The last-ever penny will be minted today in Philadelphia

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.

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.

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.

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.