The last-ever penny will be minted today in Philadelphia

The linked article raises a few problems that the US could have with that solution:

> Four states - Delaware, Connecticut, Michigan and Oregon - as well as numerous cities, including New York, Philadelphia, Miami and Washington, DC, require merchants to provide exact change.

> Kwik Trip, a family-owned convenience store chain that operates in the Midwest, decided to round down cash purchases in stores where it hasn’t been able to find pennies.

They're rounding all cash transactions down to the nearest nickel, so an average of 2 cents per transaction, 3.4 million customers, gives me $68,000 assuming each "customer" makes a single transaction per year. If they mean that there are 20 million unique customers, not 20m transactions, then the a long tail of customers who make frequent small transactions in cash could make their claim check out.

If we make the maximally pessimistic assumption that every cash transaction would require rounding down four cents, that's 68,000 customers per year times four cents, which is $136,000 per year.

A more reasonable assumption that half of transactions require rounding down cuts that in half, I suppose.

20m customers * 17% * 4 cents * 'x' transactions per customer = $136,000 * x

I suppose this makes some sense. In a worst case situation, if every customer makes 10-20 transactions per year, and they always round down the maximum possible amount, they would lose millions per year.

They must mean unique customers, not customer transactions.

They have about 878 stores, according to Wikipedia, so if it was transactions, each store would only see about 62 transactions per day, which is way too low.

I get $20,400 (20m * 17% * 40% * 0.015). But that's still nothing for a company that does 20 million POS transactions a year.

What's more contemptible: that CNN refused to spend the 30 seconds that it would take to do the math; or that it interviewed a "spokesman" that also didn't spend 30 seconds to do the math, and was sure that nobody would check?

This is the kind of article that should be written by AI (or not written, really.) If you completely fictionalized the empty interviews, nothing would be lost.

Maybe the "spokesman" has been told to angle for a government subsidy for the inconvenience of losing pennies? And from a gas station, which add that goofy fraction of a cent at the end of their pricing.

> everyone gets pennies as change but few carry them around let alone spend them

It's not just pennies, it's all coins. In a former life I worked in retail and almost nobody would fish around in their pockets for exact (or even near) change. They'd always hand me bills for their purchase even if they had just completed a transaction and had the coins in their pocket. That was in the 90's, and I still see it happening today, even though I'm no longer in the retail world.

> Finally... NYT from last year... Truly fascinating and bewildering

Yeah, really bewildering, happiness inflated by inflation.

I don't know how accurate this is, but someone posted on Reddit some Burger King is already having a hard time getting pennies from their bank: https://old.reddit.com/r/mildlyinteresting/comments/1opdlm2/...

Most of the stores in my area have started requiring people to pay with exact change or by card because they can't get pennies to make change.

Personally, I think stores should just start setting prices to avoid the need for pennies, but that would be too easy, I guess.

There's a cash-heavy business I work with that's already having a hard time sourcing the pennies they need. I guess they're all in a jar under your desk.

In Canada, most prices still end in 99. You still pay to the cent if you're paying with a debit or credit card, which the vast majority of customers are these days.

If you believe this is going to cause chaos or significant burdens on merchants I have got a bridge to sell you (but I don't take pennies). This quote tells you all you need to know.

> The government’s phasing out of the penny has been “a bit chaotic,” said Mark Weller, executive director of Americans for Common Cents. The pro-penny group is funded primarily by Artazn, the company that provides the blanks used to make pennies.

Yes. I used to work at a movie theater, where all transactions were to the nearest $0.25 because it made it easier for the kids like me behind the counter to count the change and not lose track... seemed sensible at the time and that was 20 years ago.

Sorry Europe and Canada, $1 and $2 coins are just absolutely terrible. I never want to have to think about where my change is. Bills are much lighter than coins and stack with the rest of the bills.

We also have a $2 bill that nobody uses for whatever reason.

I never understood the objections to the $1 coin, especially after the redesign to make it more distinct from a quarter. $1 coins are great for buying stuff out of vending machines since you don't have to fight with a dodgy bill acceptor or a mangled bill.

Quarters might be premature, but the half-cent was discontinued when it was worth a (modern equivalent) of $0.12-17. Even 20-30 years ago, when I was just starting to interact with money enough to have an opinion, I thought it was a hassle to deal with anything smaller than a quarter. The same logic behind getting rid of pennies (they cost more to make than the face value) also supports doing at least nickels.

Nickels and dimes certainly have predecent. When the US killed the half-penny in 1857, it had a purchasing power of somewhere around 19 cents from 2024.

Honestly I'd rather just not have coins at that point, rather than try to push $1 and $2 coins. Then I can just carry my wallet for bills and not have to worry about keeping track of coins separately.

Gotta do something to make the $2 bill popular though, no idea how.

I'd mourn the loss of the quarter. I use those quite often.

> (we have a $1 coin but nobody uses it)

Because they keep designing it in the stupidest way, making it easy to confuse with a quarter. I don't know why they do that.

That said, I do prefer paper $1 bills over coins. Paper is lighter and easier to carry. But I'd only slightly grumble if we replaced it with a reasonable coin.