Here’s a good example of why a penny makes no sense (or, if you prefer, makes no cents)
SLIGHTLY SKEWED (COLUMN) — Kamloops boy Jack Knox’s column appears in The Armchair Mayor News on Sundays.
By JACK KNOX
Joshua Kantor faces a conundrum. When the Nanaimo man cancelled his credit card this year, he thought he had cleared the outstanding bill — a whopping $1.85 — in time to avoid racking up additional interest charges.
Alas, when the postman delivered this month’s statement from the bank, it showed a balance owing: one cent.
This presents a practical problem.
“I don’t have any pennies,” Kantor says.
Not many people do, at least not without fishing down the back of the couch or searching the sock drawer. Pennies disappeared faster than Doritos at a Ford brothers barbecue after the banks began taking them out of circulation last February. One day they were here, the next they were gone, poof, just like Alison Redford. It took the Canucks longer to get rid of Luongo.
So Kantor figures his best option is to wait patiently until compounding interest charges raise his Visa bill to five cents, at which point he’ll be able to trundle over to the bank and plunk down a nickel. “I might have to wait a year or two,” he allows.
This is not as great a problem for Kantor as it is for the bank, which he figures will incur a handling cost of $1.20 or so every time it sends a paper invoice in pursuit of his penny. He finds this penny-wise-pound-foolishness unsettling. “They’re supposed to be good with money. They’re a bank.” It doesn’t, ahem, make cents.
Shaken confidence in our financial institutions was not supposed to be one of the byproducts when Canada did away with the penny, but there you go.
Not that we have, in fact, done away with the one-cent coin.
Contrary to what many people think, pennies are still legal tender and will remain so indefinitely. It’s just that merchants don’t have to accept them if they don’t want to. The same applies to any bill or coin.
“If somebody doesn’t want pennies, they’re at liberty to say, ‘No, I don’t want to be paid in pennies,’ ” says the Royal Canadian Mint’s Alex Reeves, on the phone from Ottawa.
This would appear to rob the penny of its principal purpose: an instrument of petulance/revenge to be wielded when paying parking fines or after betting on the Canucks. If you do have to part with your money unwillingly, might as well force the recipient to deal with a wheelbarrow full of copper.
Other than that, the coins are pretty much a nuisance, unloved and unwanted as a houseful of spring break relatives (though at least the neighbours don’t make a fuss when you bury pennies under the hydrangeas).
Not sure what we’re supposed to do with our leftover pennies, then. A home metallurgist could extract the copper, but that only applies to pre-1997 coins (the newer ones are 94 per cent steel, just like Vladimir Putin). A hundred old pennies would fetch you $1.77 worth of copper at today’s rate — if you were allowed to melt them down, which you’re not, at least not without the permission of the federal finance minister (and since Joe Oliver only took over that job on Wednesday, he might have other priorities).
In theory, you’re not even supposed to flatten pennies on the railway tracks (but then, in theory, Vancouver Island is supposed to have trains).
And here’s the deal: As unpopular and rarely seen as the coins might be, there are — at least in theory — billions and billions of them still sitting in old coffee cans and backseat ashtrays across Canada.
The mint, which began turning out pennies in 1908, distributed a total of 35 billion of them before production ceased in May 2012. About half of those coins were made in the past 20 years. No one knows how many remain; Reeves throws out a guess of 20 billion.
Compare that to the four billion pennies that the mint collected in 2013. Who knows how many will trickle in? “It was always known that it would be a gradual process,” Reeves says.
At least that means there should be a spare one for Joshua Kantor.
© Copyright Times Colonist
ArmchairMayor.ca 
An end of an era, when one could be penny wise and pound foolish. i guess that leaves us with pound foolish, which, judging by the behavior of certain senators, one house speaker, and one premier, seems to be a growing creed to live by.
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