Canada Plans To Pull Pennies From Circulation, Could We Be Far Behind?

As a kid I saved every penny I could find - literally. I picked up every penny I could find; under every vending machine and out of every gutter and from under every couch cushion to save up and take to the bank (I think I was more excited about watching the coin counter than I was about the 17 dollars I was depositing ).

But now Canada says they will be pulling the copper currency by the end of the year. Could the U.S.A. be far behind?

According to Yahoo it actually costs the Royal Canadian Mint 1.5 cents to produce a penny. Investing 1.5 cents into making every penny is, simply, throwing money away. And Canada has stepped up to the plate and said that they will stop making them by the end of 2012.

The Canadian penny will still be accepted indefinitely as a form of currency, but the government says it will eventually require cash transactions to be rounded to the nearest five-cent increment. Customers are already forbidden from using more than 25 pennies in a single purchase.

Now here in the U.S. it costs nearly TWO cents to produce a penny. So, for every $1,000 dollars in pennies our government produces, we are losing roughly $1,ooo.

Do you see where I'm going with this?

If we are losing that much money to make pennies, and our northern neighbors are about to give them the heave-ho. Can we be far behind?

I'm not sure I like the idea of 'rounding' every purchase to the nearest five-cent mark, but I would be perfectly happy to not have stacks of pennies floating ll over my house and to not see "take-a-penny-leave-a-penny" jars at every gas station and convenience store I go to.

What other countries have already eliminated the penny (or their equivalent)?

• Finland
• Sweden
• Norway
• Denmark
• Israel
• The Netherland
• Australia
• New Zealand
• France
• Spain
• South Africa
• Switzerland
• Brazil

What are your thoughts? Are you for or against getting rid of the penny?

[Yahoo]

Picture by miguelb, Flickr.