Four (or Five!) Reasons Why

…We Should Get Rid Of The Penny

1. Pennies take up a lot of space - in your pocket, in your desk drawers, in the seats of your car. Most people don’t spend them, piling them up to cash in for coins/bills that are easier to carry around. Some, like Freaknomics’ Stephen Dudbner, ask cashiers to keep the pennies.

2. Few vending machines, if any at all, accept pennies. And even if they did, could anyone be bothered to feed a machine with them? More so, it is only a matter of time before vending machines will take payments through cell phones and debit cards, making the penny even more useless.

3. You can’t buy anything for a penny anymore. As William Safire notes, you can’t buy penny candy at the five-and-dime anymore. In fact, there aren’t even five-and-dimes left. They’ve been abolished and converted to dollar stores.

4. They cost more to produce than they are actually worth. In the United States, the currently produced copper-plated zinc penny contains approximately 0.89 cents of material and the Mint spends an additional 0.6 cents to produce each penny. If zinc prices continue to rise, it is only going to get even more expensive to produce. Mmm…my calculator says that the economics of this doesn’t make sense.

5. Australia and New Zealand stopped producing pennies over a decade ago. The effect? Next to none.

Click here and here for different perspectives about abolishing the penny. What do you think?