> why is the US still minting pennies?

A lobbying group funded by the producer of the blanks used to make pennies opposes penny abolition [1]. There is no similarly-motivated group promoting it. (Citizens to Retire the Penny exists, but their last news item is from 2019 [2].)

When the U.S. eliminated the half cent it was worth 14 cents [3], so there is a good case of nixing the nickel alongside the penny, whenever we get around to it.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Americans_for_Common_Cents

[2] http://www.retirethepenny.org

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penny_debate_in_the_United_Sta...

> why is the US still minting pennies?

> > A lobbying group...

It is astonishing how many problems in this country start with those three words.

This is a good long-term argument for nationalizing money production.

Not to mention other countries have done this with little issue.

>Also, why is gas always ab extra 9/10 of a penny

Others have replied to the why, but it is technically 9 Mills. The thousandths unit was established in the Coinage Act of 1792 as the smallest unit of the dollar.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mill_(currency)#United_States

This is some useless trivia that I know for some reason :)

We stopped minting pennies here in Canada in 2012. Pennies are still legal tender, but cash purchases are rounded to the nearest 5 cents. I don’t think anyone here misses the pennies.

See that's the thing. If we didn't have pennies, companies couldn't ask their customers to fund as much of their tax writeoff every year when they ask them to round up for some random cause.

https://gizmodo.com/why-gas-is-priced-in-tenths-of-cents-169... > that last digit is just noise at the consumer level. That’s exactly the point.

The optics of eliminating the penny during inflation are really bad. The optics would be honest but politically bad. Maybe the next time we have a booming economy and high consumer confidence, we can make pennies seem tacky and get rid of them that way.

Buddy, there's no way you paid 3123 RON for a Big Mac, since that's approximately 750 dollars. You probably paid 3123 ROL (the old currency before it was redenominated circa 2005).

(You are correct that amounts below 100 ROL were totally meaningless.)

They should abolish coins. There is probably less need for them (who wants to carry them!) now the technology to accept notes in machines.

Maybe the people who make the note readers can lobby to abolish coins.

I have to wash my clothes at the laundromat. Get annoyed every time I have to shovel $6 of quarters into the machine, one-at-a-time.

I've asked my landlord if they would let me buy back the quarters from them since it's such a pain getting them in a coin shortage. They didn't respond. Rent is already in the thousands, really my landlord should just stomach the $8 they get off me from the laundry room a month and just make it free. I'd honestly pay my landlord even higher rent if I didn't have to deal with getting rolls of quarters.

The thinking might be that when word gets out, people let their friends come do their laundry for free.

Tangential but I find it interesting that as a general rule US apartment tenants don’t have a washer/dryer eg as a front-loader combo.

I gather from research online it comes back to the practice of generally renting furnished apartments, a preference for wood building construction, a practice of having non-water-proofed wet areas, historical custom (perhaps coinciding with apartments being constructed post-war when these appliances were large and highly expensive?), and the chicken-and-egg problem of there not being a market for smaller appliances and therefore there not being great supply of smaller appliances.

I'm not sure I've ever even met someone who rented a furnished apartment.

I just think it's because it's weird to have a washing machine in your kitchen for Americans, and nobody has managed to find the right marketing tone to make this feel normal. Also, for landlords to tolerate this, put hook-ups in, or simply offer it as a feature, you'd have to start with upper-middle class people wanting one and have it trickle down. But Americans get bigger places as a sign of wealth, so they really just want normal sized machines in-unit.

In Australia too almost never is a washing machine or dryer in the kitchen. Almost all houses and apartments will have a laundry room, away from the kitchen, even if it is just a 1 square meter closet with the washer and dryer stacked in there.

Coming from the UK, where the washing machine is always in the kitchen and having a laundry room is seen as extravagant, I think this is great because washing machines are noisy and shaky and sometime leaky. Having a separate wet room with drainage for this is a good idea. It means you can wash/dry at any time too (e.g. even if you are eating in the kitchen/diner area and want some peace!)

The simple solution is minting larger value coins.

If they were going to change anything, it would be likely to get rid of both the penny and nickel and use 1 decimal place for prices; the current US nickel already has a melt price/ face value of 124% currently (https://www.coinflation.com/), which is never a good thing

> why is gas always ab extra 9/10 of a penny

Same reason things are $.99, $19.95, $299.99 instead of $1.00, $20.00, $300.00.

In the US, there's many places that have 2 or 3 gas stations in near vicinity and price competition is fierce. So the $0.01 matters, people will drive to the gas station down the block to save that penny per gallon.

If it is 9/10 of a penny, then it is $0.001 per gallon. Fueling a 20 gallon tank is $0.02.

> If it is 9/10 of a penny, then it is $0.001 per gallon. Fueling a 20 gallon tank is $0.02.

… and some people will drive down the block for those 2 cents, even though they may not realize that it’s only 2 cents. It’s just “cheaper” to them.

Gas prices are quoted to fractions of a penny and then rounded to the nearest cent when a card is swiped. For people paying with cash, rounding to the nearest ten cents isn't that much of a leap.

It's a problem if it's always rounding up. Throwing away the penny also requires legislation enforcing round to nearest.

I dunno, usually it's 2 "upscale chain brand" gas stations with identical high prices and 1 "local brand" gas station nearby with significantly cheaper gas. I don't understand how competition works in the gas station business but $0.01 difference clearly does not matter.

It's a bit of the "look, it's not the next unit up," but it's also a bit of a tongue in cheek "this last 9/10th of a cent is the government collecting tax." It's no longer really true, since taxes make up much more than 1 cent of the cost of fuel, but it's stuck around as a reminder anyway.

That's worth at least a penny for your thoughts

My thoughts are worth only a monatary rounding error I guess...