by Freida Marie Crump
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Greetings from the Ridge.
Pity the poor penny.
Benjamin Franklin suggested the first design for our cousin of the British pence and now 300 billion coins and 11 designs later, they are thrown into drawers, unspent, by 58% of the American public.
Franklin’s coin was five times heavier and half again as large as today’s counterpart, and it had the additional benefit of being worth something.
Several years ago one of the classes in our local school system performed the "penny test." The students would place a penny in a well-traveled hallway then post spies to see who’d bend over and pick it up. The janitor was the only taker. Last year the same test was performed with a nickel and the only difference in results is that no janitor came by to retrieve the thing. Maybe the average high school student just can’t bend over.
The penny battle has raged for years and every bill introduced to abolish its use has been soundly defeated. Then came the U.S. Mint’s announcement that it now costs 1.3 cents to produce the penny. The battle lines are again being drawn. The zinc industry has produced its own pro-penny website (three guesses as to metal used to make the penny), and on the other side of the coin, Citizens for Retiring the Penny is gearing up. Americans for Common Cents says polls show that two-thirds of Americans want to keep the penny in spite of the fact that most just throw them in a jar.
U.S. Rep. Jim Kolbe of Arizona asked Congress to phase out the penny five years ago and he claims he’ll give it ago again this year. He said that if the bill fails again, he may open up a business melting down pennies to resell the metal to the government.
Edmond Knowles of Flomaton, Alabama, saved his pennies for 40 years and ended up with 1.3 million (4.5 tons) of the little rascals. His bank refused to take them all at once so he found a coin-counting company that wanted a little publicity, backed an armored truck into his yard and got the truck stuck trying to pull out his hoard. The profit? $13,084.59. That is, if Edmond’s time for forty years was worth nothing.
Jeff Gore, a Berkeley biophysics Ph.D., talks of a Walgreen’s study claiming that the penny wastes two or three seconds on every transaction. This amounts to several lost hours a year for each of us and $10 billion in productivity. This doesn’t include the man hours it took to make the study.
On the Coonridge level, the coin is an embarrassment. You walk up to the counter at the convenience store to pay for your $1.03 coffee. Why isn’t it a dollar? Marketing, I guess. The "take a penny" tray is empty. You have no pennies in your pocket. You look at the clerk and
she stares at you. It’s a standoff. You wait for her to say, "That’s close enough. Have a nice day." She waits to see if you’re going to drag out another dollar bill or if you’re waiting for her to say, "That’s close enough. Have a nice day." If you’re tight-fisted you’ll stand a moment longer, waiting for her to cave in. If you’re a pushover like me, you’ll drag out another bill, throw the change in your pocket, then find it three years later when the car dealer cleans under the seat of your trade-in.
Then there’s the fast food employee who runs out to your car with $5.97 worth of vascular constriction and fries. Do you make her run back in for your three cents or sound like a cheapskate version of Diamond Jim Brady by saying, "Oh, keep the three cents?"
The pro-penny proponents have filled their purses with reasonable arguments: prices would go up if everything was rounded to the next nickel, charities like UNICEF would suffer, the poor and elderly would be hurt worst, and we’d lose a symbol of America. They’ve padded their argument by pushing through legislation to commemorate the bicentennial of Lincoln’s birth by issuing new pennies in 2009 with four different backsides.
Bottom line: when Ben Franklin proposed the first coin design in 1787, the little rascal would buy you a loaf of bread. Now it scrambles the blades in your vacuum cleaner when you clean out the couch.
Frankly, the plight of the penny pales in comparison to other more important issues, but if we give Abe the heave-ho, the nickel should be getting a little nervous. Further down in the U.S. Mint’s press release was the news that the five-cent piece now costs more than five cents to produce.
You ever in Coonridge, stop by. We may not answer the door, but you’ll enjoy the trip.