Week 8: Poor Little Penny

I'm writing this after getting off a 6 hours shift at work. I worked as a cashier for those 6 hours and I had to make change, a lot of change. And I realized something, counting out 1, 2, 3, or 4 pennies is quite annoying. Although work was not that busy tonight, counting all those pennies costs times, and if we were busy, that wasted time would translate to customers having to wait for their food. For my wage, $7/ hour, a penny is equivalent to about 5 seconds, while for the average hourly wage of $17/hour, a penny is equal to about 2 seconds. According to a USA Today article, the penny wastes about $300 million in consumer's time. Not only that, it costs about 1.5 cents to make a penny due to the high cost of zinc, but even if the penny could be made for free, its usefulness has faded faster than its shine. Myths that rounding purchases up or down to the nearest nickel also are invalid. Anyone with a basic knowledge of statistics could testify that about 50% of purchases would round down with the other 50% rounding up, so all consumers would come out about even. My recommendation, get rid of the penny! It could replaced with a dollar coin, to replace the wearing paper dollars.