April 22, 2006
When A Penny Costs More Than $.01
Let's all take a brief moment to contemplate the penny: Tiny, sometimes red, sometimes black, sometimes shiny, sometimes sticky, you can exchange them for goods or services, a hundred of them make a buck ... OK, we done? Good. Now think about this:
This week the cost of the metals in a penny rose above 0.8 cents, more than twice the value of last fall. Because the government spends at least another six-tenths of a cent — above and beyond the cost of the metal — to make each penny, it will lose nearly half a cent on each new one it mints
In fact, it has been losing money making pennies (at a record clip, no less) for nearly six months. No reason to get super-freaked out just yet though dear reader, "the real problem could come if metals prices rise so high that it would be economical to melt down pennies for the metals they contain."
Of course, when/if that were to happen Congress would probably just decide to make pennies out of something else again (i.e. since 1982 pennies have been made of mostly Zinc, not to mention the steel pennies from WWII). But still, pretty crazy, huh?
Some Penny-related tangents: Gothamist can't recommend enough 'Pennies from Heaven,' the miniseries and the movie also, when we were little we loved the Penny cartoons on Pee Wee's Playhouse. And we keep our pennies in a mason jar, where do you keep yours?
'One Red Cent' by Triborough via Contrbute.
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I loved those Penny cartoons!
Pennies should be phased out. As soon as possible. It's too much worry over too little.
"There is no escaping economic history: It takes nearly a dime today to buy what a penny bought back in 1950. Despite this, the U.S. Mint keeps churning out 1 billion pennies a month.
Where do they go? Two-thirds of them immediately drop out of circulation, into piggy banks or - as The Times' John Tierney noted five years ago - behind chair cushions or at the back of sock drawers next to your old tin-foil ball.
... What's really behind America's clinging to the pesky penny? Nostalgia cannot be the answer; if we can give up the barbershop shave with its steam towels, we can give up anything.
The answer, I think, has to do with zinc, which is what pennies are mostly made of; light copper plating turns them into red cents.
The powerful, outsourcing zinc lobby - financed by Canadian mines as well as Alaskan - entices front groups to whip up a frenzy of save-the-penny mail to Congress when coin reform is proposed."
-- William Saffire, June '04.
I think there are a great many pennies in jars, bags, boxes, etc. just waiting to be put back in circulation. To many people they are just a nuisance coin something you either have too many of or two few of in your pocket depending on if it is before or after the $2.07 transaction you have just made.
Or we can just take the hint and start transitioning to a cashless economy.
Until you can safely and untraceabley buy drugs and other black market goods in a cashless economy it ain't going to happen Brightliner.
This is so dumb. They should just stop minting pennies, and merchants could round everything to the nearest nickel. This is what a lot of other countries have done. (Totally bizarre about the zinc lobby, BTW!)
And it's your hope that said businesses will at least sometimes round their prices down to the lower nickel?
O-kay.
I keep them in my ol' lady's Coin Slot