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time to get rid of the 1 & 2p
radyag
Posts: 2,220
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And simply round it off to the nearest 5p. This happens in other lands, down under, wheir it no longer has any real value and nobody would miss it. They even plan to axe the 5 at some point and round off to the nearest 10. I'm only talking.g about cash payments, online will still take the exact amount.
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We have way too many coins.
ETA - which is precisely what happened in Australia...
THE five-cent coin should be scrapped because it is too expensive to make and a nuisance, the Royal Australian Mint says. And the federal government is considering dumping it.
The government has received a confidential brief that shows it costs more than five cents to make each coin because of rising commodity prices.
http://www.smh.com.au/national/royal-mint-wants-5-coins-scrapped-20110625-1gl5b.html
They'd obviously be given time to exchange them.
Plus what about the 2p penny pushers in arcades?!
I think to enable this scheme you'd have to first increase the availability of those swipey credit cards and make buses accept them as they've done in London.
Yet again it would hit the poorest the hardest.
I quite like all the different coins we have...it makes my purse feel like I have a lot of money in it, when I only ever have about 38p in copper!
They'd all just go to being 10p instead, as some are anyway.
Do it, now.
Edit - ah - put would not could in there. <shrugs>
I can almost guarantee that wouldn't be the case, everything would be rounded up.
If they pay by card, then it makes no difference; transactions will be pounds and pence as before.
Only if paying cash, then there might be a loss to the customer, if the total is always rounded up.
So if you go to the shops say, twice a day, and pay with cash both times, then over the year you might be looking at nearly £20 per year. Hardly a sum which is going to make anyone richer or poorer to any great extent.
To offset that, you don't have to deal with all these pennies, many of which will just get lost anyway. Work out how many man-hours would be saved by not fiddling out with so much loose change (not only yours, but of everyone in the queue behind you).
But if totals are rounded to the nearest 5p, then overall no-one loses.
Quite a few charities depend on those 1 &2 pence pieces
You could keep shop prices the same; i.e still have items on the shelf at £1.99, but at the checkout, round the total to the nearest 5 or 10p.
You could keep the ones in existence as legal tender. Just don't make any more.
I wrote a celebrity sketch once where | compared celeb lives to us "plebs" and one of the lines I wrote was
"people like you are the only reason 1p and 2p coins are still in circulation".
The US still has 1c coins but you don't see them very often.
I don't think so. There's a very strong psychological reason that everything is sold under the £x. The differences in how much something sells at 99p compared to £1 is huge.
That reminds me, it must be near time to count them out again.