It's so strange to start with "stop minting pennies" but not "stop pennies being legal tender".

But then as an Australian it also seems very weird to even have pennies in circulation. We ditched ours in the 80s.

It'd certainly make less sense to stop them being legal tender if you're still minting them.

Also in Australia, while no store would accept the old pennies, I had thought they were still legal tender in the sense that banks would still accept them and allow you to deposit the old pennies?

	▲	stevage 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Yes. I'm not sure if legal tender is the correct term but yes. Many stores now do not accept cash of any kind.

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nixpulvis 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I mean, it makes numbers weird if you can't have less than a nickel. Tax could be designed to ensure prices are in increments of 5¢. And interest rates, etc.

Rounding to whole numbers feels more natural to people than rounding to 5¢. But ultimately it's the same thing.

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stevage 3 hours ago | parent [-]

The way you're framing this sounds like no other country has ever gone through the process of removing their 1 and 2 cent coins. Many have. It's fine. None of this is a problem.

It does work better if there's a bit of planning though.

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nixpulvis 3 hours ago | parent [-]

I wasn't trying to frame it that way. I have never had to deal with this personally, so that's just how I see it.

It's not a big deal, and people have been ignoring it for years with gas. It's just going to be more obvious in some cases now for us in the US. I'll be curious to read the psychology behind how things are priced in response to this. Will $9.99 fade in favor of $9.95 more.

All and all, the upsides of stopping wasting resources on pennies outweighs all the minuscule downsides, but it's still curious.

	▲	stevage 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		It would definitely work better with an actual withdrawal from currency. It's weird to have individual businesses having to decide when and how to handle the slow disappearance of coins. But then, there's a lot weird about American currency to me. Like I have heard that repeated attempts to introduce a $1 coin "didn't catch on". In Australia it was pretty simple - they took away all the $1 notes, they made a gazillion $1 coins. It wasn't optional. There wasn't any question of "catching on", it was just...this is what we do now.