alt.hn

5/23/2025 at 1:41:28 AM

US Treasury to stop producing pennies next year

 https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cx2j07858lno

by DarkContinent

5/23/2025 at 8:09:47 AM

It's about time.

Andy Rooney complained about pennies back in the 1980s. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A-zcWgXu4hg . "A penny saved is a waste of time."

In inflation-adjusted terms, a penny back then was worth almost 3 cents now.

by eesmith

5/23/2025 at 8:35:19 AM

I am such a cheapskate that I can't not bother with pennies. I will save so much time from this.

by rightbyte

5/23/2025 at 6:58:49 AM

Australia stopped one and two cents coins decades ago. It's sad to have to live with a system where the numbers are just two or even five times larger than they should be, but I suppose worse things have happened.

by globular-toast

5/23/2025 at 10:17:15 AM

I don’t think it’s sad. Just the reality of constant inflation. And the $1 and $2 notes were replaced with coins, which are much better.

I’m hoping the 5c coins will go soon, and we’ll get an $5 coin.

by perilunar

5/23/2025 at 10:38:51 AM

In high school, 17 years ago, I wrote a DBQ (document based question essay) for an AP test about why pennies were a huge waste to the economy. Both in cost to some, keep in circulation, and just dealing with for businesses/consumers.

It’s past time we did away with the penny and honestly the nickel shouldn’t be too far behind. Really anything less than a quarter seems like more trouble than it’s worth at this point. I would never carry change though, I barely carry cash as-is.

by joshstrange

5/24/2025 at 2:15:14 AM

Here in Argentina we unofficially deprecate the coins/bills when they are worth approximately US$0.03 [1]. Now US$1=AR$1100 and you can find in the wild AR$100 and some AR$50, but AR$20 are very rare, AR$10 almost imposible to find, and lower denomination are just museum pieces.

Theoretically you can go to the supermarket with a big bag with a thousand of AR$1 coins, and they must accept them but it would be very weird.

[1] It's a personal opinion, there are no official threshold, don't ask how I made an statistic.

by gus_massa

5/23/2025 at 11:56:18 AM

With Trump trying his very best to devalue the dollar, you think it's wise to do this now?

by beAbU

5/23/2025 at 2:48:36 PM

That would mean there would be even less need for pennies or even any coinage, right?

by RiverCrochet

5/23/2025 at 11:58:40 AM

I don’t fully understand the question. How does removing the penny factor in? I honestly don’t get or I am missing the connection.

by joshstrange

5/23/2025 at 12:16:35 PM

You very much don't understand how this works.

by mystified5016

5/23/2025 at 10:09:32 AM

> The phasing out of the coins will mean businesses will need to round prices up or down…

Only when paying cash, and only the total.

by perilunar

5/23/2025 at 9:00:16 PM

If the penny bin (bucket?) of cash registers disappears, slide the rest over one slot and start minting 1$ coins like crazy.

by euroderf

5/24/2025 at 4:50:32 PM

a few things from experience with no pennys in Canada, 2¢ now rounds down to 0¢, along with your personal opinions, and if you want to make an impression on a date.....that is already going well, then keeping a vintage penny just in case you hit an awkward pause, may bring a smile.

by metalman

5/23/2025 at 12:21:50 PM

Honestly inflation is such that any denomination less than a full dollar is almost worthless.

The only application of fractional currency in modern USA is in making every price end in 99 cents for stupid reasons. Everyone has been conditioned to mentally round up any price to the next dollar.

There's nearly nothing you can buy today for less than a dollar. There's no point in any smaller denominations.

by mystified5016

5/23/2025 at 5:24:06 PM

> There's nearly nothing you can buy today for less than a dollar.

Aren't most things in the fruits and veggies section under a dollar? What's a carrot or a lemon cost?

Looking at the weekly ad at Food4Less, tomatoes are 2lb/$3. I think that's like 50 cents each tomato. Onions are 89 cents/lb.

by jolmg

5/23/2025 at 6:09:50 PM

Doesn't it only practically matter if you're only buying ~one of those things? Who goes to a grocery store and buys one tomato? Feel like that could just round up or round random and it wouldn't be the end of the world.

by kadoban

5/23/2025 at 1:02:53 PM

Depends on your local cost of living

by bbstats

5/23/2025 at 8:35:38 AM

Replace it with a 33 cent coin

by kirykl

5/23/2025 at 2:12:15 PM

I remembered there was some kind of "more efficient" coin system. I searched for "ternary coins" and "radix coins". Both are some crypto scams. Fun times.

Apparently I misremembered how it worked and it's actually 1, 5, 18 and 25 (or 29) for a 4 coin system: https://cs.uwaterloo.ca/~shallit/Papers/change2.pdf

by grues-dinner

5/23/2025 at 1:14:13 PM

Replace pennies, nickels, and dimes with a 12 1/2 cent coin. Eight to the dollar.

by euroderf

5/23/2025 at 1:19:57 PM

When I was a kid, a first-class stamp in the UK was 12.5 pence.

by rahimnathwani

5/23/2025 at 2:49:14 PM

As mentioned in the article, we dropped the 1-cent coin in Canada over a decade ago. Nobody cares. We also dropped the $1 and $2 bills, years back. I'm guessing there will be a $5 coin soon ... but none of this matters much anymore, since people pay for so many things with contactless money transfers.

by bluenose69

5/23/2025 at 12:30:29 PM

Cool, now work on the dollar next. Think we can get a dollar coin that lasts more than a year or two? Found a Sacagawea dollar in one of my cupholders just the other day, took me a hot minute to recognize what it even was.

by chuckadams