Isn't tis trading 1 problem for another - seems kinda pointless - being the US mint loses more money on a per coin basis producing a nickel than it did producing a cent.
Eliminating the cent shouldn't have any effect on the demand for nickels, though. On average, you'll need one nickel to make change 50% of the time, just as you do now. It seems like a lot of people are still dreaming of buying one or two pieces of candy at a penny each, and mad about having to pay a nickel instead. Pretty sure that's not a big slice of the economy at this point.
Very funny Jeff - the last thing I bought for less than $1 was a cup of yogurt for 59¢ about six months ago; they were on sale and I would have bought more but that was the only one in stock and I really needed some yogurt.
Yeah, and it's still worth less than a third of what the half-cent could buy when it was retired. But if you want dimes and quarters to keep circulating, you're going to need a five-cent denomination, silly though it is. I've argued for discontinuing the cent, nickel, and dime; at this point, even if you're looking for a trivial "token" amount of money, a quarter is the only coin people take seriously. You can't stick a dime in a shopping cart at Aldi, and you can't feed anything but quarters to the car washes and laundromats I've used in recent memory. If we are going to keep the nickel, it makes sense to change the composition. It should be changed to steel or aluminum. It should not be changed to plated zinc. No circulating coin should be made of plated zinc.
The tour guide at the Denver mint put it this way: "We lose money on the cent and even more on the nickel, the dime sort of breaks even, but all of those losses are made up for with seigniorage for the quarter. So overall the mint sees a profit." Whether that's still good or bad is debatable, but it shows that just looking at production costs of a single coin in isolation is arguably too narrow of a scope.
