The Canadian pennies days are numbered and I for one am rather blasé about the whole thing. I honestly can’t recall the last time I’ve even spent a penny and as I rarely use cash I also don’t receive many.
When I do get a penny what happens is it gets dropped into the change jar and forgotten. They aren’t worth the time or effort to do anything more with. All pennies do once they end up in the jar is to get in my way while searching for a loonie.
Hmmm ok so then why am I talking about this if I don’t care? Oh yes, what has intrigued me is the absolute uproar in the papers and on the news about it.
I mean honestly #CDN_Penny is now trending on twitter and I can’t believe how many people are just so incredibly angry about it. I’m also surprised by the fact that most of the arguments I hear to keep the penny are also factually wrong.
The top two arguments I keep hearing/seeing over and over are that stores will make it so the final tally always rounds up and that the government should just find a way to make producing pennies cheaper.
Well no one asked for it but here’s my two cents on those arguments.
I’m no mathematician but if you bought one item for $1.28 it would round up, if you buy two that total ends up as $2.52 which would round down. 3 up,4 down……and on and on to infinity. Now unless a store can now predict exactly how many of each item someone will purchase during every transaction rounding to the nearest nickel is of no benefit to either consumer or store.
As for producing pennies cheaper, pennies are already made as cheapely as possible. They are made mostly of steel and still cost about 1.6 times their worth. The process of making a coin regardless of the primary metal is simply more than one cent.
If mean honestly if you’re going to argue the penny should continue being produced at least do it with a bit of common cents. No one has to lose their head or go jump in a fountain over the matter. Let’s just face facts; the penny has gone bad and perhaps it's just time to move on.
