CGP Grey is a youtuber who made a video years ago about stopping printing the penny. when trump announced ending printing the penny, he made basically the same video about stopping printing the nickel, and the dime.
Due to Inflation.
The same reason that Bernie sanders pushed for a $15/h minimum wage, which should itself be inflated from its 2016 amount to 22 bucks an hour.
While I think both of you are making reasonable arguments, I wanted to make fun of the situation.
Sure, I mean, I’m also all for raising the minimum wage, as it’s wildly stagnated against inflation. You can be for that and for getting rid of the penny?
Idk, I just don’t understand how I’m “moving the goalposts”? Or perhaps I’ve just misunderstood the point of your comment.
I actually have seen that CGP Grey video before though, and it’s only gotten more relevant as time has gone on, lol. It doesn’t make it bad policy just because Trump is the one doing it.
It’s not bad policy because Trump is doing it. The rationale is sound. The bad part of it is zero guidance was given on how cash businesses (virtually all brick and mortar business) are expected to handle the inability to make exact change in the absence of available pennies, leaving them all to figure it out for themselves.
Sure, but does there need to be top down guidance? It seems fairly obvious on its face that you would just round to the nearest 5¢. Or floor/ceil any overage to the nearest 5¢. Those are really the only options, and I’m fine to leave it to businesses to handle which way they want to go on that.
It’s not like the prices a business charges are set in stone by God. They can charge whatever they want. If milk is $1, and bread is $2, but they want everyone who buys milk and bread at the same time to pay $4, they can do that. It’d be a weird and unwise decision, but it’s certainly allowed. So in the same way if they want to charge you $1.50 even though your “actual total” came out to $1.48, that’s absolutely their prerogative, even without the penny going away.
It’ll probably require some changes to PoS systems, and getting that rolled out might be the harder part, to your point. But the PoS guys have until all the pennies exit circulation to figure it out, so that’ll be the better part of half a decade at minimum.
You have to remember, they’re not going out and stealing all the pennies. They’re just not making more. Businesses have a lot of time to prepare for this. This isn’t an overnight process.
You can’t just round to the nearest 5¢. Round up, and you end up pissing people off for overcharging them. Round down, and you end up losing money on every sale, which adds up over time with hundreds or thousands of transactions a day.
The grocery stores around me put up signs a month ago asking people to pay in exact change when using cash due to the penny shortage. Without stores able to get more pennies from the banks, this will become a problem in months, not years.
Businesses already round to the nearest cent all the time. Any time an odd number is part of a 50% off sale, or any time you charge sales tax. The fractions of a cent are too small to matter, and we’ve gotten to the point where the pennies are too small to matter.
You say people will be pissed if you round up, but stores have been slowly increasing prices by dollars for the past few years and haven’t lost a customer over it. A few cents of rounding isn’t going to drive your customer base away. Especially if all the other stores are doing it too.
And just think for a moment. Let’s say the store starts losing 4¢/transaction. The truly worst case where they always floor in favor of the customer. First, they could offset this by just blanket raising the base price of everything by 5¢ and no one would bat an eye, but let’s set that aside for now.
Let’s say a store does 10k transactions a day. Feels like a good average for a large sized store. That’s a theoretical max loss of $400 a day. If the average grocery store customer is spending around $50, that’s $500k of revenue per day for the store that just lost $400. I think that’s pretty safely in the slush. Hell, they probably lose more than that per day on shrinkage alone. And they saved way more than that when they replaced all the cashier’s with kiosks, and I didn’t see any of those savings passed on to me.
No business is gonna fold over a 4¢/transaction loss. It’s a negligible impact on your overall overhead. And even if it wasn’t, the small bump in base price you would need to cover it is so small as to not register with your customer base.
Idk, I just don’t understand how I’m “moving the goalposts”? Or perhaps I’ve just misunderstood the point of your comment.
CGP Grey made the video for “get rid of the penny”. When they got rid of the penny, he made the video “get rid of the nickel, and the dime.” When the original goal as getting rid of the penny, once that was achieved, he moved the goalposts to get rid of the nickel.
Your statement is in line with CGP Grey’s (correct) viewpoint.
Pointing this out in a facetious manner is meant to be humorous.
One dollar in 1950 had far more buying power than one dollar does now. Something that cost a dollar in 1950 would cost nearly $14 in 2026.
The halfpenny, when discontinued, could purchase roughly as much as 12¢ could today.
At that time, it was decided that a halfpenny wasn’t necessary, as transactions were of a high enough value that made tracking the numbers to the half-penny needless, and that you could just round to the nearest penny.
The equivalent today would be rounding to either the nearest dime or quarter, eliminating the need for smaller denomination coins.
Please, this is MAGA America, of course it’s a scam. Your post is exactly why we should keep the penny.
There are many, many very wealthy people and corporations out there, and they keep track of every single fucking penny they touch, and they go to War if a single penny is missing. As an example, here you are figuring out the purchasing power of some anachronistic currency that hasn’t been used in 200 years to justify it.
Those same people are now telling us that we, the working people, don’t need to keep track of every one of OUR pennies, because we don’t have enough of them to worry about. Don’t worry, all their cash registers will do the calculations for you, and it will always be fair. We’ll never round UP the numbers so you always end up paying a few cents more for EVERYTHING. It won’t make a difference to you and your few pennies, but they will add up, and make the rich even richer by taking your pennies directly out of your pocket, a penny at a time. What are you complaining about? It’s just a penny.
But it’s my penny, and I want it, and before you call me a cheapskate, I’ll remind the world that those calling me a cheapskate are the ones trying to take MY penny away. If it’s important enough for them to take it from me, then it’s important enough to defend it from them. I’m not giving these Jackals one inch.
Of course, the way around it is to use your debit card for everything, and your purchases will be calculated to the penny. And they will also be able to track every item you purchase, and where you are at any given moment, and every place you’ve been.
So should we bring back the halfpenny? Cause right now they’re scamming you out of all those fractional pennies you could be saving, and that really adds up. They’re up charging you 0.5¢ all the time, and robbing those halfpennies right out of your pocket!!!
But if you’re not for bringing back tracking transactions down to the fractional cent, what makes it different to your mind? Why is that ridiculous, but rounding to the nearest 5¢ is way out of bounds?
I wasn’t saying I thought that was your actual position. I was saying that your actual position made as much sense as that.
There’s no difference in kind between rounding to the nearest penny or rounding to the nearest nickel. It’s the exact same thing, and the question is just “where do you draw the line”?
So should the line never change no matter what? Regardless of any real life implications the line is drawn exactly where it was meant to be by God at the beginning of time and it is devoid of context or reason?
If we had massive deflation to the point where tracking to the fractional cent made sense, I would argue that it might be worth printing halfpennies again. But we don’t. And the idea that companies are going to be robbing you of pennies is no more or less reasonable than the idea that they are robbing you of fractional pennies.
Hell, there’s a real chance it’ll go the other way in a lot of cases, as stores will start marking things as $X.95 instead of $X.99. Someone else did the math based on what economists projected the cost to consumers would be, and it came out to 2¢ per person per year. Not exactly a staggering number.
The fact of the matter is that we have to occasionally re-figure at what granularity it’s worth tracking our fractions of a dollar to. Inflation will always be inflating, and in a few hundred years when a loaf of bread is $250 the idea that we would track fractional dollars will seem as antiquated as the halfpenny does now.
But we used to figure everything to the half cent. That’s my point. We stopped figuring it to the half cent when we got rid of the half cent coin.
In the same way, we would stop figuring things to the whole cent if we got rid of the penny.
As an example, let’s say I wanted to buy an item that was $1.75, but it was 50% off. How much does that cost? In reality, it should be $0.875, but we don’t track to the half penny, so we just call it 88¢.
Or, if you buy something for $1.50, but there’s a sales tax of 3%, that item will be $1.545 after sales tax, but they just round it to $1.55.
They’re already rounding your numbers up. That’s already happening. The only reason it feels different is because we “don’t track fractional pennies,” which is only true because we got rid of the coins that allowed us to track fractional pennies.
If we got rid of the coins that let us track individual pennies, we would also stop tracking all exchanges to the individual penny, and simply round to the nearest 5¢.
Which, in many cases, could actually work in your favor, I might add. If you bought something and the total was 1.52, they would simply round it down to $1.50. Sales tax law varies state to state, but that it’s how the vast majority of states handle fractional pennies already, so precident indicates it would be that way for rounding to the nearest 5¢. E.g. if sales tax is 2%, and you bought something for $1.19, that comes out to $1.2138, but most states round that to $1.21, saving you 0.38¢ (38 one hundredths of a cent).
That’s not how inflation works. “Worth” is a pretty variable term, “buying power” is typically a better description.
Think of it like this, using somewhat made up numbers. In the 50s you could get a cup of coffee for 10 cents from a diner. That same cup of coffee in 2025 costs like 2.50 dollars. Is the coffee “worth” more in 2025? No, it’s the same 8oz cup of coffee but the money has less buying power
Yes, a dollar is a dollar. But it is not worth the same value.
The dollar categorically holds less value. Worth is just a measure of how much value something has to people.
The goods are more monetarily expensive, but have the same intrinsic value (e.g. calories do not give your body more energy now than they used to). Thus, the dollar is worth less than it used to be, and it requires more of them to equal the value of the same amount of food. A dollar today is equivalent to one other dollar today, but it is not worth one dollar ten, twenty, or 50 years ago.
If I could trade $100 today for $100 50 years ago, I would have more value even though both are classified as “one hundred dollars”, because $100 50 years ago has more value and gets you more goods.
$1 today gets you the same amount of goods as $0.53 got you in the year 2000 in terms of actual buying power, hence why people use that term.
Let’s say that, in 1950, you could buy 10 apples for a dollar. Would you agree that, in 1950, 10 apples were “worth” $1? One dollar’s “worth” of apples was 10 apples?
Now, let’s say today I can buy one apple for one dollar. Would you agree that 1 apple was “worth” one dollar? That one dollar’s “worth” of apples was 1 apple?
Now, if we assume that the “buying power” of a dollar is measured in “how many apples a dollar can buy,” that my current dollar is “worth less” than a 1950 dollar, because it purchases me fewer apples? That the two “dollars” have a different “number of apples I can buy” property?
Yes, in each case I’ve purchased a “dollars worth of apples,” but it’s very much meaningful to define how many apples that is, and track how that changes over time.
And if I cancelled the halfpenny because it wasn’t worth having when it could only buy 1 apple, but right now it takes 12 pennies to buy 1 apple, then perhaps I should have gotten rid of the penny a long time ago. And the nickel. And probably the dime.
The dime is currently worth less than the halfpenny was when it stopped being minted because it wasn’t useful to do so anymore.
This is wildly overdue, and honestly, probably not far enough.
Thanks CGP Grey. You keep moving them goalposts.
Just like how the federal minimum wage needs to be over 22 dollars, not just Fif-Teen bucks an hour </bernie>
…what?
CGP Grey is a youtuber who made a video years ago about stopping printing the penny. when trump announced ending printing the penny, he made basically the same video about stopping printing the nickel, and the dime.
Due to Inflation.
The same reason that Bernie sanders pushed for a $15/h minimum wage, which should itself be inflated from its 2016 amount to 22 bucks an hour.
While I think both of you are making reasonable arguments, I wanted to make fun of the situation.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=58SrtQNt4YE < kill nickels
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y5UT04p5f7U < Kill pennies
Sure, I mean, I’m also all for raising the minimum wage, as it’s wildly stagnated against inflation. You can be for that and for getting rid of the penny?
Idk, I just don’t understand how I’m “moving the goalposts”? Or perhaps I’ve just misunderstood the point of your comment.
I actually have seen that CGP Grey video before though, and it’s only gotten more relevant as time has gone on, lol. It doesn’t make it bad policy just because Trump is the one doing it.
It’s not bad policy because Trump is doing it. The rationale is sound. The bad part of it is zero guidance was given on how cash businesses (virtually all brick and mortar business) are expected to handle the inability to make exact change in the absence of available pennies, leaving them all to figure it out for themselves.
Sure, but does there need to be top down guidance? It seems fairly obvious on its face that you would just round to the nearest 5¢. Or floor/ceil any overage to the nearest 5¢. Those are really the only options, and I’m fine to leave it to businesses to handle which way they want to go on that.
It’s not like the prices a business charges are set in stone by God. They can charge whatever they want. If milk is $1, and bread is $2, but they want everyone who buys milk and bread at the same time to pay $4, they can do that. It’d be a weird and unwise decision, but it’s certainly allowed. So in the same way if they want to charge you $1.50 even though your “actual total” came out to $1.48, that’s absolutely their prerogative, even without the penny going away.
It’ll probably require some changes to PoS systems, and getting that rolled out might be the harder part, to your point. But the PoS guys have until all the pennies exit circulation to figure it out, so that’ll be the better part of half a decade at minimum.
You have to remember, they’re not going out and stealing all the pennies. They’re just not making more. Businesses have a lot of time to prepare for this. This isn’t an overnight process.
You can’t just round to the nearest 5¢. Round up, and you end up pissing people off for overcharging them. Round down, and you end up losing money on every sale, which adds up over time with hundreds or thousands of transactions a day.
The grocery stores around me put up signs a month ago asking people to pay in exact change when using cash due to the penny shortage. Without stores able to get more pennies from the banks, this will become a problem in months, not years.
Businesses already round to the nearest cent all the time. Any time an odd number is part of a 50% off sale, or any time you charge sales tax. The fractions of a cent are too small to matter, and we’ve gotten to the point where the pennies are too small to matter.
You say people will be pissed if you round up, but stores have been slowly increasing prices by dollars for the past few years and haven’t lost a customer over it. A few cents of rounding isn’t going to drive your customer base away. Especially if all the other stores are doing it too.
And just think for a moment. Let’s say the store starts losing 4¢/transaction. The truly worst case where they always floor in favor of the customer. First, they could offset this by just blanket raising the base price of everything by 5¢ and no one would bat an eye, but let’s set that aside for now.
Let’s say a store does 10k transactions a day. Feels like a good average for a large sized store. That’s a theoretical max loss of $400 a day. If the average grocery store customer is spending around $50, that’s $500k of revenue per day for the store that just lost $400. I think that’s pretty safely in the slush. Hell, they probably lose more than that per day on shrinkage alone. And they saved way more than that when they replaced all the cashier’s with kiosks, and I didn’t see any of those savings passed on to me.
No business is gonna fold over a 4¢/transaction loss. It’s a negligible impact on your overall overhead. And even if it wasn’t, the small bump in base price you would need to cover it is so small as to not register with your customer base.
CGP Grey made the video for “get rid of the penny”. When they got rid of the penny, he made the video “get rid of the nickel, and the dime.” When the original goal as getting rid of the penny, once that was achieved, he moved the goalposts to get rid of the nickel.
Your statement is in line with CGP Grey’s (correct) viewpoint.
Pointing this out in a facetious manner is meant to be humorous.
Isn’t a halfpenny worth half a penny so a dime is worth twenty times more?
One dollar in 1950 had far more buying power than one dollar does now. Something that cost a dollar in 1950 would cost nearly $14 in 2026.
The halfpenny, when discontinued, could purchase roughly as much as 12¢ could today.
At that time, it was decided that a halfpenny wasn’t necessary, as transactions were of a high enough value that made tracking the numbers to the half-penny needless, and that you could just round to the nearest penny.
The equivalent today would be rounding to either the nearest dime or quarter, eliminating the need for smaller denomination coins.
Please, this is MAGA America, of course it’s a scam. Your post is exactly why we should keep the penny.
There are many, many very wealthy people and corporations out there, and they keep track of every single fucking penny they touch, and they go to War if a single penny is missing. As an example, here you are figuring out the purchasing power of some anachronistic currency that hasn’t been used in 200 years to justify it.
Those same people are now telling us that we, the working people, don’t need to keep track of every one of OUR pennies, because we don’t have enough of them to worry about. Don’t worry, all their cash registers will do the calculations for you, and it will always be fair. We’ll never round UP the numbers so you always end up paying a few cents more for EVERYTHING. It won’t make a difference to you and your few pennies, but they will add up, and make the rich even richer by taking your pennies directly out of your pocket, a penny at a time. What are you complaining about? It’s just a penny.
But it’s my penny, and I want it, and before you call me a cheapskate, I’ll remind the world that those calling me a cheapskate are the ones trying to take MY penny away. If it’s important enough for them to take it from me, then it’s important enough to defend it from them. I’m not giving these Jackals one inch.
Of course, the way around it is to use your debit card for everything, and your purchases will be calculated to the penny. And they will also be able to track every item you purchase, and where you are at any given moment, and every place you’ve been.
So should we bring back the halfpenny? Cause right now they’re scamming you out of all those fractional pennies you could be saving, and that really adds up. They’re up charging you 0.5¢ all the time, and robbing those halfpennies right out of your pocket!!!
But if you’re not for bringing back tracking transactions down to the fractional cent, what makes it different to your mind? Why is that ridiculous, but rounding to the nearest 5¢ is way out of bounds?
Typical bonehead take.
Yeah, that’s what I was getting at - we should bring back the Halfpenney. Good job getting the point, Brainiac.
I wasn’t saying I thought that was your actual position. I was saying that your actual position made as much sense as that.
There’s no difference in kind between rounding to the nearest penny or rounding to the nearest nickel. It’s the exact same thing, and the question is just “where do you draw the line”?
So should the line never change no matter what? Regardless of any real life implications the line is drawn exactly where it was meant to be by God at the beginning of time and it is devoid of context or reason?
If we had massive deflation to the point where tracking to the fractional cent made sense, I would argue that it might be worth printing halfpennies again. But we don’t. And the idea that companies are going to be robbing you of pennies is no more or less reasonable than the idea that they are robbing you of fractional pennies.
Hell, there’s a real chance it’ll go the other way in a lot of cases, as stores will start marking things as $X.95 instead of $X.99. Someone else did the math based on what economists projected the cost to consumers would be, and it came out to 2¢ per person per year. Not exactly a staggering number.
The fact of the matter is that we have to occasionally re-figure at what granularity it’s worth tracking our fractions of a dollar to. Inflation will always be inflating, and in a few hundred years when a loaf of bread is $250 the idea that we would track fractional dollars will seem as antiquated as the halfpenny does now.
A lot of words for a simple concept:
We need pennies because we figure everything to the penny. We don’t need half pennies because nobody figures anything to the half cent.
The wealthy want their pennies, and I want mine, too. Any other concept is just those with the money trying to steal from the citizens, AGAIN.
But we used to figure everything to the half cent. That’s my point. We stopped figuring it to the half cent when we got rid of the half cent coin.
In the same way, we would stop figuring things to the whole cent if we got rid of the penny.
As an example, let’s say I wanted to buy an item that was $1.75, but it was 50% off. How much does that cost? In reality, it should be $0.875, but we don’t track to the half penny, so we just call it 88¢.
Or, if you buy something for $1.50, but there’s a sales tax of 3%, that item will be $1.545 after sales tax, but they just round it to $1.55.
They’re already rounding your numbers up. That’s already happening. The only reason it feels different is because we “don’t track fractional pennies,” which is only true because we got rid of the coins that allowed us to track fractional pennies.
If we got rid of the coins that let us track individual pennies, we would also stop tracking all exchanges to the individual penny, and simply round to the nearest 5¢.
Which, in many cases, could actually work in your favor, I might add. If you bought something and the total was 1.52, they would simply round it down to $1.50. Sales tax law varies state to state, but that it’s how the vast majority of states handle fractional pennies already, so precident indicates it would be that way for rounding to the nearest 5¢. E.g. if sales tax is 2%, and you bought something for $1.19, that comes out to $1.2138, but most states round that to $1.21, saving you 0.38¢ (38 one hundredths of a cent).
But something worth a dollar in 1950 is worth the same as something that’s worth a dollar now in 2025.
That’s not how inflation works. “Worth” is a pretty variable term, “buying power” is typically a better description.
Think of it like this, using somewhat made up numbers. In the 50s you could get a cup of coffee for 10 cents from a diner. That same cup of coffee in 2025 costs like 2.50 dollars. Is the coffee “worth” more in 2025? No, it’s the same 8oz cup of coffee but the money has less buying power
But you give a store a dollar back then and you got a dollar’s worth of goods and now you still do.
You get a dollar’s worth of goods, but the amount of goods you get is less, because a dollar is worth less.
Well the dollar is worth the same (a dollar) but the goods are more expensive.
Yes, a dollar is a dollar. But it is not worth the same value.
The dollar categorically holds less value. Worth is just a measure of how much value something has to people.
The goods are more monetarily expensive, but have the same intrinsic value (e.g. calories do not give your body more energy now than they used to). Thus, the dollar is worth less than it used to be, and it requires more of them to equal the value of the same amount of food. A dollar today is equivalent to one other dollar today, but it is not worth one dollar ten, twenty, or 50 years ago.
If I could trade $100 today for $100 50 years ago, I would have more value even though both are classified as “one hundred dollars”, because $100 50 years ago has more value and gets you more goods.
$1 today gets you the same amount of goods as $0.53 got you in the year 2000 in terms of actual buying power, hence why people use that term.
Okay, let’s try to break it down for you.
Let’s say that, in 1950, you could buy 10 apples for a dollar. Would you agree that, in 1950, 10 apples were “worth” $1? One dollar’s “worth” of apples was 10 apples?
Now, let’s say today I can buy one apple for one dollar. Would you agree that 1 apple was “worth” one dollar? That one dollar’s “worth” of apples was 1 apple?
Now, if we assume that the “buying power” of a dollar is measured in “how many apples a dollar can buy,” that my current dollar is “worth less” than a 1950 dollar, because it purchases me fewer apples? That the two “dollars” have a different “number of apples I can buy” property?
Yes, in each case I’ve purchased a “dollars worth of apples,” but it’s very much meaningful to define how many apples that is, and track how that changes over time.
And if I cancelled the halfpenny because it wasn’t worth having when it could only buy 1 apple, but right now it takes 12 pennies to buy 1 apple, then perhaps I should have gotten rid of the penny a long time ago. And the nickel. And probably the dime.
I assume testfactor means in economic value / purchasing power.