/biz/ - Business & Finance

>>55773962

I looked it up. It seems that they are in fact still legal tender and you can use them though whenever a store or whatever deposits their cash to a bank, the bank removes them from circulation.

We stopped minting them in 2012 and they are entirely out of circulation now, except for people who still use them which is basically nobody. The main reason was because it cost more to produce a penny than it was worth (it cost 1.6 cents spent to produce a penny around the time we phased them out). Since nobody likes to have pennies on them, people would horde them, lose them or throw them away (or take a bunch to the bank) meaning we had less pennies in circulation, requiring us to mint more, but at a loss.

Inflation also had an impact, meaning they stopped being practical and useful for the average person.

We now round up or down when it is a purchase made of cash. If you use a card/digital payment method, then you still pay cent increments.

>Cash transactions with sums ending in 1, 2, 6 or 7 cents are rounded down; those ending in 3, 4, 8 or 9 cents are rounded up. Non-cash transactions are still denominated to the cent. The rounding is not done on individual items but on the total bill of sale.