Don't get rid of them, give them to Merrill or JPMorgan or whoever in case they need to hock the copper to a Chinese or other sovereign fund. Given current commodity prices, the metal's worth more than the specie.

Graf?  Not in dictionary.  If you're trying to show off, then use something that's in the dictionary.

Dime-store wisdom is not wisdom.  If you abolish the penny, then they'll start rounding up the nickel, etc. etc.  

I don't get Owen's comment that "... the growing percentage of transactions that are handled by credit card, PayPal, and other non-cash media wouldn’t be subject to rounding at all."

Credit cards (and debit cards), PayPal and other "non-cash media" are merely payment devices.  They have no bearing on whether you get a discount from prices that are rounded up. (However, fees charged to stores for credit card processing do have an inflationary impact on prices, since businesses pass on those fees by embedding the costs in the prices of their various products. Just another example of fees that affect us but to which we give little if any thought.)

By the way, NPR's story last week on the guy who has $40,000 in pennies was much more interesting.  (The guy is waiting for the penny to be abolished so he can net a handsome profit when he sells the copper.)

And while we're at it, let's get rid of the dollar bill and replace it with a dollar coin not unlike the British pound coin, small and thick.  Dollar coins failed to catch on because the bill was always available and the coins were too large.

Abolishing the penny is a 60% tax on every 4¢ you ought have gotten in change, which will then be rounded off to the nickel.

Or, something like.  Somebody smart here do the math, please.

Dollar coins failed to catch on, nbarry, because they put some ugly battle axe on one, and an unpronounceable Indian maiden on the other one.

Or both coins were butt ugly, even without the battle axe.

Oh, and one of them was easy to confuse with a quarter.

Which also brings me to how ugly our coinage is getting.  Another topic for another day.  But, ugly coinage is always a sign of decadence and decline in a nation.

epackard-02, stores don't necessarily pass on the "cost" of credit card commissions.  Credit cards are promoted to retailers as a way of factoring receivables.  The accountant's customary "discount for bad debt" for accounts receivable is 10%.  Receipts from credit cards are current (good as cash), not receivable.  So, if a credit card (or T&L card) company charges you, say, a 5% commission, it's taking your 10% discount for bad debt off the books, in exchange for the 5% commission.

So, credit card charges are not really expenses incurred but expenses avoided.  The fact that the commissions are "passed along" to the consumer is merely greed, because they really should be passing along a saving.  But alas, that's the way business is -- larcenous by nature.

ChanRobt , you know, your "ugly coinage as sign of decline" theory rings true.  I could point to others:  saggers, the decline of golf, the neglect of NASA, the rise of Obama, etc.

Chan, 60% of nothing is still nothing! Actually, it is meaningless to try to put it in percentage terms, because your "loss" depends on how much change you would have been getting back. If you buy a pack of gum with a $20, you'll lose very little as a percentage, but if you would have gotten 4 cents back, you lose 100%. Either way, your maximum loss is 4 cents.

I've been in New Zealand for the last couple of months, and here they have gotten rid of both the 1 cent and 5 cent coins. Everything is rounded to the nearest 10 cents. Some items are still priced at smaller increments (especially those things priced by weight), but the stores round the final transaction cost (fairly, 0-5 cents = 0, 6-9 = 10). Nobody seems to mind. FYI, the NZ dollar is now worth about 82 cents US, up by a lot (50-100%) over the last year or so. It's a good thing the Bush administration favors a strong dollar policy!

Hoarding pennies for their copper is just dumb. According to the US mint, pennies since 1982 have been 97.5% zinc. Not that facts have ever stopped people from doing silly things.

jm_rice, as a kid I collected coins.  And my young son does now.

Look at the beautiful coins of the early 20th Century through the early 1930s.  The St. Gauden's $20 and $10 gold pieces commissioned by Teddy Roosevelt.  The Mercury dime, the Liberty Quarter, the Walking Liberty half dollar.

Coins started to get uglier during the New Deal with the Washington Quarter (a bit banal), and later with the Roosevelt Dime and Franklin Half.  But, at least they were still all real silver.

The JFK half was a big jump ahead.  But so widely hoarded as keepsakes that we no longer use halves much.  Every other coin since the Kennedy half has been a de-evolution to ugly.  And no sign of improvement, I fear.

Play this out -

Get rid of the penny and you have an extra coin slot in registers. Use that for the dollar coin.

Get rid of the dollar bill and get those $2 bills into circulation.

Now you have nickels, dimes, quarters, and halves + ones in coins; and bills are $2, $5, $10, and $20, with your $50's and $100's stashed under the $20's or under the slide-out drawer. I have it all figured out.

Only thing I can think of wrong wtih this is you can't put a $1 coin in a g-string, and a $2 bill is 100% inflation.

Yep, coins have been going downhill.  The Sakakawea dollar was a great idea with a crappy execution.  Franklin mint could have done better.

You're right, my numismatic dream is the St. Gaudens $20 Double Eagle high-relief with Roman numerals -- by far the most beautiful coin in the world.

http://jmr.dk/eagles.htm

"Only thing I can think of wrong with this is you can't put a $1 coin in a g-string"

I dunno, she might like to have it rattling around in there.

Yeah, I pretty much second that the penny needs to be made extinct. I mean, heck, even an arch-nemesis of Democrats -- Rich Lowry of "National Review" -- wrote a very persuasive piece on this a while back:

www.townhall.com/.../ditch_the_penny

It's great to see people getting serious about this. Pennies are awful.

I'm with you on that St. Gaudens, jm_  

It seems if we had the will and the taste our coinage could be magnificent.  This country still produces great architecture, and more.

The problem with losing the penny is you lose Lincoln with it.

Chan, Lincoln's on the $5, so don't sweat it.

The dollar coin makes sense.  Canadians have a $2 coin (the dubloonie, since the $1 is a loonie).  Anyway, the time to stuff bills larger than the $1 in g-strings is long overdue.  Objectification is ok, but exploitation is not.

Chan, dollar coins have not failed to catch on because they've been ugly or because they've been too quarter-like. The perfectly fine, absolutely unmistakable-for-anything-else Eisenhower dollar coin also failed to catch on.

Dollar coins have failed to catch on, and will continue to fail to catch on, because and only because dollar bills are still printed. If we abolished the dollar bill and introduced a dollar coin made out of balsa wood and put Martha Washington on it, people would use dollar coins.

In a larger sense, I think currency reform could be a winning issue for Democrats. Propose getting rid of the dollar bill in favor of a new dollar coin. Put George Washington on the dollar coin, put Ronald Reagan on the quarter, and maybe eliminate the penny too. That would yield an annual savings to the government of about $200 million (up to $180 mil for the dollar switch, and another $22 mil for the penny elimination) as well as significantly improve the environmental impact of American money. And you also demonstrate magnanimity toward a political opponent who happens to be beloved by a majority of Americans in a purely symbolic way -- and Reagan's undeserved reputation as a government-cutter would reinforce the fiscal conservatism of the reform plan. It would be the kind of mostly symbolic gesture that would have wide cross-the-aisles appeal, make Republicans wonder why their candidate didn't propose it first, and appeal to independents who want boldness in a candidate.

Kill the penny, and the nickel and the $1 bill.  Give us $1 and $2 coins like in Europe and Canada.  Put Lincoln on the $1 and Washington on the $2.  The only loser is Jeff on the $2 bill, but he's already gone, so history is appropriately preserved.

The rounding thing is a red herring.   It can't be that hard to insist that merchant's round fairly.   And if they don't, I'll be out a nickel or two a week.  I think the household economy will survive.

And all this ugly coin talk - pffft.  I like the "state" quarters.  At least they have something on them. Ever look at Euro-zone folding money?  Now there is institutional ugly for you.  Even if you buy the reasoning behind the generic design, it's criminal in a place with the rich visual arts history of Europe to so disfigure your currency.

Possibly stupid question - why did people hoard Kennedy half-dollars?  I recall that my grandparents did so, but it always seemed to me that if you wanted a coin with Kennedy on it, one decent specimen would have done the trick.  And they weren't rare, at least not on paper - any bank would give you some.  

I don't know- a lot of the state quarters are hideous.  Some are ok, but, for example, the Illinois one is a hideous abortion of currency.  It is way too busy.  Each state tries to capture their "essence", and we jammed in like corn and Lincoln and Chicago and cows and like 11 other things.  It was a nightmare.  The state quarters turned into a nationwide county fair, which each pin-striped, suspender-wearing huckster trying to show off their goods.

North Dakota actually used an abstract piece to sum up the totalitarian bleakness of the grave, which I thought was fitting.

But If we get rid of the penny, the cost of thoughts will increase by 400%!  That can't be good for the economy.

Rhubarbs, hope you're tongue-in-cheek about Reagan.  Every time they put his name or face somewhere it's vandalism.  First, Washington National Airport, which is 100% FDR's creation, now a frigging aircraft carrier.  Enough already!

I'm not sure I understand how switching to a dollar coin would save money.  Does it cost more to print paper currency than to mint coins? Is it that coins last longer? My personal preference is for bills over coins in terms of convenience.  Maybe it's just because that's what I'm used to, but when I've been to Canada, I've found using the $1 and $2 coins sort of irritating.

We should go to "quarter" coinage and currency where everything is either a 10 or a quarter of that.  2 1/2 cent coin, dime, quarter, dollar coin, 2 1/2 dollar bill, 10, 25, 100.  4 coins, 4 bills, plenty of room for everything.

To those who say people will be confused, I say for a few minutes.  Everyone gets the quarter,  Ten "pennies" would make a quarter, 4 pennies a dime.  We can keep all the registers that have pennies, no one will care.  Sometimes you round up, sometimes down, no one wants pennies now.  A dime isn't worth a penny anymore.

When inflation makes even the 2 1/2 cent too little for anyone to care about, you take it out of circulation and bring back the nickel until that becomes worthless, then the dime becomes the smallest unit, etc., etc.

I wrote a letter about this to the Treasury Dept about 12 years ago.  Never got an answer.  I wonder why?

selish70 asks, "Possibly stupid question - why did people hoard Kennedy half-dollars? "

Not stupid at all, selish.  A mystery.  Half dollars were very much in circulation, and a very useful coin up through the 60s.

When the Kennedy Half came out in 1964, it was a beautiful coin.  I think the trauma of the Kennedy Assassination, which is hard to fully communicate to those who weren't 7 years or older at the time, caused people to want to hang onto something associated with the martyred president.

Although the Kennedy Half certain circulated, an inordinate number of them were held aside by people.  I don't know if tight jeans or some other fashion trend also contributed by making big coins too bulky for fit or comfort.

Someone has probably done a study on the phenom.  At least in numismatic magazines.  You've inspired me to do a little googling.

Owen's absolutely correct, but he's at least a month behind "60 Minutes" on this. They had a segment back in February that talked about the high price of copper, the likely lack of side effects of abolishing the penny, and even an interview with the head of the "Penny Preservation Society" (founded and funded by the copper industry, natch).

Rhubarbs, the Eisenhower dollar was certainly unmistakably a dollar.  But, it was the same "cartwheel" size as previous silver dollars, and therefor too large and heavy for the pocket.  Silver dollars had not been popular to carry (though available in any bank) since early last century.

The complain about the battleaxe dollar coin (Susan B. Anthony being the ugly mug) was that for most people, it was too easily confused with a quarter.

The ugly gold colored Indian girl dollar, is a faceted coin to make it readily apparent that it's not a quarter.  But it's also horribly ugly and with that brassy color looks fake.

People actually do care something about what their coins look like.  This latter coin is not worthy of a geat nation and is an indictment of the suck-ass taste of the modern American government.

Clueless bureaucrats have taken over our coinage.  When Teddy Roosevelt, an aristocrat, took it upon himself, without any effing committees, to commission coins by the greatest sculptor of his times, we got magnificent coinage out of it.

Frankly, I deeply resent the banality of our current coinage.  If I were president, I'd reform it by fiat.

An "ugly battle-axe" on your dollar coin? Buy People magazine or Time or a "gentleman's" magazine if you want to look at women.  Like Washington and Lincoln and FDR and Jefferson cause widespread swooning? And the Cdn $2 coin is the toonie, not the dubloonie. Since when are TNR readers such a misogynistic bunch of rednecks? Or is it just the commenters? That's what I get for reading this tripe.

boneill, you are absolutely right.  The state coins, for the most part, are as bad as most state license plates.  Nothing but dumbass chamber of commerce style ads for the respective states.  Redolent of a Sinclair Lewis Main Street sensibility.  

And the joke is, they represent an attempt buy the mint to refresh the coinage.  Problem with all these coins-- including the hideous new Jefferson Nickel with a cheap likeness of his face looking right you-- is that they are designed by committees.  And, the emerge with the mediocre artistic quality you would expect from a committee of appointees.

sdemuth, you are right about the Euros.  They, too, are coyote ugly.  AQnd they represent everything that is hateful about the European Union and its Orwellian bureaucracy of banality.

One bright note, our newer paper currency, designed to foil sophisticated counterfitting, is actually pretty neat looking.  Although Jackson came out a little funky.

Oh, God, terrymurray, I knew some politically correct twit (or twitette) would complain about that.

She, and the coin she came in on, are ugly man.  Look at ancient Greek coinage and you'll see that coins can and ought to be the glory of a civilization.

Look at some of the coins that we had in the early 19th Century including Sitting Liberties, Liberty Busts, and magnificent flag bedecked eagles on the reverse of these halves and quarters.

Coinage and currency are important and significant representations of our nation and more important, our culture and civilization.  The former are miniature sculpture, and ought all to be beautiful.  Not some P.C. paean to a suffragette.  Somebody could have given the visage of Ms. Anthony, if not glamour, at least dignity.

Channy- Sinclair Lewis, chamber of commerce style- great stuff.  That's what I was trying to get at but couldn't hit it.  You're pretty smart for a misogynistic redneck.  

You know, I never really gave much thought to coins, and their aesthetic merits, other than an almost tangible loathing of the state quarters, but now after this thread I feel very strongly about it.  

Post-penny's demise, updated related adages:

"An OTC interest rate swap derivative saved, an OTC interest rate swap derivative earned."

"A carbon credit for your thoughts."

"Treasury inflation-protected security wise, pound foolish."

"He keeps turning up like a bad 1860 milled-edge Natal six-pence token."

Etc.

jm_rice, I'm not kidding about Reagan. I too refuse to call my local airport anything other than Washington National. The disgrace there is not putting Reagan's name on it, it's effectively taking Washington's name off it. Once George Washington's name is on a thing, you don't change it. Ever.

But.

Proposing a Reagan coin as part of a larger reform measure that would save the government $200 million a year would be worth the bile it raises in committed Democrats' throats. Remember -- a large majority of Americans love Reagan. Why fight that? Why not exploit it in a purely symbolic way to coopt the tiny parts of the Reagan reputation that we agree with? I mean, it's not like having Jackson on the twenty has advanced the cause of white supremacy or opposition to a central bank. Putting Reagan on the quarter would be just as harmless.

Then again, back in the day Mark Plotkin and other DC statehood advocates rejected my proposal to declare that DC would enter the union as the state of Reagan. I still say it would have been great drama to have watched the GOP majorities in Congress squirm when faced with the choice of voting for DC statehood or voting against naming a new state after Reagan.

I'll stick up for the Connecticut quarter - it's a nice design that displays something unique to the state.  Too, it may have caused those unfamiliar with the story of the Charter Oak to check it out.

Hey ChanRobt, I wasn't being PC. I was being offended by your misogyny and double standard. I never saw the damned coin because I don't live in the US of A. I'm all for what the Irish did, pre-Euro, and that was to have no politicians on any of their money. And fyi, sculpture is my business and I'm aware that images on coins have been created by sculptors. I've interviewed some of our* leading sculptors and written about others. I think it's great to have little bits of Emanuel Hahn and Dora de Pedery Hunt's work in my pocket.

*Our = the country I live in, not the USA.

Chan, I agree with you completely about the aesthetics of the coins we're talking about. But the plain fact is that the question of coin versus paper usage has been well studied. The answer to this particular question is settled, proven by empirical observation and backed by studies of economic behavior. You could resurrect Michelangelo, have him design a new dollar coin with Jesus, George Washington, a bald eagle, and the Grand Canyon on it, and nobody would use it as long as paper dollars were still being printed.

Well, terrymurray, you're lucky never to have gazed upon the Susan B. Anthony dollar, because it is butt-ugly.  Starting with the banality of the design.  Any human face can be portrayed with dignity.  We're not expecting Julie Christie here.

Go to this URL and see for yourself

www.centercoin.com/coin_catalog/dollar/united_states_sba_dollars.htm

It's not our ugliest coin ever.  But, it was not very attractive.  And besides, the choice of Susan B. Anthony was P.C. anyway.  She made her contribution.  But she was hardly in such a pantheon as to deserve a coin.  That real estate is far too dear.

I don't know what your nation is Terry.  But we have people in our history here who transcend being mere politicians, who are great, and who deserve to be memorialized on coins.

We don't need merely to picture beavers and loons as the Canadians do.

Although, I'd hasten to point out, one of our most beautiful coins was the Buffalo Nickel, which had a magnificent Indian head on the obverse.  It was sculpted from a real person, though not a famous chief.

To your point thought, no actual person was ever portrayed on our coins until Lincoln.  Previously we had always had eagles or Indian heads, or various portrayals of Liberty.

It was, in fairness to what you say, in our original republican attitudes, to eschew putting any politician on our coins, dead and great though they might be.

Lincoln, being also martyred, as well as dead and great, was the exception who broke the taboo.  And he was followed by Jefferson (5¢), Washington (25¢), Roosevelt (right after he died, on the 10¢), Frankling (50¢), Kennedy (50¢), and Eisenhower ($1.00).

"You're pretty smart for a misogynistic redneck."

Yes, boneill, this really flummoxes my friends and acquaintances, both and most of whom are "liberals".

But, thanks for the compliment.

"...it's not like having Jackson on the twenty has advanced the cause of white supremacy or opposition to a central bank"

Jackson was one of the nastier dudes ever to become president.  Amazing an emblematic liberal like Schlesigner lionized him.  Indians would consider him Himmler.

Attitudes to change.

I hate change, by which I mean coins.  There is no convenient way to carry them.  They jangle around in either a pocket or a coin purse.  In large amounts, they're heavy.  If you use your pocket,  it all ends up on your dresser -- perhaps for years.  Many banks won't cash out your change unless you put in rolls.  In any event, taking your change to the bank or a supermarket is an annoying chore.  The only time you really need change is for parking meters, and it's also more convenient for tolls.  But then you never have the right amount, and there's seldom a good way to keep change in your car without it making a racket.  (The few coin-holder options that have come along over the years are hardly great feats of engineering.)

Nothing be done I suppose.  I just don't like coins is all.  Stupid coins.  Coins suck.

And another thing I don't like: stamps. You never have them when you need them.  Where do you buy them?  Who knows?

Screw stamps!  Those blue boxes where you put letters in?  Almost impossible to find!

I would like to say I do enjoy the dollar coins, especially now that they are going president-by-president (I can't wait for Fillmore!!!) and you can use them in more vending machines.  However, when they tarnish they get REALLY ugly, so I tend not to spend or touch any of my shiny little brass presidents.

jhildner, you are precipitous in wanting to dump coins.  

Consider:  the one artifact of Roman civilization that is almost ubiquitous and that anyone can own is their coinage.

We on the other hand, with our headlong rush to digitzie everything that is now paper, are in danger of making ours the age that is "writ in water," to borrow Keats' phrase.

So much of our correspondence, including that of artists, writers, presidents, politicians, scientists is done by email.

Meanwhile newspapers and other publications, even books, are in danger of disappearing into the digital maw.  Libraries destroy tens or hundreds of thousands of books every day, only some of which are digitized.

But, our media for digital change all the time.  And are not always forwardly compatible.  Your hard drive from ten or twenty years ago won't work with your computer today.  Do you own a floppy disc drive?

In a hundred years, and certainly a thousand years, anything of ours that is not committed to good, sturdy, long-lived paper will not exist.  If any digital media are around from our era, including optical, the data will have long been lost.

And, even if the data is still on the disks, there will be no drives that can read them.

So, spare the poor coins.  They may not mean much to you.  But, they may be one of the few relics of millennium civilization, and of America civilization, still to be found by our remote descendants 1000 or 2000 years hence.

Copper mining is insanely bad for the environment, poisonously so. If we stopped making them, and also melted them down for other copper uses, that would be fabulous.

You can make pennies out of steel instead of copper, psantillana.  That's what we did one year, 1943, during WW2 because copper was needed for the war effort.  They were coated in zinc.

I meant to blog about this earlier, but James Poulos has proposed a (to me) likeable alternative to the