#104. Non-Collectable Pennies
May 11th, 2008 by bischein
At some point in your life - if this hasn’t happened to you yet, it will – you will drop a penny on the ground and decide that it’s not worth picking up. The act of bending over, grabbing this coin, and standing up again is just not worth it. Maybe your hands will be full of groceries that day, or maybe your back will be sore. Or maybe you’ll just decide you don’t feel like bending over for a damn penny.
When you have pennies in your pocket, wallet, or coin purse, they just take up space and weigh you down. You can’t wait to get rid of them. But that leaves you with a dilemma – if you fish around for perfect change when making a cash purchase, you are as bad as People Who Pay for Small Purchases With a Check. You take just as long, and it makes you look cheap.
How else can you get rid of a penny? You can’t even get a tiny piece of gum for a penny anymore. You can’t use them at the Laundromat or in the snack machine. The only viable way to get rid of them en masse is to save them up, stack them into neat 50-pennny stacks, place them in paper holders, and take them to the bank. If your bank is a real pain in the ass, they may even make you write your account number on the paper holders – an impossible task once they are full of pennies! Who the hell wants to through all that for two quarters?
The “Give a Penny, Take a Penny” jar is your only hope. It’s an acknowledgement that pennies are an annoying aspect of all our lives, so we might as well share the burden. Sadly, not many establishments have a “Give a Penny, Take a Penny” jar. So what can we do about this penny problem?
Have you ever decided to play the board game Monopoly without the $1 currency? It’s so much easier to just round up and down to the nearest $5. Why not do that every day by discarding the penny, once and for all?!
At this point, the government is actually spending more than the value of a penny to make a penny. 1.2 cents, to be exact. I like Abe Lincoln as much as the next guy, but is the sentimental value of a penny really worth the contribution to our national debt?
As a child, I collected pennies with the hope that, one day, they would all be taken out of circulation and the value of my collection would soar. I enjoyed going through my grandfather’s giant penny jar and sifting through the old wheat pennies, looking for rare ones. But that joy is lost on the common, every-day penny. The pennies from the 2000s, the 1990s, the 1980s, the 1970s, even the 1960s are no fun. The only thing that can save us from these common-place pennies is to take them out of circulation and make them all collectors’ items.
Now wait, trying to use your spare change to make purchases is nowhere near as bad as check-writing. I mean, I wouldn’t do it if I was in a hurry, but otherwise, better to get rid of my change than to get more change back in return.
As for trading in pennies (or other coins), Commerce Bank has nice machines in all their branches that will cash in your coins for you - free of charge. You don’t even need to have an account there!
Commerce Bank did not pay me for this comment (but they could!)
Well, the government isn’t making pennies to make money off them, so technically they’re not losing anything when the cost of making them is higher.
And I like pennies. You can be much more exact with them. If everything at Walmart ended in .90 rather than .88, think how much more money they’d be sucking out of us, too.
Pennies are not all the same size and weight: I got gypped at a gas station next to my dorm when I had to pay 101 pennies instead of 99 for a bottle of water. I had about a $1.20 in pennies, and I wanted to get rid of them. So I painstakingly counted the pennies, putting them in neat stacks of ten, then dumped them all before the cashier when i picked up the bottle of water. She put them on a scale, and asked me for two more stinkin pennies! Fortunately I had some in my pocket, but I feel swindled.
And I’m sorry, but I don’t have an ATM account, so I pay for all my purchases with checks - small or otherwise. Sometimes I’ll get some cash back at the HEB so I can use dorm vending machines and such, but other than buying groceries, I don’t spend a lot.
i work at walmart whether u guys know or not 60% of the ppl use exact cash pennies to and it is nice. i am not a penny freak but hay money is money and it all spends the same right
Collectible is spelled incorrectly.
Hmmmm… NOPE: http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/collectable