Pennies Are The Worst

You know what sucks? When you go to buy something and then when you get your change back, there are 4 pennies. What are you going to do with those pennies? Spend them? Maybe put them in a jar at home? Or are you going to throw them out with your receipt?

I'm not the kind that usually throws the pennies away, but this will happen time to time. Why? Well, if I buy something for 99c and then somebody gives me a penny back. I don't want that thing corrupting the other useful change in my pocket. Yeah, sure, I can throw it in my pocket. But there's a good chance it's going to slide out of there, onto the floor of my car, and it will never be seen again. And if it is seen again, it will be by the eye of my vacuum cleaner. I don't want to touch that nasty ass penny that's been sitting under the seat of my car, that's gross.

Now what I get curious about is just how many pennies get thrown away a year? I've searched around the internet, but I haven't been able to find a solid answer. All I could find is that 50% of pennies given as change in the US are thrown away, so that's a whole fuckload of pennies.

Now look at our nation in crisis with the economy. Do you know who I blame? Pennies. Think about it. How much money has our economy lost in thrown away pennies each year? Not just money our country is losing, but if that money is never going to be used again, then it won't make it's way to any other country either. And I wouldn't be the least bit surprised to find out that in other countries they have similar problems.

So how much money are we losing annually just because of small increments being constantly thrown away? A lot. And how to we fix this problem?

Well, if we were to get rid of pennies, then it would be difficult to break a dollar in any which way. So does this mean that pricing and change giving would have to round up or down to the nearest nickel? Maybe that would work for a little while, but then we would eventually start to have the same problems with nickels, and then on to dimes. So what must we do?

Get rid of physical currency.

How?

Oh lord, this is gonna be a long one.

We're going to need under the skin RFID tags that link up with our bank accounts. This has already been speculated to happen in the future, but it does not get rid of the necessity for hard currency. Because what if it's your grandson's birthday and you want to give them a birthday card with some money things in it? Checks? Naaah.

We already have a solution for this: Computers. If we get rid of physical currency, all banking can be done online. You can just transfer the money into his account linked to his RFID tag, and maybe print him out a receipt or something fancy like that. Or even cooler, you could have some sort of iPhone app that scans his RFID, then yours, and then you can make a digital transaction using the phone.

And if that doesn't work we can just nuke the polar ice caps and try to kill everybody. If anybody survives, they can start society again with the barter system and then we don't have to worry about pennies anymore.