I’ve already used up too much of your bandwidth complaining about the uselessness of pennies, but allow me to share with you a wonderful vlog rant by John Green on the many, many reasons why the penny (and the nickel, too) should be abolished. He is good.
The Best Anti-Penny Rant Ever?
TAGS: pennies
and 
. You can also watch it on 
Nice kismet that the ad that pops up during the video is pimping “Penny Stocks”. Ha!
[partial repost here] The 1909-designed Lincoln penny will be 100 years old next year. It’s time to replace it with a George W. Bush penny, made of a much baser alloy, with his least flattering portrait on the front and a selection of his most idiotic pronunciamentos on the back-
Some words of wisdom for the back-
“We’ll put food on the family.”
“You disarm, or we will.”
“I inherited a recession, I am ending on a recession.”
“I’ve been in the Bible every day since I’ve been the president.”
The list is endless.
This would do four things-
1) People will still remember this fool 10,000 years from now;
2) People will collect them all over the world;
3) The treasury would make tons of money;
4) And the world might forgive us just a little.
Couldn’t people just stop using them? That strategy seems to have sounded the death-knell for dollar coins:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-10783019
Let’s not forget those insanely wasteful $1 bills which should be replaced with $1 coins.
J.Ja
The most perfect argument of the banning of peenies (and, nickels) I have ever heard.
But, I want the U. S. mint to keep them in circulation…
Why?
Yes, for sentimental reasons!
Ok people, there seems to be a lot of misunderstanding here. Let me explain how the elimination of small coins works in Denmark, where the smallest denomination of the Danish Kroner is 50 øre (øre = cents, but 50 øre = ~0.08 USD)
Sales tax is added before hand and is included in all prices.
If you pay with a credit/debit card you pay the exact amount.
If you pay in cash, you pay the nearest rounded amount.
And no, it is NOT hard to add the sales tax before hand! It’s a simple formula, or you can just do a bit of guess and check with the prices to see what is actually being earned. Seriously, are people here that bad at math?
PS. Yes, this does mean you could “game” the system by paying with a credit card when the amount would be rounded up and in cash when it would be rounded down. As far as I know, nobody bothers here, it’s just not enough money.
To commenter #1:
Here’s how it works. Everything is still priced the way it is now.
Your total at the register gets rounded to the nearest increment of 5c. In practice, this means things that end in 1c, 2c, 6c and 7c are rounded down, and things that end in 3,c, 4,c, 8c and 9c are rounded up. You actually do break even in the long run. Australia has been doing it for years and it’s actually saved them money.
I also imagine that electronic transactions would still use ‘odd-numbered’s sales amounts, since you don’t need pennies for Amazon.
To those to wonder how the rounding is done – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swedish_rounding
Plenty of other countries have made the switch just fine. Note you only have to round cash transactions – electronic transfers like credit cards, etc don’t have to worry about the cost of pennies.