It seems like only here in the U.S. would we spend more on making the money, than the money itself is actually worth. Apparently, the rising costs of some metals, has resulted in a penny costing 1.23 cents to make, and a nickel costing 5.73 cents. That just seems weird to me. Maybe I should be melting down my pennies and selling the metal back to the treasury at a profit?
Found via Timmy’s Blog: Esc
Yes, the making of the Pennies and nickels cost more than their value. The government makes up for it in volume however.
Today I was paying for something at BestBuy with a reward zone certificate ($10) that is as good as cash. I bought a CD that was $9.99 and the guy told me I had to then purchase something else that was a penny because he couldn’t give me change back.
(unbeknownst to him, I actually understood his logic because I used to work at EBGames and a similar thing would happen then. We were told by corporate, however, to override the price to $10 so it would be a wash)
After staring at him dumbly for about 5 seconds (longer than one might think), I finally settled on getting a pack of gum for $.99 – this brought my total to $1.03. So I begrudgingly handed him 2 dollar bills and, after he inquired, apologized for not having 3 pennies on me to make his life easier. So, instead of doing the transaction and counting out the change, he proceeded to crawl around the adjacent cash registers looking for runaway pennies; he found 2 and decided it was close enough.
The point of this little anecdote: coins don’t normally bother me, but they did tonight 0 oddly after I found this article.
And they obviously bother that guy if he was willing to crawl on his hands and knees for 2 minutes looking for loose change so he didn’t have to count out 3 quarters, 2 dimes and 2 pennies.
Or maybe he’s bad at math, who knows.
The penny used to be solid copper but a decade or so ago they switched to copper plated zinc. The cost of copper back then made them cost prohibitive. Now it’s getting the same for the zinc versions.
Someone can correct me if I’m worng here, but it’s not necessarily all that crazy. One cent is not ‘worth’ one cent, it merely represents a value that the Federal Government guarantees it will redeem to the bearer (English bank notes still have that pledge from the Bank Of England on them). On that basis that one penny can pass through the whole supply chain of the economy many times throughout it’s life so representing many cents worth of cash.
Still, I’m not an economist so I could be wrong.
no, it’s not just like that in the U.S. Right here in Switzerland the 5-cent coins (Called “Fünfräppler” here) production also cost’s more than it’s actually “worth”. So this circumstance does’t implicate the grade of insanity of a county. (you may excure my bad english)