all breaks even in the end.

    • limer@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      7 days ago

      The penny lobby: so many puns and dad jokes just waiting to be released, like in this centence