3 of 32

No

Write now Article Tools

Unless retailers are willing to round prices down by one cent, then the penny stays. Those little coins add up after a while, and there is no policy for eliminating the penny that is expected to financially benefit any American citizens or consumers. The government is so corrupted by business interests, that every business entity from banks to the corner store would influence policy with demands that they come out ahead, one penny at a time.

Where would we get our "pennies from heaven?" Those little miracles that we find on the sidewalk and which happen to be the same age as someone we know and love, or have the same date as our weddings, high school graduations and other momentous events in our lives cannot be eliminated as one of the simple pleasures in life.

Those large containers, filled with the substance of forty or fifty dollars worth of pennies, are a reminder that we have forty or fifty dollars to carry us over when money is tight and times are hard. To lose those clanking piggy banks, bottle banks, and bowls of coin is to lose a great American institution.

There is no excuse for getting rid of pennies, given the quick and automated ways in which pennies can be corralled and neatly bundled within the paper rolls that represent an actual dollar. There is no excuse for eliminating a coin which represents 1/100th of a dollar, then a dollar, then a thousand dollars over the course of a year.

When we hand a few coins over to a street performer or a homeless person, the pennies are valuable to them, and they are carefully and respectfully added up in order to eventually stack up to something for someone who has nothing. When we are short a few cents, we can reach for the discard pennies at the convenience store. When we pay attention, we might find a wheat penny, which averages to about 2 dollars each.

The penny loafer industry would suffer economic disaster if there are no pennies to insert into the little leather slots that are carefully designed and constructed just to hold and to display those coppery beauties. A hundred pennies or so would buy what used to be penny candy. A thousand of them is ten dollars, or the price of a bottle of over the counter painkiller, food for two at a fast food place, or enough gas to get home from somewhere.

In no way, and for no reason should the penny, an honorable unit of our currency and an integral part of our national history, be eliminated.

Learn more about this author, Elizabeth M. Young.
Click here to send this author comments or questions.

Add your voice

Know something about Should we eliminate the penny??
We want to hear your view. Write now!