{"id":1029,"date":"2007-10-05T07:14:09","date_gmt":"2007-10-05T12:14:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/2007\/10\/05\/save-the-humble-penny\/"},"modified":"2007-10-05T07:51:37","modified_gmt":"2007-10-05T12:51:37","slug":"save-the-humble-penny","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/2007\/10\/05\/save-the-humble-penny\/","title":{"rendered":"Penny for your thoughts?"},"content":{"rendered":"

According to a news report this week, the Canadian government has been considering the elimination of the lowly penny<\/a>. The article says that only one-third of Canadians regularly use the penny.<\/p>\n

What the heck are the other 2\/3 doing?<\/p>\n

I mean, I know use of a debit card has probably widely surpassed the use of actual cash in most transaction. I only ever carry about $20 at a time myself. But everybody has to be using cash at least some of the time. Think about this: Tim Horton’s sells 76% of Canada’s coffee and baked goods (source<\/a>) and they don’t take debit — how can only one-third of Canadians be using cash?<\/p>\n

Mmmm, doughnuts…<\/p>\n

Anyway, I’m not sure I’m on board with this idea of dropping the penny. I’m sure that there are far more pennies held hostage in jars, piggy banks and change trays across the country than are actually exchanged in commerce on a given day, but just because something doesn’t work as well as it used to doesn’t mean we should simply get rid of it. Heck, we still keep William Shatner around, don’t we?<\/p>\n

My boys are still at that tender age when they believe me when I lie to them, and the sticky-fingered little monkeys like to filch coins off the dressers and countertops where Beloved and I dump them from our pockets. So far, it’s been an easy sell to tell them they’re only allowed to take the shiny, copper-coloured “pirate coins”, which are of course far more valuable than those bulky one- and two- dollar coins. Tristan, bless his clever little heart, has only in the past month or so figured out what a quarter is and that it is infinitely more valuable than the other coins because that’s what fits in all the candy machines. (Sheesh, that’s 2500% inflation since I was a kid – I still remember penny gumballs!)<\/p>\n

What do you think? Is there a better use for the $130M the government spends each year keeping the penny in circulation? Or are you a traditionalist who thinks we need to keep the penny alive, at least so we can use it in wishing wells and fountains throughout the country?
\n
\n(Edited to add<\/strong>: the title of this post was edited to reflect the brilliant comment by Trixie. I’m embarrassed I didn’t think of it myself first!)<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

According to a news report this week, the Canadian government has been considering the elimination of the lowly penny. The article says that only one-third of Canadians regularly use the penny. What the heck are the other 2\/3 doing? I mean, I know use of a debit card has probably widely surpassed the use of … Continue reading “Penny for your thoughts?”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[17],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1029","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-life-the-universe-and-everything"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1029","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1029"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1029\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1029"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1029"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1029"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}