The Pennies Ending Is Now Here

Those kind of drugs Medicare will pay for!

 

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I'm remembering an old science fiction novel by Rudy Rucker. One of the main characters was a "pheezer", short for "freaky geezer". In the novel, Florida had basically been ceded to them, and they were mostly content to stay high and listen to 60s music. It hits different for me today...

 

Blows my mind that with billions of pennies in circulation that suddenly banks are not supplying them to vendors. Maybe it's due to the fact they are nearly worthless, people unintentionally hoard them in jugs? A lot of banks quit offering coin counters and the Coinstars are one armed bandits.

 

You can get 100% of your money from Coin Star if you don't take the cash option. But yes it is egregious to take 50 dollars from someone and give then a voucher to get back 44 dollars (or w/e) in cash. This is why I just slam the self serve machines with change. I get 100% that way. As for the penny, Canada stopped producing pennies a while back and there's no rioting there over it. If people would redeem their pennies, there would be enough in circulation to last a very long time. Most people now don't even use cash for anything.

 

I think some are in a toilet paper like panic over the cent.

On Youtube i have seen some local TV reports saying the .Gov stopped producing last month and now banks and merchants have run out.

Wait, anyone who ever looked at their change would know that finding a current year cent has always been rather rare. Most coins in circulation are older. How can they all disappear in a month?

 

I always heard 75% of the school age population aren't good at math, and the other two-thirds just don't care.

 

I go to the bank every couple of weeks and get 2 rolls each of quarters, dimes, nickels and cents, gather for a couple of years and then do the search. Today the young lady gave me my loot, and I asked if they were running out of pennies yet and she said that the shipment they had just received had none, so just now starting to hit us here.

I laugh thinking about "panic over pennies", like what happened with the TP. I honestly believe that most people won't notice and even fewer will care. I wouldn't care at all other than not being able to get them to search through.

 

No profit for Brinks, Loomis etc supplying heavy obsolete coinage. There, I said it

 

It's not a panic, it's a shortage. You have to remember that in order to get people to use coins that have no value at all they have to be "pushed" into circulation. You have to give people who use cash and hate a pennies a handful on them when purchases end in a 1 or 6 and many just throw them in the trash. They need a steady flow just to compensate for wasting. These things virtually evaporate in air and some dates are issued already tarnished. Pennies are dirty and leak oxides wherever they go. Of course they're disappearing. The wealthy has eaten its share and now we take out the trash.

 

Yes, and the idea of getting a new smaller easier to handle cent was thought to be great. Not to mention they would also be used to redeem all the worn out slick spanish/mexican silver coins at full value. Made the new flying eagle cent very popular.

Banks aren't supplying them becasue they can't get them And the people are "hoarding" them because they are worthless and not worth their time to round them up for redeeming. Since the people are returning them to the banks, the banks can't get enough. Most of the coins a bank puts into circulation come from coins that are brought into the banks by the customers. When they don't bring enough in they have to get new coins from the mint. Well now the mint isn't going to be supplying them. Not enough coming back and no new from the mint means very quickly the bank doesn't have the cents to supply to the businesses. If the businesses can't get them they will try a couple things, but eventually they will resort to rounding.

Once rounding starts there will be even less cents going back to the banks, and the businesses then stop even trying to get cents from the bank. With no one asking for them the banks will start send those that come in back to the Fed. The whole process feeds on itself and quickly the cent disappears from circulation completely

 

I'd argue that they essentially disappeared from circulation a long time ago. What you described in that first quote is a one-way flow, not circulation.

I guess I'm wrong, though, if people talk about stamps "circulating". Do they? (I've never been a stamp collector, so I don't know the terminology.)

 

Pretty easy with stamps. If it's postmarked or licked, it's circulated.

Some of the contentions here specific to "hoarding" cents aren't accurate in my personal experience. All of my change goes into jars, not just cents, and when I roll and dump them back into circulation, it's all of the denominations. I see very few people pulling out their change purse anymore, so I think a lot of people do this. Maybe a few have a specific "penny jar", but to me anything under a dollar is worthless to carry around and it's all coin jar material.