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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;Conder101, post: 2455295, member: 66&quot;]How many cent shortages have you lived through?&nbsp; I&#039;ve been through at least three.&nbsp; And in every case as the cents started getting scarce the cents first got hoarded, and then businesses and banks started offering premiums up to as much as 25% to try and get people to turn loose of their hoards.&nbsp; It didn&#039;t work.&nbsp; Businesses had to resort to handing out pieces of candy instead of cents, and some did start rounding.&nbsp; And this was during periods when the Mint was still striking cents around the clock. What happens when they are NOT striking them?</p><p><br /></p><p>The time from when the shortages first started being noticed, to the premiums, to the candy, and then rounding was about four to five months.&nbsp; You also have the problem that when something starts to get scarce, people start hoarding it, even when premiums are offered, in the hopes of cashing in on even greater premiums in the future.&nbsp; So a shortage tends to feed on itself.&nbsp; If a shortage lasts long enough that many businesses start rounding, they stop trying to get cents.&nbsp; When that happens demand drops and the premiums dry up.&nbsp; Then even if they dump their hoards on the banks, there isn&#039;t a lot of incentive for the business that have gotten used to rounding to stop.&nbsp; They still don&#039;t try to order cents and the surplus coming into the banks just gets shipped back to the Fed.</p><p><br /></p><p>When Canada discontinued their cent most of them disappeared within about a year.</p><p><br /></p><p>Back in 1942 the country was faced with a cent shortage.&nbsp; People offered premiums, they appealed to their patriotism to turn in their cent hoards to help the war effort.&nbsp; Remember this was WWII and patriotism was running sky high. Recirculate your old copper cents so we won&#039;t have to make new ones. The appeals failed, and we got the steel cent.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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