Small change
“A penny for your thoughts,” says your friend, which is about all that a penny will buy these days. Arguably, you can get them cheaper than that: as the old German folk song has it, die Gedanken sind frei. Alas, the days when “a penny saved is a penny earned” have fallen victim to a very long inflationary trend.
There was a time, of course, when the penny carried a considerable packet of value on its back. When it was first minted in the days of the Anglo-Saxons (the penny is older than England itself), it was called a sceat. The old story that it was renamed the “penny” after King Penda of Mercia is probably apocryphal. In any case, the silver penny was the only common coin minted in England for over six hundred years. Even after other coins began to be circulated, the medieval penny usually had a cross design on its reverse, which facilitated cutting it into even halves or fourths to make change. Eventually, purpose-minted half-pence and farthings were minted, and “cut currency” was frowned upon by those who watched over the coining of money.
Even at the height of colonial America, the penny was a coin of some value. Benjamin Franklin left Boston as a young man to try his hand in Philadelphia. In his Autobiography, he tells the story of his first day in Philly. He was keenly aware that he had only a modest amount of cash, and he didn’t know how far it would go. He decided to buy a single roll for lunch and he went to a bakery to ask for “a pennyworth of bread.” To his surprise, in Philadelphia a penny would buy three huge, puffy loaves of bread. So he went walking down the street with one loaf under his arm and another on top of his hat while he munched on the other, much to the delight of a certain young woman.
The penny retained a minimal value even in my younger years. A friend who was a camp director in the 1980s said he always had penny candy in his trading post because by the end of the week, Scouts would come into the TP and place their last grubby coins on the counter and ask what it could buy them. He wanted to make sure they could buy something, and everyone went away happy from the deal. When I was a camp director a few years later, I also had penny candy for sale in the TP.
But try to find anything for a penny today! There is nothing you can buy with an individual penny that I can think of. And so, despite my conservative soul, I have come to the conclusion that we need to quit minting pennies and, indeed, demonetize them. Let the remaining coins be made collectibles or be melted down to make something useful from them.
“Oh, but we can’t do that,” you say. How would we express the price of something, if not in dollars and cents? Well, we would simply express them in dimes and nickels (the nickel’s name was originally the “half-dime”). Round up or down to the nearest five cents. You can express prices in fractions of tenths as easily as fractions of hundredths. “$29.9” is as comprehensible as “$29.02.” The half-dime could be expressed as “$29.9 ½” or $29.95,” as you please.
To those who want to quibble that a metric currency must have a unit of one-hundredth, I say the hundredth is as irrelevant as the thousandth. “But nobody reckons in thousandths,” you cry. Oh yes, they do. In fact, when our currency was set up under George Washington’s administration, the dollar was set as the basic unit of account and decimal fractions of tenths, hundredths, and thousandths were written into the law. Now, nobody ever minted a coin worth $0.001 (called a mill), but that doesn’t mean we don’t use them in our pricing system. Certain local and property taxes are charged in mills, and we’re all familiar with the price of gasoline, which is carried to three decimal places, then rounded off to the nearest penny. So, the fact that we have the mill as a unit of account, but we’ve never needed a mill coin, should show you how we could drop the penny and simply make the mental adjustment to do without it. We wouldn’t change a thing in our currency system except what coins we have decided to mint to facilitate it.
Having thus reluctantly come to the conclusion that the penny needs to be retired, I turn to that other perennial bugaboo of the gummint: the dollar bill. There has been a strong push for many years to quit printing $1 bills and instead make $1 coins. It takes less money to mint a dollar coin than to print a dollar bill, and the coin lasts longer. Yes, I know, but for me this is a bridge too far.
In the UK, they have left off printing one-pound notes and replaced them with one-pound coins. They also mint two-pound coins. These heavy little buggers tear out your pockets. Bills are lighter and easier to carry than coins. And we need a “one” unit in whatever currency system we have. Canada, also, no longer prints $1 bills. Their $1 coin has a loon on the reverse, which is the source its nickname, the “loonie.” So, of course, the $2 coin is a “two-nie.” Loonies and two-nies. How appropriate. “That’s all, folks!”
There was a time, of course, when the penny carried a considerable packet of value on its back. When it was first minted in the days of the Anglo-Saxons (the penny is older than England itself), it was called a sceat. The old story that it was renamed the “penny” after King Penda of Mercia is probably apocryphal. In any case, the silver penny was the only common coin minted in England for over six hundred years. Even after other coins began to be circulated, the medieval penny usually had a cross design on its reverse, which facilitated cutting it into even halves or fourths to make change. Eventually, purpose-minted half-pence and farthings were minted, and “cut currency” was frowned upon by those who watched over the coining of money.
Even at the height of colonial America, the penny was a coin of some value. Benjamin Franklin left Boston as a young man to try his hand in Philadelphia. In his Autobiography, he tells the story of his first day in Philly. He was keenly aware that he had only a modest amount of cash, and he didn’t know how far it would go. He decided to buy a single roll for lunch and he went to a bakery to ask for “a pennyworth of bread.” To his surprise, in Philadelphia a penny would buy three huge, puffy loaves of bread. So he went walking down the street with one loaf under his arm and another on top of his hat while he munched on the other, much to the delight of a certain young woman.
The penny retained a minimal value even in my younger years. A friend who was a camp director in the 1980s said he always had penny candy in his trading post because by the end of the week, Scouts would come into the TP and place their last grubby coins on the counter and ask what it could buy them. He wanted to make sure they could buy something, and everyone went away happy from the deal. When I was a camp director a few years later, I also had penny candy for sale in the TP.
But try to find anything for a penny today! There is nothing you can buy with an individual penny that I can think of. And so, despite my conservative soul, I have come to the conclusion that we need to quit minting pennies and, indeed, demonetize them. Let the remaining coins be made collectibles or be melted down to make something useful from them.
“Oh, but we can’t do that,” you say. How would we express the price of something, if not in dollars and cents? Well, we would simply express them in dimes and nickels (the nickel’s name was originally the “half-dime”). Round up or down to the nearest five cents. You can express prices in fractions of tenths as easily as fractions of hundredths. “$29.9” is as comprehensible as “$29.02.” The half-dime could be expressed as “$29.9 ½” or $29.95,” as you please.
To those who want to quibble that a metric currency must have a unit of one-hundredth, I say the hundredth is as irrelevant as the thousandth. “But nobody reckons in thousandths,” you cry. Oh yes, they do. In fact, when our currency was set up under George Washington’s administration, the dollar was set as the basic unit of account and decimal fractions of tenths, hundredths, and thousandths were written into the law. Now, nobody ever minted a coin worth $0.001 (called a mill), but that doesn’t mean we don’t use them in our pricing system. Certain local and property taxes are charged in mills, and we’re all familiar with the price of gasoline, which is carried to three decimal places, then rounded off to the nearest penny. So, the fact that we have the mill as a unit of account, but we’ve never needed a mill coin, should show you how we could drop the penny and simply make the mental adjustment to do without it. We wouldn’t change a thing in our currency system except what coins we have decided to mint to facilitate it.
Having thus reluctantly come to the conclusion that the penny needs to be retired, I turn to that other perennial bugaboo of the gummint: the dollar bill. There has been a strong push for many years to quit printing $1 bills and instead make $1 coins. It takes less money to mint a dollar coin than to print a dollar bill, and the coin lasts longer. Yes, I know, but for me this is a bridge too far.
In the UK, they have left off printing one-pound notes and replaced them with one-pound coins. They also mint two-pound coins. These heavy little buggers tear out your pockets. Bills are lighter and easier to carry than coins. And we need a “one” unit in whatever currency system we have. Canada, also, no longer prints $1 bills. Their $1 coin has a loon on the reverse, which is the source its nickname, the “loonie.” So, of course, the $2 coin is a “two-nie.” Loonies and two-nies. How appropriate. “That’s all, folks!”