A Penny For Your Thoughts??

Need a penny? Take a penny. You see that little ditty on the plastic trays beside cash registers. The thing is, who the heck actually needs a penny? Yeah, yeah, I know--if you save up a whole bunch of pennies in a big old mason jar then you'll have...um, about five bucks worth of coins to roll, weighing in at about ten pounds. Lucy posted a whole series of cute questions (Questions! Questions! Oct 26 '05), and one of them is a sweet little logic question:

Why do you have to "put your two cents in"?... It's only a "penny for your thoughts". Where's that extra penny going to?

My glib answer is "who cares?" Throw a half a dozen pennies on a busy sidewalk and watch to see if anyone over the age of ten will stop to pick them up. In Colonial times a penny would buy you a whole loaf of bread. Now, take your two cents worth to a candy store and see what you can buy. Maybe some of those creepy red fish, but not much else. Try to spend rolled pennies somewhere, anywhere. Good luck. I'll bet even the guys who rake the mall fountains hate pennies. Notice how many nickels and dimes, even quarters, there are in fountains lately. Let's face it, pennies suck.

Pennies are a waste of our precious natural resources. They aren't a hundred percent copper anymore, but they're metal of some value. The mills and presses at the various U.S. Mints which toil tirelessly churning out a few billion pennies each year consume power, labor, and overhead. All those shiny new pennies have to be wrapped, counted, handled and distributed all over America. As mentioned before, the little buggers are heavy. Waste of good gas, I think. For the sake of our economy, and in the name of patriotism, (not to mention a national savings of millions of dollars) let's just be done with pennies.

Impossible! you may say. People will be cheated. Old folks won't know what to save for a rainy day. There will be panic in the streets. Bullsh**. We once had half pennies, you know. They were big, ugly, brown coins larger than today's quarters. Do you miss 'em? Well, do ya? And don't bother sending me that old story about the crooked banker who wrote the computer program to divert his customers' fraction-cent interest to his own account (he made eighty gazzillion dollars before he was caught...yeah, right). We don't need pennies anymore. Hell, we don't even need nickels, but the government just redesigned those. Don't even get me started about the dollar coins. I'm not even gonna go there. Yet.