Oh the humble
penny! I’m going to miss that grubby piece of copper. Oops, that isn’t quite
true. Since 1996, Canada’s pennies have been made of copper, zinc and steel,
but I’m going to miss them anyway. And there are a lot of them to miss.
According to the Royal Canadian Mint, there are still more than six billion
pennies in circulation and it will take at least three to five years for them
to disappear from our pockets, wallets and dresser drawers. Wanna bet? Pennies
remain legal tender for all cash transactions, and human nature being what it
is, I have a sneaky suspicion we’ll be seeing pennies around for at least a decade.
Maybe more.
Maybe
life will become more convenient without the lowly penny. After all, according
to the Canadian Retail Council, approximately 65 per cent of all sale
transactions today are made by credit or debit cards and less than 25 per cent
by cash. But as the use of cash slowly but relentlessly disappears, we’re
losing other things with it. Like penny lore and a wealth of quotations about
the lowly coin:
A
penny for your thoughts. (Ancient proverb) A penny saved is a penny earned.
(Benjamin Franklin) A bad penny always
comes back. (German proverb) Penny wise, pound foolish. (British proverb)
Getting your two cents worth. (unknown) )
“It’s raining pennies from heaven.” (Johnny Burke song) And then there’s
Margaret Thatcher. “Pennies don’t come from heaven. They have to be earned here
on earth.”
One
of the reasons given for phasing out pennies is that they actually cost 1.6
cents to produce and the mint is losing $11 million every year producing the
Queen’s image in copper. The first Canadian penny was struck by the British
Royal Mint in 1858, according to the Ottawa Citizen. Over the years there have
been five different penny designs minted and since the Canadian Mint took over
in 1908, some 35 billion pennies have been produced and if you stacked them all
in one tippy pile they would reach as high as 100,000 CN Towers and weigh
almost twice as much as the ill-fated Titanic, the Citizen says. The most
valuable Canadian penny ever produced as every numismatist knows was the famous 1936 penny with a dot mistakenly on the
face that recently fetched $400,000 in auction. Only three such coins are known to exist. The last penny minted
by the Canadian Mint was made May 4, 2012. Distribution of pennies ended Feb.
4, 2013.
So now what?
According to a press
release issued by the Federal Department of Finance, the penny will remain
Canada’s smallest unit of currency “indefinitely” for cash transactions by
businesses that choose to accept them. Obviously the catch here is that
businesses no longer have to accept your penny stash even though they remain
legal tender. However, if you really want to get rid of that annoying pile of
copper that you’ve accumulated over the years, your best bet will be to roll
them and take them to a bank which is obligated to accept them, or better yet,
donate them to a local charity which would likely be quite willing to roll your
donation for you.
And then there’s the
confusing issue of “rounding up and rounding down” in cash transactions. The
secret here is you round to the nearest nickel. In other words, cash
transaction of $1.01 and $1.02 are rounded down to one dollar. Transactions of
$1.03 and $1.04 are rounded up to $1.05. Likewise transactions of $1.06 and
$1.07 are rounded down to $1.05 and transactions of $1.08 and $1.09 are rounded
up to one dollar and 10 cents. Is that clear? I didn’t think so. Check the
government of Canada’s web page under penny elimination. Or just ask at the
till. I came across one major merchant in town this week that’s rounding every
transaction down as a good will gesture to its customers.
But no matter how you
look at it, it’s definitely the end of an era. Will our grandchildren even know
what a penny is? Will they care in what’s rapidly becoming a cashless world?
Sad to say, those cursed electronic instruments known as “smart phones” will
probably handle all our financial transactions in the future, including cash.
It’s a “Brave New
World” as Aldous Huxley once said. But is it a better world? I’ll leave that up
to you.
Gerry Warner is a retired journalist and Cranbrook City Councillor. His
thoughts, what few he has, are his own.
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