Friday: A Penny for Your Thoughts
Do you remember May 2012? That’s when Canada stopped producing pennies. But we were not the first.
New Zealand did it in 1889, Australia did it in 1991, and other countries like Estonia, Netherlands, Italy, Ireland, Finland, and Belgium are all opting out of their lowest denomination of coin.
Besides the fact that it costs more than face value to mint a penny, it does make sense to eliminate it with most consumers using credit and bank cards to make their purchases.
As a kid, I remember looking through my change to find the earliest date, hoping to find that one rare coin that would fetch millions at auction*. A pocketful of pennies would fill a small paper bag with germ-covered candies from the communal bins at the corner store.
At some point, I started to save all my change, paying only with bills, and tossing the coins into a jar to, at the end of the year, roll them up in those brown paper sheets the bank would give you for free. There was an art to coin rolling, with the failure rate of 50% resulting in the collapse of the coin cylinder, spilling the metal discs across the table.
The game changer was the invention of the coin tube, which the bank would give out for free until they realized they could make money selling them. Later, banks would put automated coin counters beside the ATMs into which you could pour that jar of coins into and it acted like a reverse slot machine, doing all the work for you until someone realized some were miscounting by a few cents on the tens of dollars and launched a lawsuit which led to the demise of that.
Do I miss the days of standing behind someone trying to count out exact change for their purchase? Nope. Just tap and move on, dude.
If you haven’t hear yet, the US government voted on a bill that if passed would discontinue their penny, saving $56 million/year which is fiscally more responsible than firing government employees or ending life-saving aid programs**.
-Leon
*No, I never found it…
**I almost got through a whole post without a critique of the US government.
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Leon Stevens is a multi-genre author, composer, guitarist, songwriter, and an artist, with a Bachelor of Music and Education. He published his first book of poetry, Lines by Leon: Poems, Prose, and Pictures in January 2020, followed by a book of original classical guitar compositions, Journeys, and a short story collection of science fiction/post-apocalyptic tales called The Knot at the End of the Rope and Other Short Stories. His newest publications are the novella trilogy, The View from Here, which is a continuation of one of his short stories, a new collection of poetry titled, A Wonder of Words, and his latest sci-fi mystery, Euphrates Vanished.
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