

The Best Anti-Penny Rant Ever? - iamelgringo
http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/09/09/the-best-anti-penny-rant-ever/?ref=nf

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thristian
Here in Australia, we got rid of our 1c and 2c coins years ago; the way it
works is that if you pay for something with cash, 1 and 2 round to 0; 3, 4, 6
and 7 round to 5; 8 and 9 round to 10. It works out pretty well, but since so
many people pay for things with credit/debit cards, it doesn't matter much in
practice.

Those are the legally suggested rules, but not every company exactly follows
them; I recall hearing that one supermarket chain always rounds downward at
purchase time, but rounds up if you return the product for some reason - a
nice gesture.

~~~
mahmud
OT, but on my first week in Oz I had bought a cup of coffee for $4 (I could
see them, they're four small copper coins.) then went through my pockets to
get rid of small change as tips, much to the waitress' resistance. So I gave
her something around 6 - 10 _smaller_ copper coins, much smaller than $1 coin.

Turns out, the smaller coins are actually worth $2, and I must have given her
$12-$20 worth of tips for a cup of coffee.

~~~
eru
Could have happened in England, too. Just look at how big the 2 pence pieces
are. There are almost the same shape as 2 Euro coins.

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thought_alarm
And get rid of the dollar bill, too.

Back in the 70s you could buy a meal with the spare change in your pocket, and
you could buy a Coke by dropping a coin in a machine. Now you've got to jam a
bunch of dollar bills into a flaky bill reader. It's ridiculous, and it only
gets more ridiculous with each passing day as inflation takes its toll on the
value of a dollar.

~~~
points
Agreed. And jamming 50 dimes into a washing machine is equally ridiculous.

In the UK we have a 2GBP coin, which is roughly $5. Imagine how useful it'd be
to have $1 $2 and $5 coins for vending machines etc.

~~~
cookiecaper
The government has pushed $1 coins on several occasions before but they have
never been able to get it to catch on.

~~~
thought_alarm
> The government has pushed $1 coins on several occasions before but they have
> never been able to get it to catch on.

They would catch on real quick if you got rid of the dollar bill.

~~~
heresy
How would "ballers" show how much money they have then?

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phamilton
I was talking to a friend about this and we started talking on the lack of
small change in most european countries. They can avoid small change because
everything is priced at a rounding point. A hamburger costs 2 euros, not 1.99
+ tax. Tax is already included in the price. But we came across the reason why
it wouldn't work here. A company can't have a set price across the board
because each country has a different sales tax rate. The only way for this to
work would be for the companies to bear the whole burden of the tax and charge
the same for a Big-Mac in LA (9.75% sales tax) and Salt Lake City (6% sales
tax). I don't see this happening in the near future.

~~~
sliverstorm
> The only way for this to work would be for the companies to bear the whole
> burden of the tax and charge the same for a Big-Mac in LA (9.75% sales tax)
> and Salt Lake City (6% sales tax).

That or they just charge the Salt Lake City residents as IF they had 9.75%
sales tax. Or they do some fancy booking, and charge the LA people a little
less than 9.75% and the Salt Lake City people a little more than 6%

~~~
eru
Don't LA and Salt Lake City already have very different labour and land costs?
The few percent difference in sales tax shouldn't matter too much.

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blintson
While we're talking about currency, why hasn't anybody in the US(to my
knowledge) made a payment processor that works by generating transaction
numbers, and then sending those numbers instead of sending people payment
authentication credentials?

Let's say George wants to give Sally $5.

1\. George logs into his PayCo. account. He clicks generate transaction,
amount $5. The server returns a very long randomly generated key. 2\. He copy-
pastes that key into Sally's pay-info server. 3\. Sally sends that key to
PayCo.'s server, money changes hands, and the key is no longer valid.

~~~
mseebach
I've thought about a similar idea, except in mine, you send a "locked" payment
via email to the recipient, and give him a pin-code to unlock the payment.
This allows for exchange of money in person (say, you're buying a used car
from someone, and want to see and drive it before handing over the money, and
don't want to carry the cash - neither party trusts each other to wire the
money ahead of time or after).

The recipient can easily verify and claim the transfer using phone, SMS or
online.

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sabj
Obviously, I agree. I think that pennies are unfortunate for the opportunity
cost, among other things. I like them for nostalgia and wouldn't want them to
die completely, but if they went the way of the $2 bill, that would be OK -
rare novelties, not a bother for pricing.

I actually want people to use more $2 bills, they're quite lovely.

@phamilton, not sure I follow. You could just round up or down as needed?

~~~
eru
And get rid of $1 bills, while you are at it.

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blahedo
My favourite suggestion about this is "rebasing", which Austan Goolsbee (among
others) has written about:
<http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/01/business/01scenes.html>

~~~
gojomo
Another thing I love about this idea: as it becomes more thinkable, people may
hoard pennies. Penny shortages would make it more necessary to do something --
to combat the seigniorage loss and make the hoarder-voters happy.

Once it reaches a certain level of awareness/remote-likelihood, it could
become a snowballing self-fulfilling prophecy/proposal.

So people, vote against the penny by hoarding it! You'll get a 400% return
after the re-basing!

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pvg
Important not to forget valid pro-penny arguments such as

[http://www.comedycentral.com/videos/index.jhtml?videoId=6066...](http://www.comedycentral.com/videos/index.jhtml?videoId=60669&title=ass-
pennies)

The focus on entrepreneurship and pitching seems particularly relevant.

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Pyrodogg
Giant squids of (penny) anger on the NY times. lol. John Green is great.

I agree though, I find penny's nearly completely worthless. At least I can
still use nickels in vending machines.

~~~
sciolizer
I think you mean "nickel's".

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GiraffeNecktie
Hopefully this quaint historical notion of using metal buttons to represent
money will just go away completely when we're able to swipe our phones for
payment.

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RiderOfGiraffes
At time 1:13:

    
    
      > So there's this very important idea in
      > Economics called "Opportunity Cost" ...
      > Any time you are doing something you could
      > be doing something else ...
    

Yup - I could be writing code, or reading a book, or watching a documentary,
or spending time with my wife.

I'm not going to watch the rest of the rant.

And the time it's taken me to write this costs me something, but I hope it
contributes to HN by suggesting that you do something useful too, instead of
watching this.

