Should the US make pennies from plastic?

All of them out side the US do.

Put me in the kill it group it doesn't do anything except make a poison readily available to children.

 

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We should just nix the cent.

No machine takes pennies, except for a penny smashing machine or an old penny bubble gum machine.

Everytime you pay for something, you get back pennies in your change.

You put all these pennies in a jar or bucket, and cash them in for bills.

You use these bills to buy stuff, and when you buy stuff, you get back pennies in your change.

Which you then stick in a jar.....

Pennies are just a pain.

Just round everything up to the nearest nickel. For cripe's sake, it's 4 cents....whoopt tee doo.

Everytime I buy something for 99 cents, like something off the dollar menu, a candy bar, a soda, etc, it comes to $1.09 (we have a penny tax in my area). If we nixed the penny, it would be $1.10. Pull out a dollar bill and a dime, and your done.

Speaking from someone who works a cash register, I hate it when older people make everyone in line wait while they dig out a few pennies. "Oh I think I put a few pennies here" (spends literally 5 minutes looking for them).

If you asked me, the whole mint needs an overhaul.

 

Penny slots are important entertainment for a lot of folks down in south Florida.

 

Unless you are in line at the supermarket (and in a hurry) and the old lady in front of you insists on using exact change to pay. It takes the average old lady at least 4 and 1/2 minutes to rummage thru her purse to find her wallet and scrounge around in her wallet for the exact change. Bonus points if it turns out she doesn't have enough and has to pay will a bill anyway. Super bonus points if it takes her another 5 minutes to put all the change back in her purse and schmooze with the cashier while doing so!

 

is it possible we need the cent for poorer countries to be able to exchange better?

 

Hence, the suggestion of running longer? Why even deal with the logistics of 300 million cents in an 8 hour shift. It's more feasible to run 10 machines for 10 months and pay the operators close to nothing. Have you worked in a high production injection molding facility? Like I said, they can be run for quite a while for close to nothing. Dump their cent equipment for new, injection molding equipment, and train the operators on 3 shifts, 24 hours a day. You'll hit that 300 million mark fairly quickly with little to no maintenence cost. Not to mention the profit you'd make from dumping equipment from the other mint. Again, making plastic cents would be a whole lot easier than striking blanks. Plastic costs nothing compared to metal, and can be pumped out much faster. The only real problem I see them facing would be the amount of errors injection molding can encounter. Far worse than metal-working, IMO.

I wasn't saying that they switch machines and resume production. I suggested a few cost effective measures be taken and it will clearly be more ecocomically feasible. Even so, I still say we continue with metal. I'll never store a jug of plastic, fiat, garbage.

+1 on the 2 cent pieces!

 

Really?
You went there? lol

 

Well played Geezer!!

 

BTW...

NO
Stop making them AND the Nickel. Round everything to the dime. And while your at it stop printing the Paper dollar too! Then we will use all those darn clad dollars we have.
One day we will admit the inflation that we have incurred by doing this but until then we still have the inflation we just are not admitting it!

 

Keep the penny, but only in mint sets and mint-sold rolls, so they command a rather large premium and are worth the money it costs to produce a worthless coin

 

Copperking, have you ever studied the production of a coining press? you mentioned in the first post that 10 machines were turning out half a million pieces each a week. Was that running 24/7 or an 8 hr day?

Lets assume they run very fast and that is from running them for an eight hour day five days a week. If so we can run it 24 hours a day with three shifts and make 1.5 milllion coins a week or 78 million coins per year with six man years of labor. (You said two men per machine so that is two per shift for three shifts or six man days per day) Now I don't know where people came up with that 300 million figure but the mints production is closer to an average of 3 billion coins per mint per year. So to make 3 billion coins at 78 million coins per machine per year you are going to need 39 machines per mint and it will take 234 man years of labor per year. (If I was wrong and the half million piece per week for the injection molder was with it running 24/7 then multiple the number of machines and man years needed by three.)

Now the coining presses they use today strike 750 coins per minute or 1,080,000 coins in a 24 hr shift That's 5.4 million coins a week or 280 million coins per year with 3 man years of labor. So how many presses do we need to make the 3 billion cents per year? 11 presses and 33 man years of labor.

If each person earns $50K per year the operators of the injection molding machines would cost $11.7 million to make $300 million in cents. The coining press costs $1.7 million in labor. So labor cost is much less and I would imagine an injection molding machine costs as much as a coining press so you have close to four times as much in machinery cost and need four times the floor space. (Not to mention they already have the coining presses)

The ideal solution would be to eliminate the cent, then they could switch those presses over to production of other coins and probably save more money by eliminating one full work shift or more (Currently the mint runs 24/7, eliminate the cent and they could probably satisfy the rest of their production running 16/5 or less.)

 

A lot of people criticize the money because it is not worth enough.

On the other hand, some people are upset because the money cost too much to produce and has too high a melt value.

There are a number of sides to the issue. But cheapy plastic pennies? This is the USA. If we can't afford to use metal (and we probably can't) then it's probably best to avoid the embarrassment of issuing plastic coins and just do away with the cent.

 

:desk:
Yes, running 24/7 like I said. Aside from government holiday's. 300 million is the amount of pennies? Did you even read the thread title, or did you just jump on the opportunity to shame someone online? Are you that bored, or that on edge? I'm confused. When was the last time you ran production numbers on injection molding machines? Don't tell me google is your best friend.
When did I say 2 men per machine? 2 tech's can maintain 20 machines running 24/7, easily. The operators are basically box packers and the fix small problems that are a regular occurance when IM'ing plastic. 2 of them can take care of 20 machines, also. That's 4 men on 20 machines, or 1:5, per 8 hour shift. California has a law that over 8 hours is overtime, so if you go to another state, you can run 12 hour shifts on regular pay. That's 8 men 24 hours a day, at bare minimum. You can bump up their pay or higher another new guy, and things will run smooth. You seem to imply that the goverment is going to be minting plastic money with the same old Battenfeld's we were making drippers with, in the same production model, haha. I think they'll buy more efficient, higher capacity molds. We only had 64 cavities per mold, when running at full capacity. I think they would shoot a little higher.:thumb:

Did you even read my post, or the title of the thread? I don't know what half of your arguement has to do with what I said, but I'm glad you've proven your math skills. I said plastic is cheaper to buy and process than metal. It requires no preparation other than refining, which is done cheap in the middle east. Other than that, it's a simple injection molding process which can be done by any bonehead for $30k a year, other than a couple of mold tech's to change out molds every now and again. Even that can be taught to the same bonehead and he'll do it for another 2 bucks an hour. I've seen it done in a mid-sized operation; with the mint's budget, it would be a cake walk to do cent pieces in plastic. Your whole example excludes the fact that you DON'T buy metal anymore, you DON'T melt, refine, and transport millions of tons of metal over and over again. You save money by purchasing a cheaper material, eliminating several preparation costs and CONSIDERABLY lowering transportation fees. Not to mention your whole example is about the mint in general. I believe this is about pennies? Why don't you try to positively contribute to a conversation, rather than simply make a post just to insult another's judgement.

I also disagree with you on the point of eliminating the cent. Why don't they eliminate dollar bills and replace them with all the left over dollar coins they have? How intelligent is it to make the most circulated bill in America out of cotton pulp? Do you know how much longer a dollar coin lasts than a cotton bill?

Sodude: You're right about the plastic money. Like I said, it would be easy to do, but, like my first post says, I don't think we should. Plastic doesn't carry enough value for someone to save, so why would we create a currency that uses it? Like someone said before, the whole mint needs an overhaul. So much money could be saved on pointless things that we'd be able to keep what we like, while staying economically feasible.

:loud:
Nix the dollar bill, replace with the dollar coin, keep the cent pieces!

 

Dump the penny? The only drawback I can think about is state sales tax which is often 6,7,8 percent and would screw up the system if we didn't have pennies. Other than that, I'm sure everyone could price everything to the even nickel just fine. I get really irritated with the darn things - they fill up the change tray in my car and you can't use them in parking meters anymore.

Doug

 

Speaking of which, looking in the "Significant U.S. Patterns" section in my Redbook I found out that before they decided on the zinc plated steel configuration of 1943 cents they experimented with a plastic cent. Just my .

 

Good piece of info. I ordered myself a Redbook for Christmas; it seems to be the, "tell all," of U.S. coinage.
Does it say why they decided for zinc rather than plastic? My guess is the amount of wear a Zincoln can take v.s. a plastic cent.

 

Pennies should be 100% biodegradable and then they can just be taken outside the mint and dumped in the nearest park or green space for use as fertilizer.

A lot of people mistakingly believe the cost of pennies if primarily caused by the cost of the material of which they are made but this cost pales in significance to the cost of transportin, handling, and using these currently highly toxic slugs. They should be recalled for proper disposal. The banks should offer a bounty of a nickel for each one or most will end up in landfills and contaminate the water for decades.

 

My figuring shows that the USA has added nearly two full zeroes to the Dollar over the past century, this by using the price of gold as the constant (remember that the USA was on the gold standard into the 1930s) and 100 years ago, for example, a decent room in a downtown hotel was $2/night (now $150-200) and a very nice room was $3 (now $250-300); a decent beer in a bar was maybe 5¢ (now $5 - or more!); a good restaurant meal for the family was maybe 50¢ (now $40-50), and so forth). The 1¢ of the early 20th century is nearly $1 today!

Sad to say it, but the quarter is now just barely useful for any form of real commerce and all of the coins below it are now only useful for parsing sales taxes. Where I work, I don't even use coins below 25¢ for making change anymore.

Drop the lower coins and just round sales taxes.

Mike

 

Make 2 cent pieces again, Problem solved

 

Well, decidedly 'Third World' and very poor Ecuador has used the USA Dollar as their local scrip for about a decade now and even THEY don't use 'pennies'. The smallest coin in normal daily use there is the 5¢.

Mike