When will the penny be retired?

In countries where cash totals are rounded - yes, I understand you don't care - that is the cash register's job. The single items are scanned by the cashier or customer, at the end the total is displayed, say 27.33. If you choose the cash payment option, that will automatically be rounded to 27.35 (if the total was 27.32, it would be rounded to 27.30). If you pay using a card or phone, the total is not rounded. Does not take a rocket scientist ...

Christian

 

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Having owned several registers and having hired employees to use them, the register is only as accurate as the numbers entered into them. I have had employees enter $10 for a $1 bill given to them and just because the register said so, they gave change back for a ten. Or even worse is they enter $100 for a ten. Then on the flip side, a customer gives them $100 and they enter ten and the fight ensues. Bar code scanners are only as accurate as the employee who entered the data. If people paid attention instead of believing that machines make no mistakes, they would notice that 2 out of ten prices from the scanner, differ from that advertised on the shelf.

 

I pick up every penny I see too. I'm not even saying I want to see it go, just that it seems inevitable. And just because it was no longer being minted doesn't mean it would suddenly be gone altogether or not be legal tender anymore. The phase out process would take years if not DECADES after the minting of the last one due to the Billions that are in circulation today. Also I'm certain that there would be POS programs that would do the rounding for the mathematically inept graduates you speak of.

 

"Would you like fries with that?"

 

I'd say one year, maybe two at the most, and six months wouldn't surprise me.

 

It really just depends on if stores refuse to take them or not. I wouldn't be surprised if people still had them and went to spend them 10 years after they ceased being minted if they still retain full status as legal tender at that point.

 

More cents are sitting in jars and cans and rolls than are in circulation.
Most transactions today do not even involve cash anymore. If you were to stop minting this coin, it would take many years to use up the billions that are already in circulation. It doesn't pay to hoard billions of zinc cents, because in 20 years they might be worth 2 cents. That's ridiculous. Despite the rapid corrosion of this coin they could stop making them tomorrow, and there will still be billions of cents left over when we switch to electronic digital currency or some other absurd thing. The cents will not run out.

 

Strange since, I cannot think of one single reason why a store would not accept the coins.

 

I can think of a couple, but they're outweighed by the fact that the coins would still be legal tender.

 

Thursday. During lunch.

 

The penny will probably end when it contains more than a penny's worth of zinc. If you can get $110 for the zinc in $100 face value of pennies, they'll be turned into zinc ingots pretty quickly. Get your $110 dollars from the scrap dealer. Use $100 to get more pennies. Repeat. Similar thing happened with silver in the 60's.

There is no metal that is significantly cheaper than zinc that is suitable for coinage. Steel is cheaper but presents problems in terms of die wear, rusting and magnetism. We might see a return of steelies, but I doubt it. Lead is cheaper but too soft and is toxic. All other metals cost about the same or more.

Plastic and natural fiber (wood, paper, cotton, etc.) are probably unacceptable.

The penny could be shrunk in size, but it's already pretty small.

Just a matter of time until inflation of metal prices kills it.

Cal

 

Thank you so much for the most logical and well thought out answer I could ask for to this question.
Also the bit about the possibility of reducing its size made me think of the novelty "Nixon Penny" haha

 

According to my crude math that escews any copper plating in the equation the break even point is $1.81~$1.82 per pound. Interestingly enough....
http://www.infomine.com/investment/metal-prices/zinc/all/

 

I believe smelting zinc is not going to happen.

"Molten zinc will release seriously harmful fumes. Lookup Metal Fume Fever for more details - but it's a real and serious risk. You can get 'minor' cases that last weeks from just welding galvanized steel, let along having molten zinc."

 

Not sure if you are serious, but will pretend you are. First melting and smelting aren't the same thing although the former occurs during the latter. Hot dipped galvanized steel wouldn't exist without molten zinc. The workers in galvanizing plants are around swimming pool size vats of the stuff. Zinc fumes occur when zinc is boiled which will occur when galvanized steel is arc welded or cut with an acetylene torch, both of which use temperatures way above the melting point of zinc. And yeah, zinc fumes are little bit more unhealthy than the air in Beijing, maybe.

Finally, when did environmental danger prevent a significant proportion of the population going after otherwise easy lucre?

Cal

 

I just quoted something that I read on the net. There's no reason to be condescending.

 

Usually when we mortals refer to "melt value" on any coins, gold, silver, copper, whatever, we usually don't mean we expect to melt them ourselves, a messy and dangerous endeavor no matter what metal. For that matter, with pennies, it's still illegal to melt them anyway, and I believe illegal to export more than $5 face value out of the country in any one shipment.

When the penny goes away in the US? When it has lost its cultural charm perhaps, which should be soon. Personally, I'm 62 and as fond of them as I am, I could really not care if they ditched it. It's a nuisance coin at this stage of our economic history. Canada dropped the hammer on the one cent piece in 2013? They discontinued the $1 bill in 1989 also. Times are a changing.

With modern circulating coins having no intrinsic precious metal value, I wouldn't be surprised to see the US MINT start selling corporate sponsorships on the reverses perhaps, NIKE at US FITTY CENT pieces and some such lunacy. The older I get, the older and older the coins I seem to buy...

 

Sorry if it came off condescending; I didn't intend it that way. Residue of my teaching days I guess.

Cal

 

Stores will not stop accepting them, but the cent is pretty much a one way coin, Mint - bank - Merchant - Customer - Change jar. If the stop making them the merchants will not be able to get them from the banks to make change, Fairly quickly this will result in rounding to the nearest five cents. Yes there will be a small amount of cents moving in the reverse direction Jar - Customer - Merchant, but at first those will go right back to customer and jar. There will not be enough of that back flow to allow the merchants to be able to make excat change and stop the eventual rounding.

Once the rounding occurs then the merchants don't need the cents. Yes they will still take them if they come in, but then they will be a one way trip in the other direction. Since the merchant no longer needs them to make change they will go back to the banks. and since the merchants don't need them they will not be requesting them from the banks. They will pile up there and then be shipped back to the Federal Reserve. And this reverse flow will still be a trickle. Face it who is going to go out an buy something with rolls of cents? Sure some jars will be deposited at the banks, but if the merchants are no longer requesting cents where are they going to go?

Final thing, during the early stages where they are still being used to make change and the merchants are desperate to get them, the average man on the street gets the idea that cents are becoming rare, and they WILL start hoarding them. Thus making it even more difficult for merchants to make change and accelerating the change to five cent rounding. (At first merchants and banks will offer premiums for rolls of cents, but that will not shake many loose, and may even increase hoarding hoping for even higher premiums. I've lived through two cent shortages and seen this happen, and that was with the mint still making cents.)

Remember the mint isn't making six to nine billion new cents every year because the economy has expanded so that we need that many more, they make them because all the ones they made last year have disappeared. (That is a bit of an exaggeration, but the average household of four only has to put aside, lose, or throw away four coins per week to consume the entire annual production of the mint, and then some.)

 

And then there's the Federal Statute which forbids the melting of current coinage to recover the metals........

http://moneyweek.com/why-its-now-illegal-to-melt-down-us-coins/

http://www.numismaticnews.net/buzz/cent-nickel-melting-still-illegal