The Dumbest Thing Ever (Gwen Moritz Commentary)

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In the newspaper business, we call the beginning of a story the lede. It’s a deliberate misspelling of the word “lead,” as in taking the lead, so as not to be confused with the metal lead, which was used in typesetting until about 50 years ago. A good lede compels readers to keep reading, and I’ve rarely seen one better than that written by Caity Weaver for a feature in the Sept. 1 New York Times Magazine.

“I was disappointed to learn, recently, that the United States has created for itself a logistical problem so stupendously stupid, one cannot help wondering if it is wise to continue to allow this nation to supervise the design of its own holiday postage stamps, let alone preside over the administration of an extensive Interstate highway system or nuclear arsenal. It’s the dumbest thing I ever heard. I have come to think of it as the Perpetual Penny Paradox.”

Thus Weaver pulled me into a mind-expanding explanation of why our government keeps minting hundreds of millions of pennies every year at a cost of 3 pennies each when the vast majority of them will never be spent. Instead, they end up in our collective change jar, where they will be joined by other pennies we receive in change on the increasingly rare occasions when we pay with cash, and so perpetually on.

I had never given this conundrum any thought, but after reading Weaver’s enlightening article, I come down firmly on the side of doing away with the penny. Paying three times as much as something is objectively worth gives me a tic.

Canada jettisoned its penny in 2013. Canadians who pay electronically are charged to the 1/100th of a dollar — say, $20.11. But a Canadian making the same purchase with cash will pay $20.10. A $20.12 total will also be rounded down to $20.10, but $20.13 or $20.14 will be rounded up to $20.15. Doesn’t that sound nice? You pay a smidgen less sometimes, a smidgen more other times, and you never have to deal with pennies.

I suppose a retailer might try to game the system to make it more likely that the price would round up rather than down, but the dizzying variations in sales taxes from jurisdiction to jurisdiction would probably defeat the purpose. Rounding up to the nearest dollar has become a popular option in a variety of settings, so rounding up or down to the nearest nickel doesn’t seem like something that would get much blowback.

And yet the Perpetual Penny Paradox, which has been recognized by the federal government for almost half a century, costs tens of millions of dollars every year and benefits no one except a single Tennessee company, Artazn, which provides the U.S. Mint with the metal “blanks,” and the Coinstar company, which earns a commission when we finally get around to dumping our coin jars.

Caity Weaver is right. It truly is the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard.

Gwen Moritz is a contributing editor at Arkansas Business Publishing Group. Email her at gmoritz@abpg.com.