Perceptions by Gerry Warner

Oh the humble penny! I’m going to miss that grubby piece of copper. Oops, that isn’t quite true. Since 1996, Canada’s pennies have been made of copper, zinc and steel, but I’m going to miss them anyway. And there are a lot of them to miss. According to the Royal Canadian Mint, there are still more than six billion pennies in circulation and it will take at least three to five years for them to disappear from our pockets, wallets and dresser drawers. Wanna bet? Pennies remain legal tender for all cash transactions, and human nature being what it is, I have a sneaky suspicion we’ll be seeing pennies around for at least a decade. Maybe more.

Maybe life will become more convenient without the lowly penny. After all, according to the Canadian Retail Council, approximately 65 per cent of all sale transactions today are made by credit or debit cards and less than 25 per cent by cash. But as the use of cash slowly but relentlessly disappears, we’re losing other things with it. Like penny lore and a wealth of quotations about the lowly coin:

A penny for your thoughts. (Ancient proverb) A penny saved is a penny earned. (Benjamin Franklin)  A bad penny always comes back. (German proverb) Penny wise, pound foolish. (British proverb) Getting your two cents worth. (unknown) )  “It’s raining pennies from heaven.” (Johnny Burke song) And then there’s Margaret Thatcher. “Pennies don’t come from heaven. They have to be earned here on earth.”

One of the reasons given for phasing out pennies is that they actually cost 1.6 cents to produce and the mint is losing $11 million every year producing the Queen’s image in copper. The first Canadian penny was struck by the British Royal Mint in 1858, according to the Ottawa Citizen. Over the years there have been five different penny designs minted and since the Canadian Mint took over in 1908, some 35 billion pennies have been produced and if you stacked them all in one tippy pile they would reach as high as 100,000 CN Towers and weigh almost twice as much as the ill-fated Titanic, the Citizen says. The most valuable Canadian penny ever produced as every numismatist knows was the famous 1936 penny with a dot mistakenly on the face that recently fetched $400,000 in auction.  Only three such coins are known to exist. The last penny minted by the Canadian Mint was made May 4, 2012. Distribution of pennies ended Feb. 4, 2013.

So now what?

According to a press release issued by the Federal Department of Finance, the penny will remain Canada’s smallest unit of currency “indefinitely” for cash transactions by businesses that choose to accept them. Obviously the catch here is that businesses no longer have to accept your penny stash even though they remain legal tender. However, if you really want to get rid of that annoying pile of copper that you’ve accumulated over the years, your best bet will be to roll them and take them to a bank which is obligated to accept them, or better yet, donate them to a local charity which would likely be quite willing to roll your donation for you.

And then there’s the confusing issue of ‘rounding up and rounding down’ in cash transactions. The secret here is you round to the nearest nickel. In other words, cash transactions of $1.01 and $1.02 are rounded down to one dollar. Transactions of $1.03 and $1.04 are rounded up to $1.05. Likewise transactions of $1.06 and $1.07 are rounded down to $1.05 and transactions of $1.08 and $1.09 are rounded up to one dollar and 10 cents. Is that clear? I didn’t think so. Check the government of Canada’s web page under penny elimination. Or just ask at the till. I came across one major merchant in town this week that’s rounding every transaction down as a good will gesture to its customers.

But no matter how you look at it, it’s definitely the end of an era. Will our grandchildren even know what a penny is? Will they care in what’s rapidly becoming a cashless world? Sad to say, those cursed electronic instruments known as ‘smart phones’ will probably handle all our financial transactions in the future, including cash.

It’s a “Brave New World” as Aldous Huxley once said. But is it a better world? I’ll leave that up to you.

Gerry Warner is a retired journalist and Cranbrook city councillor. His thoughts, what few he has, are his own thoughts, such as they are.

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