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- Thread starter Tanglewood
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There have been times when I toss the pennies away. One day last week I stopped at a subway newsstand to buy the paper for fifty cents. I handed the vendor three dimes, two nickels and ten pennies ... it took him just a few seconds to fly into a rage and throw the pennies against the wall. I turned around and said, "I'm not in love with them either, but it still is money ... if you have other issues, speak to those police officers who are leaning against the wall."
Deepdale said:
Ha, that is funny. There was really no reason for him to get so upset with you because you paid him in different denominations of coin- the bottom line is that you did pay him.
On my second last day of work in Canada I pinched a bunch of those terrible paper things for rolling the coins (geeze I love being able to use plastic bags here, oh, and not having 1c coins, or 2c coins anymore), and on my last day of work I took in 6 months worth of 1c, 5c, 10c and 25c coins and swapped them for notes.
Get rid of 1c coins people, they're weighing you down. We ditched our 1c and 2c coins back in the late 80's/early 90's and it was a wonderful day. Our neighbours across the ditch are just about to get rid of the 5c coin too and we're apparently going to do the same some time. I just hope we can follow the kiwis a bit further and reduce the size of our massive coins. The 50c coin is just ridiculously huge and is a big problem because we use them just as much as the 5c, the 10c, the 20c the $1 and $2 coins.
Get rid of 1c coins people, they're weighing you down. We ditched our 1c and 2c coins back in the late 80's/early 90's and it was a wonderful day. Our neighbours across the ditch are just about to get rid of the 5c coin too and we're apparently going to do the same some time. I just hope we can follow the kiwis a bit further and reduce the size of our massive coins. The 50c coin is just ridiculously huge and is a big problem because we use them just as much as the 5c, the 10c, the 20c the $1 and $2 coins.
risc said:See my sig.
As an addendum to my earlier post, I made it to the Coinstar thing and dumped my change. I got a $44.10 Starbucks card (and that's with no fee, since there are no fees if one gets a gift card).
$44 in change! And $17 of it was in pennies....I'm starting to think I should've stopped midway and gotten part of it as iTunes certificates!
I see where they could get 600 million if they rounded up the price of each item purchased, but what about slowly phasing out the penny by requiring that the manufacturers make new cash registers round up the total (after tax) to the nearest nickel.
mkrishnan said:
As an addendum to my earlier post, I made it to the Coinstar thing and dumped my change. I got a $44.10 Starbucks card (and that's with no fee, since there are no fees if one gets a gift card).
I'm starting to think I should've stopped midway and gotten part of it as iTunes certificates!
That is a nice sum of change that you had there mkrishnan.
dmw007 said:That is a nice sum of change that you had there mkrishnan.
Hehehehe, yeah! It was *heavy*!
mkrishnan said:Hehehehe, yeah! It was *heavy*!
I would imagine so, you probably had to make two trips to bring all of the coin in.
You know I used to laugh at keeping pennies and small change then I started a penny jar , its a 2L glass jar , when it gets 3/4 full about every four months I dump it out and count, there is usually $80-100 in there. Now that isnt small change.
a Stupid FYI : my local starbucks ( less then 80 feet from house) makes over $50 bucks a day in the karma cup / tip cup in small change.
a Stupid FYI : my local starbucks ( less then 80 feet from house) makes over $50 bucks a day in the karma cup / tip cup in small change.
I wonder if you went into an Apple Store with $1200 worth of pennies would they sell you a Macbook?
exabytes18 said:A penny for my thought......
That's just my two cents.
Where did that extra penny go?
It must have dematerialized.
At my last workplace on our floor we had a neat little co-operative vending service called the "pop fridge", maintained by some anonymous "pop fairy". It was basically a fridge that was stocked with various cold pops and juices, and a shelf stocked with chips, candy bars, twinkies, etc. Someone would make a run to Costco periodically to keep the area stocked with food. Everything was 50 cents, and you simply dropped your change into a coin box on the shelf. The proceeds paid for the next round at Costco and any extra money was donated to a charity.
So what I started to do was accumulate my pennies and small change from my shopping trips or visits to the company cafeteria, and keep them in a penny jar at my desk. Then, when I was hungry, I would use them to buy my snacks from the pop fridge. If I was feeling really rebellious, I would exchange my pennies for quarters from the coin box without even buying anything.
So what I started to do was accumulate my pennies and small change from my shopping trips or visits to the company cafeteria, and keep them in a penny jar at my desk. Then, when I was hungry, I would use them to buy my snacks from the pop fridge. If I was feeling really rebellious, I would exchange my pennies for quarters from the coin box without even buying anything.
Tanglewood said:
I've adopted a superstition from someone I knew in college: When I see a penny (and it's not filthy or otherwise inconvenient to reach) and it's heads-up, I pick it up "for luck", but if it's tails-up, I flip it over so that someone else might gain that luck.
Anyway, the only way I'd agree to have the US penny dropped is if they prohibitted merchants from rounding everything up and used the Swedish rounding system that frankblundt described on the final total, for cash transactions. And put egregious round-up offenders in public stockades. I've read that in Ireland (and other places, I'm sure) many a shop owner took advantage of the switch to euros to raise their prices, and we don't need that happening here.
nbs2 said:
While I want to keep the penny, too, $600m per year is "only" $2 per person. Or slightly over half a penny a day. Hey! We should reintroduce the idea of the ha'penny.
When I get pennies I tend to drop them in the "leave a penny, take a penny" dish, if there is one. Those have come in handy for me many times. Otherwise they end up at home in an old globe bank that my mother had when she was a child (it shows such places as French West Africa!).
It's been 149 years since the US got rid of the half-penny. I think we've had enough inflation since then to render the penny pretty much obsolete.