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.
You don't need a nickel if you get rid of the quarter; they are basically useless now; you have to feed at least two to even get air for your tire. We will still need the dime for change; it would become the new "penny". The dollar coin would finally find its place and become the new "quarter", as long as we get rid of the $1 bill as well. Everything would be priced to the tenths place, no rounding, we would be good for the next 50 years at least.
That's the thing. Many items in stores end with .49 or .98 or .99 -- that might be where they got that number. But, still, the main point (or my main point) is this: if I get items that are rounded up two cents 100 times per year, that's only $2. Compare that to indulging in one additional pizza per year . . . hard to get excited about it.
Halting cent production increased the Mint’s per‑unit cost for every other coin it produced. The same would happen if they did the same with the nickel.
But nobody wants to get rid of the quarter. It's by far the biggest workhorse of all our circulating change.
Would it, though? I mean, as long as there are fixed costs that get apportioned across all coins minted, sure, cutting out any one type of coin increases the "cost" of the others - but that seems like a disingenuous accounting/reporting approach.
Well, Uncle Sam is probably right to eliminate the penny, but Indiana, Illinois and Kentucky will have some say in that, because those are old domiciles of Honest Abe. What I would like to see, both in the US and here min Canada, is to get rid of the 'mil", which is 1/10 of a cent and 1/1000 of dollar. The only place it's used now is gas stations and will always be .9. Back when I was growing up (50's early 60's) to drive and there would be periodic "gas wars" where stations tried to undercut other stations and you'd see .6 or .4 or .7. Now, up here in Canada and when I go to the VA in Buffalo, you can't find a station that is anything but .9. Why try to eliminate the penny when the mil is still used?
If gasoline were only sold in whole gallons, I might agree. But the pumps around here measure down to the thousandth of a gallon, so any price is going to be multiplied by some fraction and then rounded. If a gas station wants to price their gas at π dollars per gallon, it's no skin off my nose. In fact, I'd fill up there - it's a great price, even if they rounded it up to $3.142.
As if any gas pump measures accurately to the thousandth of a gallon. There must be some history behind gas pricing but I'm too lazy to look. I can't think of anything else that was ever priced in tenths of a cent. We used to have the half cent and prices accordingly, but tenths?
At $3.99 9/10’s people round it due to yo $3.99 per gallon and it’s not $4.00 or over. It’s a mind game. An item in the market is $3.99 and that’s thought of as $4.00 but it’s okay. It’s a mind game and with one item it’s not acceptable and with another item it’s fine and dandy. Been that way my entire life and I hear it so much I can only laugh at the way we think.
Quarters are not the workhorse any longer. Most coin operated machines take dollar coins, some only dollar coins, and if they do take quarters you have to pump six or eight just to get a washing machine, dryer, car wash vacuum or sprayer to even start. We are fixated on quarters the same way we were with cents, and they have as much logical use today as the cents do. Get rid of them and finally stop with the umpteen varieties every year, please!
