I HATE PENNIES!!!! (Also Nickels.)

Vlogbrothers shirts: http://dftba.com/vlogbros

In which John Green discusses his virulent hatred for pennies and nickels, two utterly irrelevant coins that inexplicably remain money in the United States of America. It costs more than 1.7 cents to make a 1 cent penny coin in the US; nickels are even more ridiculous, costing more than nine cents to produce.

UPDATE: Those statistics are out of date. In 2009, it cost 1.6 cents to make a penny and 6.1 cents to make a nickel; the US Mint lost 22 million on penny and nickel production, not the 70 million they lost in 2008. (This is because the recession has made zinc and nickel cheaper.) Thank to youtuber http://www.youtube.com/sivartis for the correction.

My inflation calculations came from the CPI inflation calculator: http://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl

Information about the opportunity cost implications of pennies and the calculations of lost productivity can be found here: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/09/24/AR20060924009... and here: http://www.consumeraffairs.com/news04/2006/07/penny_sense.html

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• money
• economics
• coins
• currency
• monetary policy
• finance
• macroeconomics
• coinage
• pennies
• freakonomics
• nickels
• dimes
• quarters
• dollars
• irrational economic behavior
• arguments
• for
• eliminating
• the
• penny
• politics

[wearethebomb42]

it would be so ironic if the was a sale on the shirts for five dollars and six cents.

[user1maximus]

maybe if we eliminated pennies and nickels, we could stop pricing things like "$99.99." Boy, is that pointless, annoying, and deliberately misleading!!

[wang78739]

No pennies (one cents) in Hong Kong :D !

[user1maximus]

@Iamlooty depends on if there's sales tax where you live. Where I live in oregon there isn't.

[Iamlooty]

@user1maximus It avoids the $100 tax band in this situation, and makes it less to tax and therefore cheaper.

[KristennT123]

Just one last video, and then i'll sleep.

[jehovahuponyou]

A REAL PENNYTARD.

[TheKidWithBlueHair]

HEY! MY MOM IS A PENNY! (her name :I)

[hammereddulcimer]

John! Read this!

18 cent coin FTW!

cs (dot) uwaterloo (dot) ca/~shallit/Papers/change2.pdf

[NoopieSon]

@KathrynAnn116 That's a very good point I hadn't thought of. Besides nobody actually pushing for the elimination of pennies, perhaps a large reason is because companies would actually generate less income. That $X.99 strategy makes them A LOT of money if you think about it. If they were forced to choose between having an item be $19.9 and $20.0, to have the same affect I would assume they would choose $19.9 which would mean they would get 9 cents less on everything they sell.

[LovehammerMedia]

@user1maximus It would just be 99.9