Realcent.org

Hi all-

For all you members in Canada, what is it like up there in ground zero with the penny gone? Are craigslist ads going nuts? Are people buying pennies like mad? Are they selling well over face value?

...............or, none of the above?

I'm getting back into pennies, and I wanna know what it's like up there-

Thanks!!!

wags

It's cold

NHsorter wrote:It's cold

Not in Vancouver.

I love Vancouver. Not the hockey team, lets be clear about that. Just the city. I think it would be my top pick as far as places to live in Canada. Vancouver area at least. Probably not right in the city. I like the woods. But still close enough so that I can make a quick trip into town when the Bruins show up the beat the Canucks.

How do gas pumps handle it? Does the meter read in five cent increments?

My bet is that VERY little has changed!

Zincanator wrote:How do gas pumps handle it? Does the meter read in five cent increments?

No. Everything is the same, only cash payments may be rounded.

sooooo.....if you are paying in cash, you let the dollar amt on the pump go to $xx.02

lol

Z00 wrote:sooooo.....if you are paying in cash, you let the dollar amt on the pump go to $xx.02

lol

Where I live I noticed the gas stations _finnaly_ went to making people pre-pay after
who knows how many drive offs. From what I remember at 7-11 the gas pump system
we had was tied into the tills (pre-paying was an option back then), the clerk would
specify an amount in the till collect payment, then the pump would stop at the amount.

Something like more than 99% of the time it stopped it right on the nose, a few odd
times it might let an extra cent or two worth through but that was pretty rare so it
wasn't too much for the store to eat that. (Much more accurate than even the best
humans trying to manually hit an exact figure. ^_-)

So if you live in a place where it's pre-pay that trick probably won't work. ^_-

I was at a coffee shop last weekend and their re-programmed till actually wouldn't let them
type in an amount that included the 3¢ in pennies I handed them to pay exact change so
they just rounded off in my favour. I think at least that one shop will do what Home Depot
does and round off in the customer's favour as it looks better.

7-11 seems happy to accept my exact change payments.

Safeway has rounding built into their till software but they still have the now "purely
ornimental" pennies in the automatic change dispenser taunting us with possible
copper just out of our reach. ^_-

Last FR I was able to get $24 worth of pennies from my credit union.

Haven't looked if there is any buy/sell activity locally yet.

So not one person has posted negative experiences from this. Dropping the penny needs to be done in the US. The majority of payments are done electronically where rounding won't occur anyway. Having lived in Australia for 1.5 years where their lowest denomination was .05 my experience was similar, i.e. no negative impacts. We need to stop the wasted government resources utilized by manufacturing pennies.

fansubs_ca wrote:I was at a coffee shop last weekend and their re-programmed till actually wouldn't let them
type in an amount that included the 3¢ in pennies I handed them to pay exact change so
they just rounded off in my favour. I think at least that one shop will do what Home Depot
does and round off in the customer's favour as it looks better.

The possible 4 cents per a purchase loss that a business may take is negligible most likely but can easily be defrayed by the business increasing prices on some high margin/fast-mover items to the tune of compensating for the 4 cents potential loss. Rounding up against the favor of the customer, even if the business rounds up from 0.04 to .05, a whole one cent, is enough to tick off the customer looking to start a crusade anyway of being ripped off for something.

I see the US cent going away if for no other reason that people will get tired of the mockery of one cent having no value to their real world purchasing decisions. Also, seems that it is the subtle Gresham's Law transition going on, not unlike with silver coinage ca. late 1960's. From what I read, people saw the 90% silver coinage get debased overnight with clad coins and sensed that the 90% coinage was worth more, even at the time it was near spot of silver.

Heard a radio interview today with a principal from this site:

http://www.pennies.org/

I see they are located on K Street. Thought maybe they were a zinc industry lobbying group but they said they were neutral on penny composition. Hmmmmm. I think pennies will circulate for years if they stop making them. I suppose. Maybe people will hoard the heck out of them then and churches and take-a-penny trays and poor consumers and low-margin businesses will suffer? Interesting. Why aren't people hoarding them now then? The website makes a case for penny drives and charities and necessity for the penny. Maybe people will just have to cough up a nickel and not be a cheapskate and just give a few loose pennies next time there is a coin drive?

inflationhawk wrote:So not one person has posted negative experiences from this. Dropping the penny needs to be done in the US. The majority of payments are done electronically where rounding won't occur anyway. Having lived in Australia for 1.5 years where their lowest denomination was .05 my experience was similar, i.e. no negative impacts. We need to stop the wasted government resources utilized by manufacturing pennies.

Well, we don't have any members currently working in retail it seems, so we don't have
access to reports of the "full experience".

I'm quite convinced if I was still working in retail, especially someplace high volume
and one of the companies that poorly thought out how they would handle the situation
(which the front line workers don't have the power to change) I'd be witness to
somebody throwing a snit fit by now. It may not be common but from what I know
about people it is happening somewhere. Also most likely from someone who pays
so little attention they didn't know the penny was going to be discontinued.
(It's always those that pay the least attention to what's going on around them
that have the worst tempers. -_-)

Just because you didn't see it doesn't mean it hasn't happened somewhere. ^_-

Of course the companies taking the rounding in the customer's favour approach
will avoid being the site of this.

If I owned (or even managed) a store my prefered approach would be to use my
private stash (of steel core, then zinc core) to supply the store with pennies for
as long as possible and put up a sign saying "we still use the penny". Plan B to
truck in American pennies to fill the void, although not "legal tender" in Canada
the value is almost the same and in practice everyone up here considers U.S.
coins interchangable with CDN coins. (I think it's $100 allowed per shipment
since it would be monitary use. ^_-) When/if that isn't an option I'd round in
the customer's favour for the above mentioned reasons.

Of course if I owned a store I'd also keep a coin cointer near the register to
accomodate customers that come in with their change jar. Manually counting
takes too long when you have a line but you don't want to turn anyone away
either. (That is one thing I so wish I had back when I worked for 7-11. ^_-)

fansubs_ca wrote:

inflationhawk wrote:So not one person has posted negative experiences from this. Dropping the penny needs to be done in the US. The majority of payments are done electronically where rounding won't occur anyway. Having lived in Australia for 1.5 years where their lowest denomination was .05 my experience was similar, i.e. no negative impacts. We need to stop the wasted government resources utilized by manufacturing pennies.

Well, we don't have any members currently working in retail it seems, so we don't have
access to reports of the "full experience".

I'm quite convinced if I was still working in retail, especially someplace high volume
and one of the companies that poorly thought out how they would handle the situation
(which the front line workers don't have the power to change) I'd be witness to
somebody throwing a snit fit by now. It may not be common but from what I know
about people it is happening somewhere. Also most likely from someone who pays
so little attention they didn't know the penny was going to be discontinued.
(It's always those that pay the least attention to what's going on around them
that have the worst tempers. -_-)

Just because you didn't see it doesn't mean it hasn't happened somewhere. ^_-

Of course the companies taking the rounding in the customer's favour approach
will avoid being the site of this.

If I owned (or even managed) a store my prefered approach would be to use my
private stash (of steel core, then zinc core) to supply the store with pennies for
as long as possible and put up a sign saying "we still use the penny". Plan B to
truck in American pennies to fill the void, although not "legal tender" in Canada
the value is almost the same and in practice everyone up here considers U.S.
coins interchangable with CDN coins. (I think it's $100 allowed per shipment
since it would be monitary use. ^_-) When/if that isn't an option I'd round in
the customer's favour for the above mentioned reasons.

Of course if I owned a store I'd also keep a coin cointer near the register to
accomodate customers that come in with their change jar. Manually counting
takes too long when you have a line but you don't want to turn anyone away
either. (That is one thing I so wish I had back when I worked for 7-11. ^_-)

Oh!! A market for zinc CTU's!! Too bad the shipping is too expensive to get them there

I don't think anyone would actually specifically buy a Zinc CTU when they can just go to a bank and get an assorted box for $25 (with a few wheaties and maybe an occasional indianhead)

Or four boxes, as the border limit would suggest.

Shipping is interesting. Depending on trade deficit it really doesn't matter much. IE: China sends ships to the US filled with goods, and a lot of times - they go back empty. It costs very little to fill them up with something - anything as they have to go back to continue making round trips anyhow.

China will take $13 per ton worth of scrap iron in crushed car form shipped from the US, and still make a profit.

ZenOps wrote:I don't think anyone would actually specifically buy a Zinc CTU when they can just go to a bank and get an assorted box for $25 (with a few wheaties and maybe an occasional indianhead)

Or four boxes, as the border limit would suggest.

Shipping is interesting. Depending on trade deficit it really doesn't matter much. IE: China sends ships to the US filled with goods, and a lot of times - they go back empty. It costs very little to fill them up with something - anything as they have to go back to continue making round trips anyhow.

China will take $13 per ton worth of scrap iron in crushed car form shipped from the US, and still make a profit.

Oh, I wonder if a lot of copper pennies are already leaving the country that way~

My wife just returned from 3 weeks visiting family in Canada. She cleaned out all the close friends and relatives of pennies. Brought back 20 unopened rolls of 2012 pennies that one of the friends got from the petty cash at a McDonald's they work at. .....lol

Z00 wrote: Brought back 20 unopened rolls of 2012 pennies

hang onto those... they could be worth one cent apiece someday

Actually...since the 2012 didn't really get to "circulate" very long, they may become worth more than a cent faster than you think. A roll of BU may actually become worth something.

Have yet to see even one person or news article be against the removal of the penny or rounding here. Really a non-event.

Z00 wrote:Actually...since the 2012 didn't really get to "circulate" very long, they may become worth more than a cent faster than you think. A roll of BU may actually become worth something.

I agree. I don't think the mintage figure for 2012 has been released yet, but considering how early in the year they stopped making them, it should be quite a bit lower than usual, I think. And some people like Jade Dragon were getting solid new boxes right up until the very end. This suggests that the mint still had a lot that were never distributed, and those were presumably among the first to be melted down once circulation ended. So in all probability we have a year with low mintage and a high percentage destroyed already. If it were a US coin, I think it would almost certainly become worth more than face value within a few years. Considering Canadian coins aren't as widely collected, it might not happen, but if any recent year becomes valuable, I think it would be 2012.

I sell sealed boxes of 2012 canadian pennies with RCM date and time stamp. My boxes are Magnetic...... $100 each

I hope that even if the penny gets dropped from wide circulation that they continue to put them in the mint and proof sets.

AGgressive Metal wrote:I hope that even if the penny gets dropped from wide circulation that they continue to put them in the mint and proof sets.

Nope, they aren't going to do that. 2012 was it