Why is there a coin shortage. Why did I wake up one morning and all of a sudden I couldn’t get my change back from the convenience store.

As a matter of fact, I went in to my local gas station and was owed .59 cents in change. I wasn’t able to get it. At that moment I was literally robbed for .59 cents by a business that already profits millions.

It’s not just the .59 cents that they got from me. It’s the total amount of free money they got that day by robbing the many people that chose to shop in their store.

Why is there not some other kind of a refund system, set up for people who chose to spend their hard earned money, at a place that is willing to steal from them at the expense of a seemingly excusable and justifiable cause, such as this coin shortage?

What will be the back up payment option when we cant use debit/credit because the system is down? We go into stores all the time with signs that say “cash only” due to a nearby power outage that caused the system to go down. What happens then? Will the store close down since we cant pay with cash?

I don’t see the irony in the desire of said fans of coins to get rid of pennies. The difference is that nothing sells for a penny anymore, so why bother keeping it?
When the half-cent was eliminated last century, prices became rounded to the nearest cent. And since the purchasing power of the dollar has gone down, a penny from 1933 would have the purchasing power of a dime or a quarter today.

Maybe it’s time for denomination. Cutting a zero from everything, except from coins is an interesting idea. 30 cents per gallon at the gas station, like in 50’s…

It takes approximately $23.23 in today’s dollars (USD) to equal the purchasing power, due to inflation, of our first federal Flowing Hair silver dollar of 1794.
I read once, that when we had the large copper 1-cent coins in the 1793-1857 period, parents would give their kids a 1-cent coin to buy candy & told them to bring back a half-cent in change because a whole cent would buy too much candy! Lol

NumisdudeTX

Just a general reply…

The idea is to make rounding unnecessary. I figure in this scenario, quarters (not half-dollars) would be the smallest denomination so everything would be incremented in 25 cent intervals. After all, we don’t still price products in half-cents and then round the total since the coin’s abolition, we price in cents. Eliminate the cent, increment in nickels. I assume you get the idea.

Product sizes would change to accommodate a quarter-dollar incremented pricing system. I imagine it would only be difficult with certain random weight items to price but I suppose we could always look back for guidance how shopkeeps did it when the cent had 25 cents worth of purchasing power back in the 1910s.

As for sales tax, incrementing in 25 cent intervals would probably be the best argument for ending it altogether. The consumer doesn’t remit sales tax to the state, the business does. Sales Tax is basically a corporate income tax so adjust their income tax rate appropriately to cover the revenue that would’ve been collected via the sales surcharge we consumers pay now.

Unfortunately I don’t know what $5 and $10 coins would be made of. I assume whatever the composition, they would be prime targets for counterfeiting. Maybe that’s why coins around the world have such negligible purchasing power in the first place? (perhaps also why we don’t bring back $500 and $1000 bills despite inflation too)

The 3¢ piece was an oddball denomination created to make it easier to pay for postage, which was fixed at 3¢ for a long time. However 3 doesn’t divide equally into 10 which mathematically requires even more coins when making change. Every country that’s looked at minimizing the number of coins needed to make change has settled on a 1-2-5-10-20-etc. scheme.

But if we get rid of the penny and maybe the nickel, a 2¢ piece would be moot. The real problem is the quarter which is a “hybrid” denomination created in the 1790s as a compromise to allow co-circulation of Spanish “bits”. There’s no reason to be compatible with coins that haven’t been used in almost 200 years. Even Canada’s looking at replacing its quarter with a 20 cent coin.

Yes – definitely a 20¢ piece, because that fits properly in a decimal currency system. The quarter (and obsolete quarter eagle) are leftovers from the days when Spanish milled dollars co-circulated with US coins. It makes no sense to be backwards compatible with coins that haven’t been used in 170 years!

Every country that’s adopted decimal currency in the last half-century (Australia, NZ, the UK, the EU, etc.) researched the issues and found that denominations based on factors of 10 require the fewest coins for making change. Even Canada, which has used American denominations since the 1850s, is looking at getting rid of their nickel and quarter and adding 20¢ and 50¢ coins. That would give them 10, 20, and 50 cents plus $1 and $2 coins much like NZ and the EU.

It must be worth a lot . If you are short a penny at Publix in Florida they want your penny!! they will give you 99 cents change for your dollar and you better have one!!?????