Usefulness Of Pennies

The penny is practically worthless to many people in our country. In a Gallup Poll of 1,002 adults conducted from June 11 of this year displayed shocking results. Nearly 75% of those adults would stop and pick a penny that is present on the ground. About 40% of men and 35% of women would walk passed a penny that is on any type of surface. This poll also found that 58 percent of Americans stash their pennies in piggy banks, jars and drawers. Some Americans redeem their cents at banks or coin-counting machines, but 2 percent admitted they toss them into the trash. They consider the penny a nuisance to many fellow Americans. This sentiment has been growing through recent years. The penny is basically obsolete and should be removed from American currency.

Plautus once said “You have to spend money to make money,” a quote made painfully true by the penny, a coin worth 1/100th of a dollar. The penny’s story starts in 1792 with the first U.S. Mint which produced the dime, quarter, nickel, penny and half penny which we will get back to later. Pennies were originally made of 100% copper, however, as prices of copper rose they soon started to make pennies out of 95% zinc and 3% copper, which is how they are made today. Soon after this, the raw material of pennies began to cost more than the penny itself was worth, therefore people began to melt them down and sell the material for profit. When this occurred, instead of the government getting rid of the pennies all together and being happy citizens where removing them from circulation they made melting the currency down illegal and continued producing 4 billion pennies a year! You can find these tiny useless coins anywhere from in your couch cushion to on the sidewalk. The reason we should stop minting pennies is that they cost money, waste time, are bad for the environment, and they are useless.

Getting rid of the penny is good for the economy because it would save the government on average 60 million dollars a year. Evidence that supports this claim is, “Pennies may not be big money, even if you add them together. But we are paying a cost for the privilege of squirreling

That one cent can change into something big. As in source #3 it states, “Washington Middle School hosted it’s annual Penny Drive for charity. Students from every grade brought in bags and jars of pennies, and with everyone’s assistance, they raised over $3,000 in one week!” With a common cause and the penny that is willingly given away, you can only achieve higher. “Michael Cooper, an eighth grader from Washington Middle School, said, “Pennies.. Add up, because they are worth so little, people don’t mind donating them to charity.”” There is power in numbers and if it goes to a good cause who could object?

In the first place, the penny should be kept as American currency because of the great impact it holds. For instance in the article, The Ever-Changing Penny, the author states, “The history of a penny reveals… a piece of American culture. The one-cent piece has influenced our language… such as ‘a penny for your thoughts’”(Story 5). Provided with this evidence, the author is saying that the penny is very important to Americans, as it created part of our language. Many

The penny is one of the worlds most known coin. It is the cheapest and most worthless coin in the U.S currency, people are considering removing the penny from the U.S curency for a lot of reasons. The penny should be removed from today's U.S curency because it costs the government too much money to make the penny, people rarely use pennies because of how worthless they are, and the coin has been redone to many times.

In Forbes magazine, Neena Moorjani said “It’s practically useless in everyday life” (Lewis). Most people today fling their pennies into the trash, they drop out of circulation, or in couch cushions where you won’t see them again. In the 1900’s there was a thing called penny candy. You could go to a local store and buy one piece, or a few pieces of your favorite candy with just one penny. Today, candy bars from a gas station can cost up to two dollars. Adding to this, vending machines cause problems with coins. The vending machines used to take all types of coins, nickels, dimes and even pennies. If you try to put a penny in a machine now it will just spit it back out or an alarm will sound. In stores when someone says “one second I think I have some pennies” is very annoying. It uses about “...40 wasted seconds per day per person.

Is a penny saved really a penny earned? Well not much longer it isn't, people think that we should discontinue the penny from our current day system. In my eyes i see the penny as a waste of time and a waste of money.There has been talk lately about discontinuing the minting of the us penny,and after reading all four articles it's hard to say that we should keep the penny: “Penny Wise, or 2.4 Cents Foolish?” (Source 1), “Is the Penny Worth It?” (Source 2), “Give a penny-Save the day!” (Source 3) “The Ever-Changing penny” (Souce 4). In my opinion we should discontinue the U.S. penny because it is costing us too much to produce pennies and the cost to produce it is actually more than it's worth, many countries have already dropped the pennies and it's going just fine for them, there is already a plan for when we are going to discontinue the pennies, so we are prepared.

Have you ever felt like you wanted to get rid of something? That “something” might be the penny. Well, the penny’s value has comedown so much, no one really cares about it anymore. The penny costs too much money to make so we are wasting time and money. The cash register takes a long time to count each penny so prices should be rounded. In my opinion, America should abolish the penny.

If we just get rid of the penny, the mint would only have to do half the work! And we’re not even counting all the time, fuel, expense, and hassle of carting all those pennies around to the banks,merchants, etc. If we stop making pennies in the first place, we save all this associated time and trouble, too” (Headley). If we just got rid of the penny we wouldn't have to pay the price for making therm, and for getting them everywhere, which could cost nearly as much as making all the pennies. On the flip side, some might say that if we got rid of the penny then we would have to round everything to the nickel, because of this we would have to make more nickels, which are even less economically efficient then the penny. What these people don't realize is that most goods, and services will round up to the nearest dollar, so we won't have to make nearly as many nickels as we would pennies.

The penny is barely used in the united states. The penny is often refused as change in transactions(Sommer). They are not wanted for change because of the low value. They are also commonly put in jars and consequently forgotten around the house(Sommer). Pennies easily forgotten due to the limited amount of opportunities to use them. Getting rid of the forgotten and useless pennies will have them sent to charities to give them money, and then later put them into

To start, pennies should not be eliminated for many reasons one reason is that they are very helpful for charities. For example, Washington Middle School brought bags and jars of pennies and raised over $3,000 in one week for a charity penny drive. This shows that pennies can add up quick because they are worth so little. In addition, an eighth grader at WMS said, “ He was happy to give them to someone who could use them.” In others words, you can always contribute a penny to a better benefit by donating them to a greater good.

According to the text “The Cost of the Penny” to the editor it says “ One-cent coins constitute a complete and utter waste of taxpayers' dollars—not to mention a waste of our time and energy. People think that we should keep pennies because if we did have pennies people would have to round everything up to the nearest nickel, that is why some people think we should keep pennies. Although people have any reason why they would want to keep pennies, pennies are costing us $100 million dollars year to make them. This means that there are some benefits for having pennies. But some people believe that we should get rid of pennies.

To start off, many people think the penny should be eliminated. Some say we should stop the production of the penny because it costs approximately 2.41 cents to make each penny, as of 2014. Others believe that pennies take up too much space and take too much time to count. Some have even gone as far as eliminating the nickel. It costs over 11 cents to produce each nickel. Many people feel as though pennies are not worth the trouble of carrying around and that the penny is not worth enough by itself. “”Pennies take up too much space on our dressers at home,” Jim Flaherty, the Canadian finance minister, said in a speech last month. A persuasive government brochure put it this way: “After eliminating the penny, businesses would use the rounding system to avoid using the pennies. Most people use debit and credit cards to pay for their everyday goods these days.

The first reason we should eliminate the penny is the production of the penny costs more than the penny is actually worth according to coinnews.net the penny cost 1.5 cents to produce which is .5 above its face value it may not sound like a lot but usmint.gov says The modern Philadelphia and Denver facilities together in recent years have produced as many