eliminating the penny would require producing more nickels to “fill the gap in small-value transactions.” But nickels suffer from a similar “seigniorage” problem: the 2024 U.S. Mint report said the five-cent coins have a unit cost of 13.78 cents each.
Cool research, thanks for being one of the few to bring substantial arguments to this discussion.
For your first point, I would like to add the next sentence for context: "That means that a typical grocery store would receive an additional estimated $157 in revenue just from rounding." I feel like this is negligible.
Also, for the nickel, the seigniorage ratio is 2.something, isn't that lower than the penny? I think there's a decent chance that removing the penny would still be a net benefit for the mint.
Especially since the lower cost means that we would save more than that 5 cents in taxes. (Well money is fungible so not really, but that money would be spent for some other government service.)
https://economics.ubc.ca/news/penny-rounding-profitable-for-...
eliminating the penny would require producing more nickels to “fill the gap in small-value transactions.” But nickels suffer from a similar “seigniorage” problem: the 2024 U.S. Mint report said the five-cent coins have a unit cost of 13.78 cents each.
https://time.com/7215870/trump-us-penny-mint-costs-one-cent-...