The one good executive order to come out of that bag of puss
this post was submitted on 22 May 2025
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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-cash 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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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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?
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.
Did you respond to the wrong post?
I said I use coin op shit. It takes way too many quarters to use that shit.
Sorry, I thought it was obvious that making people carry around large quantities of metal dollar coins is a bad idea for anyone wanting to spend any reasonable amount of money, and that you were implying using cards to replace the paper dollar and quarters, rather than simply replacing it with dollar coins.
Easily stackable, foldable, lightweight paper money is much more practical for most people than un-foldable, harder to carry in wallets, heavier, louder coins. Nothing stops anybody from easily getting dollar coins right now, but there's a reason most people didn't want to spend them when they were first introduced, or even after the government sold them for exactly $1 online (shipping was free), and I don't think
But if you really prefer dollar coins, you can get them from your bank today, or order them from the mint online. Many coin operated machines actually take them.
denominations below quarters AREN’T useful
They are for people spending smaller amounts of money, like children who very often buy candy worth anywhere from $0.10 to $0.25 (not including tax, which requires them to have more smaller coins)
and paying 3 dollars in quarters is insane.
Three single dollar bills will get you there much faster.
Cash machines jam all the time.
Whatever cash machines you're using must be very badly maintained. I haven't had a single cash machine jam on me in my entire life.
This is why most pay machines now are credit card
Most machines are now credit card based because nobody has to then physically go to the machines to actually empty the money out of them.
The half penny was eliminated when it was worth more than a dime in todays money.
Cool, I still think the dime right now has enough value to justify being kept around for a bit, especially if we're getting rid of other smaller denominations, as it provides more of a transitionary period for people to adjust to spending and receiving larger denominations, especially when rounding of purchase prices made with physical money is still being normalized.
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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 going to be harder to ask people what they're thinking 🤔
Got a nickel for your thoughts?
Great title
Common cents
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.)
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