Abolishing the Cent: new developments

I worked a job where I had to get up at 2:30 am in order to get to work on time... did that for a month before I had to quit for the sake of both my physical and mental health.

 

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Okay, confession time: I thought the connection between time changes (especially "spring forward") and increased mortality was pretty ironclad. But I'm seeing some recent papers challenging that conclusion.

I still think the bad effects from the time change outweigh its benefits, but I won't be asserting that as fact any more until I've got better support for it.

 

Talk about a major hijacking - makes one wonder how short of an attention span people have.

Odd story. I went to a local grocery store to pick up a few things, went to pay at the self-checkout and they had notices at all of the kiosks asking to use exact change if possible. My total was $16.03 so I put in a $20 to see what would happen. It paid back four $1s, so they lost 3¢. There was an item that they were out of stock there, so I went to a smaller store located about 3 miles away, and when I checked out there, they had no notices, and I got two cents back in my change. For grins and giggles, I went to customer service and asked if I could get some rolled cents and they had no problem selling me two rolls; probably should have bought more but didn't want to push it.

 

Yeah not really seeing this as a "the sky is falling" kind of issue. I think a lot of people are just making it out to be more of a thing than it really is.

 

I think some big businesses are trying to get ahead of the curve here, and I have no problem with that. I have to imagine they've been itching to get rid of cents anyhow, just because they're a time sink.

 

Depends. Are we talking about paperwork (attention span near zero for me), or about a pet peeve (attention span basically unlimited)?

 

More anecdotal nonsense...

Lately (say over the last couple of months) I've been receiving in my change significantly more dimes and significantly fewer nickels and cents than previously. Quarters are holding steady.

3 thoughts on this...
1) Penny shortage (whether real or imagined) and humanity's predilection for being lazy has driven cashiers to the point of just being too lazy to count out the exact change - "do what ever it takes to minimize mathing and minimizing the number of coins they have to pick up".
2) Mintage of nickels is way down this year compared to previous years??? Is this true? So the real crisis is a shortage of nickels!!!
3) Rounding neither increases nor decreases the average number of coins received in change. I have a spreadsheet where I worked this out...but it's coming up on nap time so bugger off and be quiet.

 

(Shhhh - tiptoeing around the sleeping corgi; I think he got high-centered on a fold in the carpet and ran out of energy trying to get off).

Cent / nickel production since 2015
2015 - 1¢ = 9.3 billion / 5¢ = 1.6 billion
2016 - 1¢ = 9.1 billion / 5¢ = 1.5 billion
2017 - 1¢ = 8.6 billion / 5¢ = 1.4 billion
2018 - 1¢ = 7.8 billion / 5¢ = 1.3 billion
2019 - 1¢ = 7.0 billion / 5¢ = 1.1 billion
2020 - 1¢ = 7.6 billion / 5¢ = 1.6 billion
2021 - 1¢ = 7.9 billion / 5¢ = 1.6 billion
2022 - 1¢ = 6.4 billion / 5¢ = 1.5 billion
2023 - 1¢ = 4.5 billion / 5¢ = 1.4 billion
2024 - 1¢ = 3.2 billion / 5¢ = 0.1 billion
2021 - 1¢ = 1.3 billion / 5¢ = 0.9 billion (to date)

Interesting to see that cents have been dropping steadily since 2022, well before the command to stop making them. Other than the reduction last year nickels have held steady.