Penny shortage at nation's checkouts may confuse and inconvenience American shoppers As you may well know, the final penny ever made rolled off the U.S. Mint's conveyor belts back during the summer... truly a "
sad day". Now, mind, it isn't like they're taking scads of now-worthless coins and melting them down to be turned into doorknobs and pipe fittings, as they did
its Bermudan cousin five years ago. The penny will still be circulated for years to come. Some will be squirreled by dowagers inside empty mayonnaise jars and peanut butter tubs that will be quarreled over by their heirs or bought along with other personal effects at their estate sale, likely for more than the change itself is worth. Others will be
inserted into the spaces between the locks and doorjambs of college students' dorm rooms. Still others will be ground and mashed into
cheap souvenir trinkets by one of those machines they have at tourist traps across the length and breadth of this great nation.
Still, I was surprised when, at a grocery store checkout yesterday, I chanced to spot a sign on the register saying that due to limited availability of pennies, change would be rounded up to the nearest value. In essence, this little piggy will be now be paying an extra two or three cents on every trip to market, and it makes me want to wee-wee-wee in rage. (I am getting older, and my badder is sadly not what it used to be.)
![:-]](//psfforum.com/Smileys/default/Blush.png "Blush")
We have, ladies and gentlemen, a looming penny crisis in America.
Donald Trump's decision to get rid of the penny to save production costs [
1] is perhaps the only decision of his I've ever really disagreed with and gone on record as saying is a bad idea. Actually, I've been hearing talk of dumping the ol' copper sammich for over ten years now, citing the 2.5 cent price tag, and in
Belch Dimension Comics #134 I proposed my own solution--the "threepie", or
three-cent piece.
But the thing is, people
don't listen to me, and more frustratingly, they won't admit what a-holes they look like
by not listening to me.
Have you noticed how many prices on the shelf end in -.49- or -.99? It feels almost like a relic leftover from another time, like cooking times on food packaging ending in :15 (that's for another rant I'm thinking about doing, on push-button pads vs. crank dials on microwaves.) There is a reason for this: see, retail sales were once logged manually, so a price ending in cents almost guaranteed the cashier had to open the till to make change for a note. This served as an internal control, reducing the opportunity for a cashier to fraudulently pocket the cash without logging the sale. While most of your modern transactions are electronic, this pricing habit does remain.
A threepie, thus, would make sense, if you continue ending prices on the shelf in multiples of three. There actually
was a three-cent coin in America once upon a time, by the way. [
2]... So it's not an
entirely batty notion.
Some research for this editorial was AI-generated.
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