ZenOps wrote:I'll be keeping all of them for a year or so at least.
There is a small but reasonable chance that they will announce next year, a penny buyback program. Where they might give you say 1.5 cents for every penny you bring in.
It sure beats 1% interest.
If they do that and the U.S. is still circulating their penny the Canadian government
will end up getting a lot of U.S. pennies in the mix.
(About 4% of what's circulating
up here already is anyways. ^_-)
The simple fact is that most of the general population doesn't even know the U.S.
restricts the amount of pennies you can export so without knowing it people who
think they've found the next big thing will become large scale penny smuglers
just to exploit the bounty on them. That sucking sound is all your pennies going
to the Canadian mint. ^_-
As for my own stratagy:
Whatever I'm able to acquire while I still can I will:
-Do an initial magnet sort, steel in one box, zinc and copper in the other
-Unload magnetic pennies as soon as oportunities present themselves to do so,
not sure how fast this process will go. Maybe take handfulls by weight with me
when I go to the Safeway with a self check out to save on rolling. Might talk to
my freindly neighborhood 7-11 manger about selling them boxes of pennies as
they need them. Want to build up a few boxes pre-rolled and ready to go before
I do this so I don't run short on what they need. Just have them tell me what to
bring them and when. (7-11 doesn't have a lot of extra space. ^_-)
-Sort copper from zinc later
-Decide what to do with zinc later once my steel pennies are gone and I have no
new sourcing.
Also if the government isn't too agresive pulling them in and just lets the supply
gradually get tight we may just see some businesses bring in U.S. pennies so
they can keep their tills stocked and avoid blowback from anyone that doesn't
like the rounding. This will largely depend how many people just say "meh" or
already dislike the penny versus how many people make noise about being
shorted a penny or two. Also having enough change instead of rounding means
your bussiness avoids people "gaming" the rounding rules. There are just enough
people that will come up with the pennies only when it's to their advantage to do
so that any bussiness that follows the standard rules will consistantly come up short.
Also unless the rounding is built into the till's software companies with really anal
acounting will have staff get irriated after the 37th time they are written up for
being more than X amount short despite it being the result of rounding and under
anticipated gaming of the system by consumers. ^_-
Strictly speaking I can see clerks who get sick of this taking it upon themselves
to bring in a certain amount of U.S. pennies to sell to their own till at the beggining
of each shift just to avoid the rounding game. Getting any freinds or relatives
going south to grab them pennies to keep them supplied.
Converting 1004.10 Canadian Dollars to U.S. Dollars will yield 1005.00 U.S. Dollars.
(Derived rate = 1.0009) (At Royal Bank today.) so it's an economical sourcing of
change. Again most business people don't know about the export restrictions so
most violations would be accidental.
The teller I got some pennies from today told me at some point they will start just
sending any pennies they get back to the Bank of Canada but he didn't know when
that would happen. I should probably try to convince my credit union and/or bank
to let me have them, though that may mean jumping each day they call me to say
they have some. Not sure how smoothly that would work.
Posted: Wed Apr 25, 2012 5:53 am
