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The last-ever penny will be minted today in Philadelphia

(www.cnn.com)
460 points andrewl | 9 comments | 12 Nov 25 16:10 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source | bottom
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Night_Thastus ◴[12 Nov 25 18:13 UTC] No.45903609[source]▶
I'd say screw it, get rid of nickles and dimes as well. Quarters can stay, for now.

It's a complete waste of money and time continuing to mint such low-value currency. It can't be used for just about anything.

Unfortunately, I do see the problem with part of this. For a handful of items where it does matter, it will force people to use cards more if they want to avoid rounding. And the card providers already have a choke-hold on retailers, and the whole thing is basically a scheme that funnels money from the poor to the wealthy via interest and fees on the consumer, interchange fees, and rewards programs.

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bbarnett ◴[12 Nov 25 18:51 UTC] No.45904256[source]▶
I know you're referencing more than pennies, but to speak to pennies, I find the current rounding noise in the US to be weird. Likely, it's just more of the media, talking heads, and youtube personalities trying to turn a nothing into something, story.

Back when we did it in Canada, I don't recall a single person I knew concerned about penny rounding. Everyone was sick of pennies. No one cared. Everyone was happy. And the math seems fair enough:

https://www.budget.canada.ca/2012/themes/theme2-info-eng.htm...

Basically, if something is $1.01 or $1.02, you round down. If it's $1.03 or $1.04, you round up. Rounding is to be applied after all taxes are paid, etc.

Of course, there was also central guidance and, well, everyone just followed it. It's called "having a society".

People blathering on about stores fixing the rounding are morons, there's no way to do so if you buy more than one item. No one gets ripped off with the above method. In the end, it just works out.

And really, who cares?! It's a penny.

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quantified ◴[12 Nov 25 19:10 UTC] No.45904655[source]▶
When the US attempted to transition to the metric system, gas stations raised their prices per unit volume and the American consumer was convinced that the metric system was bad. I have family that think metric is bad because some fringe people thought there should be 10 hours in a day and 100 minutes in an hour, also something like 10 months a year, and the whole thing is bad because some awkward ideas were floated.

Here, it's a question of resolution, with a proven history that transitions screw the consumer, though maybe it won't be so. We're ok with arbitrary hundredths of a dollar, why were we not at thousandths? The American half cent disappeared a long time ago. You still need to include the cents in a tax bill that runs into the millions of dollars.

It's just an awkward stage in inflation. Eventually a US dollar will be worth what a Zimbabwean dollar was, and we won't have $100 bills anymore.

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1. burningChrome ◴[12 Nov 25 19:32 UTC] No.45905083[source]▶
>> and we won't have $100 bills anymore.

Heard some pundits on the radio talking about the elimination of the penny and one of them who worked at the Secret Service as an analyst talked about why the US paper money only goes to $100 bills. He said it was to reduce criminals and illicit activity and criminals having to store it.

He related the story of Pablo Escobar's brother or cousin who was the accountant for the cartel. He said they were losing billions of dollars every year because of various kinds of attrition like rats chewing up the money, it getting too wet and disintegrating. They were losing so much because they had to store it and that wasn't always the best because they had so much of it on hand which seemed to lend credence to his story.

So if you were to get rid of the $100 bills that would further erode the ability of criminals to store so much of it.

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2. drdec ◴[12 Nov 25 19:36 UTC] No.45905165[source]▶
I'm pretty sure the OP was talking about a far future where a $100 bill is worth less than the current penny
3. tempestn ◴[12 Nov 25 19:39 UTC] No.45905202[source]▶
Though I think the parent means, eventually in the (hopefully) distant future, we'll get rid of the $100 bill because it will be worth too little.
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4. emodendroket ◴[12 Nov 25 19:50 UTC] No.45905403[source]▶
The 500-euro bill is being phased out for similar reasons. Though it's worth noting a 100-dollar bill was worth more than twice what it is today when Pablo Escobar died.
5. 542458 ◴[12 Nov 25 19:56 UTC] No.45905510[source]▶
I'm not really sure about "He said it was to reduce [...] criminals having to store it". Storage shouldn't be a huge problem - IIRC you can pack about a hundred million onto a standard pallet. Even for Escobar, who is THE outlier here, and assuming he's holding 100% of it in cash, that's about 300 pallets which easily fits into a normal warehouse. If you've got that much money it shouldn't be impossible to keep a warehouse like that clean and dry.

Now, "illicit activity" more broadly speaking checks out to me. The EU stopped printing the 500 euro note because it was primarily used for illegal transactions and money laundering.

6. quantified ◴[12 Nov 25 19:59 UTC] No.45905557[source]▶
When the $1000 bill was retired, a loaf of bread cost a couple cents. There was indeed a push to purge them during the drug scares of the late 20th century. A suitcase of $1000 bills is far sexier than one of $100 bills. It really was porting them.

With bitcoin, it's moot.

A $100 is basically a tank of gas and a sandwich in CA.

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7. quantified ◴[12 Nov 25 20:14 UTC] No.45905821[source]▶
Exactly. Like with the Zimbabwe dollars being printed in billion-dollar denominations, $100 is irrelevant then
8. robocat ◴[12 Nov 25 21:20 UTC] No.45906885[source]▶
> rats chewing up the money

Profit for the US government. Fixed by plastic bills.

Every $ printed but never redeemed is a significant profit (assuming other costs are low like printing).

Especially yummy when countries just want to hoard the currency - same as selling stamps that are never used:

  estimate the stock of U.S. currency circulating in Argentina ... U.S. currency inflows during 1988-1992 totaled $20.8 billion
https://www.federalreserve.gov/pubs/ifdp/1993/460/ifdp460.pd...
9. nine_k ◴[12 Nov 25 21:20 UTC] No.45906893[source]▶
In 1934 the dollar was worth approximately 24x more than in 2025. A cheap loaf of bread is about $2 here in NYC, so it would be about 8¢ at the time.

On one hand, the difference between 2¢ and 8¢ looks completely inconsequential now. OTOH it's a four-fold difference.