The Precious Penny

I frequently visit our local McDonalds to buy the senior coffee for my wife and myself. The total, including tax comes to $1.07.  The last few times I went there, I gave the girl a dollar and a dime and she gave me a nickel in change.  Maybe they ran out of pennies, or possibly the restaurant decided to give me a break.  I don’t know which is true, or if there is some other reason why I didn’t get the three pennies in change.

The poor little penny is in danger of becoming extinct, and yet I believe it is one of the most precious coins we have in our treasury.  There are a lot of people who think that it is time to retire the penny and make the nickel the smallest denomination coin.  That would be a huge mistake.

There is an expression, “See a penny, pick it up, and all day long you’ll have good luck.”  I know several people who will pick up a penny and consider it a good luck sign.  But most people—this was proven by the late Andy Rooney of 60 Minutes fame—will not stoop to pick up even several pennies.  Of course, the end of that little saying goes, “See a penny, let it lay, and you’ll have bad luck all day.”

I guess if you are superstitious and lazy, you could make a case for getting rid of those nasty pennies so that you wouldn’t be subject to the bad luck that goes with seeing and ignoring a fallen penny.

That doesn’t seem to be the reason most detractors give for deminting pennies.  The reasons usually given are that the penny takes up too much room in pockets or purses and it has no real value anymore.  What can you buy for a penny these days?

Okay, let’s look at what might change if there were no more of those little copper pennies in our metal currency.

First and foremost, all transactions for cash would have to be rounded off to the nearest 5 cents. My own opinion is that cash transactions would be rounded up instead of down, as no business owner would want to lose some of the price. 

Since there might be some resentment against the rounding up of totals, it might be necessary to make certain that when you get the bill for an item or a service you check to make cure it was rounded off to the nearest five cents before you get it.  It is easy to program calculators or cash registers to round off.

Then there is the question of taxes.  If your tax is 8%, and buy an item for $1.00, your total should be $1.08.  If your bill shows a rounded up amount of $1.10, who gets the extra 2 cents?  The business? The government? 

One of my pet peeves is the pricing of items to one penny, or one dollar below the next plateau--$19.99, or $2599.  Without the precious penny that would no longer be possible.  Even the idiotic pricing of gasoline with that weird 9/10 of a penny would cease, but that would be a good thing since it is a form of fraud that has been allowed for decades.   I don’t know how many people fall for those mind games when they consider a purchase, but I suspect that most of us do.

If you don’t believe me, try this: When you see the price of gasoline is $3.68 and 9/10ths on the big sign at the gas station, do you round it off to $3.68 or $3.69? If you chose $3.68, you are likely to round all prices down instead of up. $19.99 might easily be thought of as $19, not $20, and $2599 could become $2500 in your price calculation.

If the penny goes out of circulation, we will be paying more for everything, and that can add up over time to some serious money.

 Let’s never get rid of the penny. They’re precious!