Here in Australia, we got rid of our 1c and 2c coins years ago; the way it works is that if you pay for something with cash, 1 and 2 round to 0; 3, 4, 6 and 7 round to 5; 8 and 9 round to 10. It works out pretty well, but since so many people pay for things with credit/debit cards, it doesn't matter much in practice.<p>Those are the legally suggested rules, but not every company exactly follows them; I recall hearing that one supermarket chain always rounds downward at purchase time, but rounds up if you return the product for some reason - a nice gesture.
And get rid of the dollar bill, too.<p>Back in the 70s you could buy a meal with the spare change in your pocket, and you could buy a Coke by dropping a coin in a machine. Now you've got to jam a bunch of dollar bills into a flaky bill reader. It's ridiculous, and it only gets more ridiculous with each passing day as inflation takes its toll on the value of a dollar.
I was talking to a friend about this and we started talking on the lack of small change in most european countries. They can avoid small change because everything is priced at a rounding point. A hamburger costs 2 euros, not 1.99 + tax. Tax is already included in the price. But we came across the reason why it wouldn't work here. A company can't have a set price across the board because each country has a different sales tax rate. The only way for this to work would be for the companies to bear the whole burden of the tax and charge the same for a Big-Mac in LA (9.75% sales tax) and Salt Lake City (6% sales tax). I don't see this happening in the near future.
While we're talking about currency, why hasn't anybody in the US(to my knowledge) made a payment processor that works by generating transaction numbers, and then sending those numbers instead of sending people payment authentication credentials?<p>Let's say George wants to give Sally $5.<p>1. George logs into his PayCo. account. He clicks generate transaction, amount $5. The server returns a very long randomly generated key.
2. He copy-pastes that key into Sally's pay-info server.
3. Sally sends that key to PayCo.'s server, money changes hands, and the key is no longer valid.
Obviously, I agree. I think that pennies are unfortunate for the opportunity cost, among other things. I like them for nostalgia and wouldn't want them to die completely, but if they went the way of the $2 bill, that would be OK - rare novelties, not a bother for pricing.<p>I actually want people to use more $2 bills, they're quite lovely.<p>@phamilton, not sure I follow. You could just round up or down as needed?
My favourite suggestion about this is "rebasing", which Austan Goolsbee (among others) has written about: <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/01/business/01scenes.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/01/business/01scenes.html</a>
Important not to forget valid pro-penny arguments such as<p><a href="http://www.comedycentral.com/videos/index.jhtml?videoId=60669&title=ass-pennies" rel="nofollow">http://www.comedycentral.com/videos/index.jhtml?videoId=6066...</a><p>The focus on entrepreneurship and pitching seems particularly relevant.
Giant squids of (penny) anger on the NY times. lol. John Green is great.<p>I agree though, I find penny's nearly completely worthless. At least I can still use nickels in vending machines.
Hopefully this quaint historical notion of using metal buttons to represent money will just go away completely when we're able to swipe our phones for payment.
At time 1:13:<p><pre><code> > So there's this very important idea in
> Economics called "Opportunity Cost" ...
> Any time you are doing something you could
> be doing something else ...
</code></pre>
Yup - I could be writing code, or reading a book, or watching a documentary, or spending time with my wife.<p>I'm not going to watch the rest of the rant.<p>And the time it's taken me to write this costs me something, but I hope it contributes to HN by suggesting that you do something useful too, instead of watching this.