Centerfield

Down with the penny!

I would not risk a muscle spasm to pick up a penny.

OK, so I'm a geek, but...

As a grad instructor I once had the class figure out how well it actually paid to pick up pennies, as a lesson in real-world applied analysis. We came up with an hourly rate of a touch over $7/hr for what is literally "stoop labor." (For other coins, just multiply.)

If you refuse to work stoop labor for $7/hr*, you can skip the pennies. I don't. I'm a tightwad. Money is money.

[*--it was a penny every five seconds for 12 pennies a minute, or $7.20/hr]

"See a penny, pick it up; all day long you will have good luck."

That superstition could have something to do with the poll result.

Like good Ol' Ben Franklin used to say: "A penny saved, is a penny earned." Then again, I don't have back problems.

I'm guessing that poll respondents when asked "if you see a penny on the ground, would you pick it up" really think in their head "if someone leaves money lying around, but not so much that they would miss it, would you pick it up?" To which any sensible person would reply "oh hell yes." Honstly, my experience is that nobody stops to pick up pennies lying on the ground. and certainly not 76% of people. Probably not even 0.76%

I've got a big jar of dirty pennies.

So how would that 8% sales tax work then? And would Walmart still be able to roll back prices?

What does picking up pennies have to do with their being a worthwile form of currency? And what about the people who drop the pennies? If they didn't have pennies to drop, they wouldn't be losing them. They could drop nickels instead, making the picker-uppers that much more happy. $35/hr is a professional salary in most places. Pennies are good for putting on train rails for flattening.

I pick up pennies. But then again, like a lot of thespians, I'm a tad superstitious, so I'm probably not a good example.

Picking up coins off the ground is dangerous; they could have germs or something or could have some sort of terrorist device attached to them.

I wouldn't mind having pennies if you could use them in vending machines.

I just found a penny in the stairwell at the office and picked it up. With the Powerball jackpot tonight at $100 million, I think that I will test that luck superstition.

Sorry, Todd. A penny only promises good luck, not phenomenal luck. Luck on the order of the traffic light going green when you reach the intersection, or finding a convenient parking space (hopefully, with time left on the meter).

Now, if you found the winning Powerball ticket on the street....;-)

I recently saw a case where somone accidentally threw away a really big winning ticket, and they sued the finder and won, which surprised me quite a bit. The person who found the ticket got ougatz. Zero.

Now I don't know if I'd say "Finders, Keepers" should be the rule.
But if you threw it away without signing it as opposed to having it blow out of your hand after you signed it, I think the rule might reasonably be "tough sh!+."

I guess I feel like anyone who had a big winning ticket and then accidentally threw it away doesn't deserve the money, since they didn't care about it enough to pay attention to what they were doing.

The rounding idea proposed in this bill is idiotic to me. 1,4,6 and 7 go down and 2,3,8,9 go up? Plus, how much is it going to cost the economy to reprogram every POS system in the US? Who loses money on the round down and gets it on the round up? It would seem to make more financial sense just to make a cheaper penny. Then throw in the costs of moving the Mint from the Treasury Department to the Federal Reserve.

This whole stupid bill costs more then it is going to save. Just find a cheaper design for the penny and be done with it.

Jim, whatever those programming costs are, they are one-time costs. Since the penny would be gone forever, it'a actually not possible that the bill could cost more than it would save. Sooner or later, things would HAVE TO tip into the black.

Plus, think of the jobs created by the change.