This is probably the least controversial thing, other than the little question whether he’s usurping authority.
At this point, outside of grocery stores, no one really ever deals in pennies anyway. I don’t buy fast food anymore, so maybe that’s still a use case, but even there, pennies on a $12 combo meal are rounding errors.
Rounding errors are one way to make money at scale. If the smallest denomination you had was $1, you can bet that combo meal would suddenly become $12.50 so you had to pay $13 for it.
The solution is electronic money, like a debit card. Many EU countries have been introducing rechargeable debit cards for people without a banking account, in Spain we can get one at the Post office. It has limitations to the amount and number of recharges per month, but otherwise you can get your salary/pension deposited onto one, then use it with €0.005 rounding errors.
That’s ultimately the plot of Office Space.
Re: your first paragraph. Absolutely, my bank account can round up and put the ‘leftovers’ into a savings account.
Also, Richard Pryor made an excellent film with this as the theme.
Canada got rid of the penny more than a decade ago, and it doesn’t seem to have caused any serious problems. If you are paying cash, stores just round prices to the nearest five cents.
Even a stopped clock shits itself during press conferences. Wait… that’s not right…
Yeah, as much as I hate this man, pennies are pretty redundant now. However, I’m kind of of the opinion that inflation has made all denominations below the dollar kind of pointless, so I recognize my opinions on this are kind of extreme.
I keep quarters for laundry but try to use anything smaller as soon as I get it. Self-checkouts are perfect for this, as you can just dump everything in the coin-input cup and use it like a Coinstar without the fees.
Yeah! My personal beef is that I feel like I shouldn’t have to have any denomination of currency that can’t be used by itself to purchase something meaningful.
Like, a quarter can’t buy anything on its own anymore. A dollar can’t in most cases, so why bother with all this little change?
We should have revalued the dollar after going off the gold standard to avoid this, but turning $10 into $1 would not be popular for market cap (goodbye, trillion-dollar companies). Oddly enough, the introduction of the Euro didn’t seem to cause financial collapse when several countries had to suddenly shift to a new scale.
