Find a Penny pick it up

All the day you’ll have good luck.

 

-         Someone with no sense of wealth.

 

I’m tired of pennies. 

I’m tired of getting 4 back ever time I spend a dollar.  They are functionally useless in small numbers and in order to make them efficient you risk the dubious choir of destroying your pockets weighed down with them. 

 

Let’s assume that everyday you eat at McDonald’s (or El Pollo Loco if you’re more inclined) and when you go up to the window and offer them that 20 bill you received from the teller machine, she tells you the cost of the food 3.76.  You get back a Ten, a five, a one and two dimes, four pennies.  All of this is shoved into your pocket.

 

At the end of the day you stop to get gasoline for your auto and a slushy.  You tell the guy 10 bucks on pump 6 and the price of the drink.  He says, “11.06”.  You give him the ten, the one, and a dime, and get back: 4 more pennies.  In one day you’ve accumulated 8 cents in copper.

 

Over the course of your week you do similar activities and by the end of the week (5 days) you’ve got 30 to 40 pennies.  That’s 2 and ½ inches worth of stacked pennies.  No one would carry that sort of weight around in their pants, but if you did, you’d wear holes in the pockets before you could afford to buy a new pair.

 

So instead, that forty cents disappears.  It gets tossed into drawers.  It gets thrown into ashtrays, and bottles. It stops being money and you loose it.  I don’t know about you, but loosing forty cents a week is hardly useful.  That’s money that will, face it, never get spent.  Oh sure you can save it and roll it up, take it to the bank, and deposit it into your bank account.  But isn’t your time worth something?  If you had a bottle of pennies, some 10,000 of them it would amount to $100.00 dollars.  Let’s say it took you two 8 hour periods to roll all that change.  You’d be making less than minimum wage for your effort: $6.25 hour.  What about taking into account the time you spend collecting the coins.  Not to mention the time you spend standing in line at the bank, having to deal with the 18 year old moron at the counter, and god forbid, being charged a fee just for the luxury of dealing with a teller.  At that point your value to effort ratio drops considerably. 

By the way, collecting that 10K in pennies at 40 a week would take you 250 weeks or 4.8 years. That almost seems worth it, doesn't it?

 

We all realize this.  That’s why pennies end up in the street.  No one wants them.  They are valueless and considerably more of a headache to hang onto.  At any one time I’ve got no more than 6 in the car and never do I carry them on my person.  Instead I toss them out the window.  I leave them on the counter.  I throw them in the trash with my left over meal container.

 

Ten years ago pennies had a place in our society.  But since the advent of high speed computers you would think someone would have come up with a program that figured the perfect price so that when paying for something it rounded out penniless.  The computer would start with the tax rate, figure the end price and then adjust the retail price to fit the exact price.  So that way when you went into the store and looked at the price on the product, you would know that what is says is the price, is the exact price you will pay at the counter.  All the info is presorted and added into it.  No guessing.  Easy to follow, easy to add up.  And no pennies.

 

I’m sure that the federal government has done studies on moneys lost to pennies falling out of circulation, but I’ve not been able to locate the information.  I’d bet the numbers are astounding.   What ever the case maybe, I still hate the little bastards.

There was a study conducted in 1976 of this and other suggestions regarding our coinage system. However, the idea of eliminating the penny received strong objections from an overwhelming majority of State revenue collection departments, retail firms, and commercial banks. Other objections voiced in later studies concerned the inflationary impact of such a proposal on prices and possible difficulties on collecting sales taxes.
- From www.usmint.gov

Notice that the survey was taken before the on set of computers and also notice that the majority of those opposed to pennies dying are government agencies...hum...I wonder why?

I said earlier that your time has value, which I really believe it does. The fact that the government thinks pennies have value proves that they are blind to the concept of value of time and it proves that collectign taxs from you is more important than anything else, even becoming more efficient. Hell, if that were to happen maybe the government wouldn't need so much tax revenue.