AlexH

My grandpa would have been happy to see this story.

MP to introduce bill to eliminate the penny

A Winnipeg MP who thinks the penny is a nuisance and too expensive to ship around the country is expected to introduce a private member’s bill on Monday to take it out of circulation.

It makes sense for a variety of reasons:

• Inflation: Prices are increasing, and there are few things that you can buy for a penny now. What you can buy for a penny is generally not sold in single units.
• Metal prices: Metal prices increase over time (again due to inflation) and you get into a situation where the coins are worth more melted down than they are as currency.

The article brings up an interesting note that I doubt my grandfather ever considered: electronic payments.  Transactions that are done with debit or credit cards would not be rounded to 5 cents, they would round to the penny.  But this begs the question, what should we round transactions to?  Computers can handle large numbers of decimal places, so why round to the penny?  We shouldn’t round the amounts for any transactions that are done electronically.

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