Penny pinching: Can Obama kill the one-cent coin?

[Malthus]

Tip, you many want to cut back on the amount of smoking you do in that chair. 

Tip, cigarette lighters don't teleport themselves out of pockets when you're not smoking.

Yeah, but you've already set the trap.  :tickingtimebomb:   

The secret of spontanious human combustion: revealed! 

[garbon]

Coins don't really fall out of your pocket though.  I think you might be doing it wrong.

Perhaps I am as mine do.

[Malthus]

Say what now? Point taken on vending machines but tips? I don't see why a coin would be preferable there.

Coins stay on tables, rather than wafting to the floor in a passing breeze.

Admittedly they are no good for sticking to sweaty strippers, but I don't frequent such establishments. 

Dollars are not valuable?

Not really.

Actually in either form they'd be fairly useless. Unless you are saying the dollar (and the 2-dollar) are on the same useless scale, not sure why you'd dollar denominations turned into coins.

My point is that they are useful, but not particularly valuable. They are for small transactions where you don't want to have to pull out your billfold.

Now, a good argument can be made for going cashless, but as long as cash is useful, a good argument can be made that one dollar is now, literally, "pocket change" for the same reason that one cent is worthless - inflation has changed the relative values of money.

[Malthus]

Heh the US used to have paper notes in denominations as low as 3 cents.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fractional_currency

[mongers]

Say what now? Point taken on vending machines but tips? I don't see why a coin would be preferable there.

Coins stay on tables, rather than wafting to the floor in a passing breeze.

Admittedly they are no good for sticking to sweaty strippers, but I don't frequent such establishments. 

Don't they have a coin slot ?        

[alfred russel]

Coins don't really fall out of your pocket though.  I think you might be doing it wrong.

So you just jingle jangle down street?

At any rate, it's all pointless anyways.  Cashless is the way of the future.

Thank goodness.

[Admiral Yi]

Hey, Mr. Tambourine Man.

[alfred russel]

Say what now? Point taken on vending machines but tips? I don't see why a coin would be preferable there.

Coins stay on tables, rather than wafting to the floor in a passing breeze.

Admittedly they are no good for sticking to sweaty strippers, but I don't frequent such establishments. 

Don't they have a coin slot ?        

That is what I thought. But that bouncer sure did disagree.

[Malthus]

Say what now? Point taken on vending machines but tips? I don't see why a coin would be preferable there.

Coins stay on tables, rather than wafting to the floor in a passing breeze.

Admittedly they are no good for sticking to sweaty strippers, but I don't frequent such establishments. 

Don't they have a coin slot ?        

That is what I thought. But that bouncer sure did disagree.

It may be especially problematic for the sort of strippers garbon is likely to watch. 

[Neil]

Coins don't really fall out of your pocket though.  I think you might be doing it wrong.

So you just jingle jangle down street?

No.  I don't carry money.  We're further down the road to cashlessness than you guys are.

[Razgovory]

I'm with you on the penny, but not the rest. I don't carry coins; and I don't have a wallet to accomodate them. Bills are much easier. I'm willing to pay in taxes the extra $2.00 or whatever my share is to keep the dollar bill.

The question is why do you carry cash?  And why small bills?  I have my cards, I have a few 20$ bills from the ATM, but that's all.
I'm not gonna carry 100$ on me in 1$ dollar coins.  Never did that with bills in the past.

In some cases they even have advantages over metric.

Please, make a list?

Some people don't take credit cards. For example, a person who alters my clothes out of her house only takes cash. Valets and parking attendants often only take cash.

Your wife charges you for fixing patching your clothing?

[alfred russel]

Your wife charges you for fixing patching your clothing?

What really hurts is she is the woman I was trying to pay when the bouncer got me.

[Ed Anger]

All this sounds like a foreign plot. UN out of the US.

[Josquius]

Makes sense.

Its strange but I can't recall ever hearing of the penny being an issue in the UK but I have seen it from time to time about America. Its almost as stupid for Britain as for the US.

Its strange that you wouldn't know about the controversy over the tiddler (the half-penny, which was the equivalent of the US penny), you being British and all, but, then, again, the tiddler was before your time and what Brit knows any of Britain's actual history?

Ironically, the argument over the tiddler was the exact opposite of the argument over the US penny; the public disliked the tiddler and the government liked it.

Part of the reason why the public hated the tiddler was its size, though.  Since British coins (within metal class) were proportional in weight to their value (a normally good idea) the tiddler had to be made half the weight of a penny and a quarter the weight of the tuppence.  If the tuppence was to be kept a reasonable weight, the tiddler had to be too small and easy to lose.  They were only in circulation for a dozen years or so.

Because I didn't mention the half penny I'm unaware that it ever existed?

[Razgovory]

Grumbler some times gets his centuries mixed up.  He has confused the Norman half-penny and the decimal half-penny.