Elon's looking at the penny

And how does he make a perfect fit? Sorry, just trying to see the rationalization as to how he benefits the American people more than himself.

Actually, please don't answer that. I feel we are headed in the completely wrong direction with this thread.

 

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Not trying to be political, but him trying to eliminate the penny may be the worst thing to happen. Pennies may be worth more than 1 cent in melt value, but there are still billions left in circulation. I personally estimate that at least 25 billion are circulating, which is a large lot. I'm gonna get a little mathematical.

Trying to take out pennies is probably something they are doing to try and make money, to where the penny market may be cornered. The thing is, 25 billion pennies is 10 million boxes. That is approximately 75 million inches by 40 million inches, or 6.25 million feet x 3.33 million feet. Multiply that, and it takes up 208,333,331,250,000 feet - that is over 208 trillion square feet. They could try, but no matter how much money they got, they ain't gonna have the room.

 

Lol, I’m reading the first issue of Numismatic News (bought both the physical copy for Dad and the digital copy for me), came across this and thought of this exact post. I have a couple rolls of wheaties i made somewhere

 

I doubt they’ll do actually do it, i see it as pure rhetoric. You summed it up pretty well without really getting political. It just wouldn’t make any logical sense.

 

I'm trying to figure out who El on is?

 

If that wasn’t sarcasm: Elon Musk.

 

WalMart has 37 million customers a day. If the cent was eliminated, and the average customer gets rounded up by 3 cents, that's a million dollars more a day. Let's face it, Elon, the Waltons, etc don't give a crap how much it costs to mint a penny.

 

Oh sorry, I don't wear cologne thank you.

 

The company formerly known as Jarden Zinc Products is the provider of zinc cent blanks (based in Greenville, Tenn.). They’re also the company that electroplates the substrate with 20 micron of copper. In May 2019, the organization was purchased by One Rock Capital Partners, a private equity firm. JZP changed their name to Artazn LLC in 2020. During the FY2024 they spent $140k lobbying Congress to keep the cent in circulation.
To keep Musk from convincing Congress from nixing the cent and killing their golden goose, they might have to borrow the line from the movie Jaws, "We're gonna need a bigger lobby coffer"

 

Then pretty much the same as how the Morgan dollars got coined.

 

Any Canadians have any input concerning changes after removing the 1 cent coin? It can go away as far as I am concerned.

 

Better check your math here.

(A hint: if you lay out a hundred pennies in rows to make a square, how many are on each side?)

 

Math says ten times as much.

But do you understand that rounding goes in both directions? If your total is $1.02, it would get rounded down to $1, not up to $1.05.

 

Not necessarily - breakage, absent of Federal guidelines, would more than likely be determined by State Law with a possibility of the State itself claiming all breakage as their money. Sort of transforming the breakage into a hidden sales (transaction) tax.

While there is no doubt the US Government would save money doing away with the production of the cent. I think the cost savings is probably overstated. All the allocable expenses such as overhead, indirect labor and other such non-variable fixed cost absorbed by cent production would have to be absorbed by the production of the other denominations causing the per unit cost for producing these go up accordingly.

Then there is the cost incurred by the general public due to eliminating the cent. Such as updating cash registers, payroll systems and such that are now programed based on the premise that 1 cent exists.

 

Still, with trillions of cents in circulation it would take a while before they were phased out if planned properly. If new-metal cents (aluminum?) were chosen they would continue in the American mainstream indefinitely.

What I think is important is to stop the bleeding. Common sense needs to be injected into this calculation somewhere.

 

The penny can go. Or, what about making them plastic? There'd be the counterfeiting problem, I guess though, if someone would even bother.

The Romans eventually got rid of low-value denominations. Why can't we?

*But, due to devastating inflation and then perhaps deflation, a trickle of gold coins were about the only real currency at the end.

However given the long timespan, their currency held up a lot better than ours.

 

I'm trying to remove myself from this thread, but I'll reply once more.

Do you really think that the greedy corporations won't engineer their prices so that they will get as much gain as possible? Greedflation is a thing. They will maximize their profits at the expense of everyone else. After all, they get to set their own price... so what's to stop them?

 

Obviously there won't be any "rounding." $2.91 will become $2.95. $2.96 will become $3.00. All other things being equal of course.