— By Kevin Montgomery (@kevinmonty) |
Don't get me wrong, I'd miss having that giant Skippy peanut butter jar full of worthless zinc and cooper on my desk if we banned pennies outright, but it's about time someone started rounding out pennies. And for good reasons too! From Mike's Bikes laundry list of reasons for ditching the coin:
Pennies are 3% copper, and 97% zinc and are primarily made from virgin ore. Making pennies from zinc means and copper means mining for those materials. Red Dog Mine, which is the largest zinc mine in the US is by far the #1 polluter on the EPA's list, because of large quantities of heavy-metal and lead rich mining tailings. The process of refining both metals can release sulfur dioxide (SO2), lead and zinc into the environment.
And:
Pennies are so worthless now that it doesn't even pay the California Minimum Wage of $8/hour to pick them up off the street.
Of course, this isn't going to make a huge dent in the problem (especially considering the zinc industry lobbyists crushing related US legislation / the fact I never shop at Mike's Bikes), but perhaps the Board of Sups can take Mike's lead and make this the next San Francisco environmental cause du jour.
[pic via reddit] (Thanks Tony!)
Comments (8)
is making nickles less toxic than making pennies? maybe mikes should only use dimes–volume-wise the most efficient coin.
How can anyone possibly spend 2.4 hours a year handling pennies? About every 3 months I’ll take excess pennies out of my wallet and dump them in a change jar or into the “take a penny” thing at the grocery store. That’s like 5 minutes, total, per year. WTF are these other people doing with pennies that takes 2.4 hours? I’m genuinely curious.
Fair enough, but that still seemed really high, so I tried to find the data it was pulled from. Looking at the below and their way-overly-generous guesstimate of how much time people spend on pennies outside of retail transactions, I’d say a fairer estimate is about 1.5 hours per year. (I’m anti-penny, but pro-accuracy!):
http://www.retirethepenny.org/
2) Waste of time: Most cash transactions involve the exchange of pennies, leading to an increase in the time for the transaction to take place. The National Association of Convenience Stores and Walgreen’s drug store chain estimated that handling pennies adds 2 to 2.5 seconds to each cash transaction (remember that we are including the occasional customer who spends 30 seconds looking for the penny in his pocket).
Let us estimate that each person goes through two of these transactions per day and that on average there is one person waiting in line (making for a total of three people’s time wasted in each transaction). We can then calculate that the presence of pennies wastes (2 transactions/day) X (2 seconds/transaction) X (3 people per transaction) = 12 seconds per day, or 1.2 hours per person per year. Of course, when you get home you still have to find something to do with your pennies, meaning that probably only about half of the wasted time is directly connected with a cash transaction (the other time is associated with counting pennies etc), giving a total of 2.4 wasted hours per person per year. The mean wage in the US is approximately $17/hour, implying that each of us is effectively “paying” $40 per year to keep pennies in circulation. Given that the US has ~ 240 million adults, using pennies is currently costing the nation $10 billion per year!
That retire the penny page is so 1990s. Love the animated GIF of the penny.
that said they do have a legitimate point…I think when there was that boom in copper prices, true copper pennies were actually worth MORE than a cent for a while…
Instead of “banning pennies,” how about they just round off all their prices to the nearest nickel and include tax? A lot of places do this already without making a big fuss about it.
Besides, I bet that sign cost more to make than they’ll ever save on this.
pennies are for queers and terrorists!
Next up is discounts for dollar coins.
You’re either part of the problem or part of the solution.
I was thinking maybe this is actually a mental/ spiritual health initiative by the govenernment. They are trying to keep us all sane. See we believe in this currency system right? So we believe that diet pepsi is really worth 99 cents. My 99 cents is equal to your diet pepsi. But if we started saying ya its 99 cents but I’ll give it to you for a dollar- we all start getting stressed out. Those pennies add up. I mean if I bought 500 sodas a year at Mike’s bikes for 99 cents thats 5 dollars over my year. I don’t care if that makes my time worth nothing- anything is better than nothing! Vegetables brought over on a boat from China are better than nothing! And thats what we all are fearing everyday right? Having nothing! Good forbid i couldn’t buy mikes coolest new bike park? I would have nothing! So we keep using them to keep from going down that road, you know?