After hundreds of years, the U.S. Mint will no longer be making new one cent pieces, commonly called a “penny”. This was done because it takes more money to make a penny then a penny is worth, though that loss is but $85 Million a year, which is a drop in the proverbial bucket of trillions. With more people just paying by credit or debit cards, the impact is expected to be negligible. However, stores don’t put out signs like this for negligible reasons:
How stores are dealing with cash transactions can vary. Your humble author has seen many stores simply not that few pennies worth of change, meaning that the customer pays more than they have to. Still other companies will round up or down accordingly, meaning the impact will even out for the company in question. Nonetheless, many stores say they will round down to benefit the customer. While this will leave customers with a bit more change, or substantially more if they pay often with cash, the communitive effect will hit many of these stores at a time when there are economic warning signs.
And then there’s the political aspect of this: It is an outright admission that inflation is not only very real but it having a very real impact… including the creation of shortages of even soft specie.
Oh well, at least they won’t end up with egg on their face over this…
