There was a full page ad in the NYT business section yesterday that, and I kid you not, said:
“NEW LEGISLATION WILL ATTEMPT TO DO AWAY WITH THE PENNY. WHAT’S NEXT, PUPPIES AND RAINBOWS TOO?”
Really. That is what it said. Here, I have proof:
You are thinking, surely this title is just to grab attention. It can’t go on like this can it? Oh but it can.
“Our citizens love the jangle of coins in their front pockets. We enjoy seeing the shiny copper in our change jar. That is what makes us feel American.”
The ad is brought to us by Virgin Mobile, a UK company. So the “our” and “us” confuse me a bit. But now that I think about it, that jangle and jar do kind of make me want to sing the national anthem. American, land of the change, home of the free.
The ad also strongly suggests we contact our representatives and tell them that we “see great power in the penny, and can’t bear to lose this historic symbol of America. And that [we] hate rounding.”
Can’t you just picture the team that wrote this? “The penny has power. That’s it. Say that. Should we talk about communism? Did communists have pennys? Probably not. We could call it a historic symbol. Get that in. Totally historic. Oh, yeah, and don’t forget about rounding. Rounding sucks.”
The full page ad was brought to us by Virgin Mobile, “SERVING the GREATER GOOD.” (I’m not quite sure what they were going for with the deemphasized “the.”) In this case, the greater good is pennies, puppies, and rainbows. With all that is wrong in this world, they chose to spend time and money on the penny.
The world today me laugh and weep at the same time. If it were for the laughing, I’m not sure I could bear to get out of bed in the morning.
Here’s reason enough to ditch pennies - for the first time in history, it now costs the U.S. Mint more than one cent to produce a penny (1.23 cents to be precise). I once read that the Mint produces 30 million every day. Do the math. (Maybe they plan to make it up in volume).
Scott Dear,
You’re so strange.
I definitely feel that a less precise currency system is taking us in the wrong direction. If anything, I think we could really clean up our national fiscal policy if we could move to a fully floating-point currency system. Not only would financial calculations become far more accurate, and eliminate the antiquated “rounding” practice, but we could all get to say the word “mantissa” a lot more. How could this go wrong?
I think we have a long way to go. I’ve gotten used to restaurants assuming that I will leave anything less than 10 roubles (coins) anyway and simply not giving me the change. I thought it was rude for the longest time, but I guess I can be trained.
I’d vote for eliminating pennies, nickels, and even dimes! What is a dime, anyways? Round up/down and everything will work out the same. I could even be persuaded to ditch the quarter if we could make laundry and parking machines work with an ATM or credit card.
I saw an interesting “Modern Marvels” on the History channel recently and found out that, because of historic political differences, the US Mint makes coins while the Bureau of Engraving & Printing makes the paper bills. So keeping up coin production over bills could be seen as a self-perpetuating interest of the Mint.