Pocket change. Those two words are quickly becoming irrelevant.
Most all of us have questioned the need for the penny. In one of my first introductions to the value of money as a child, I learned the hard way that pop machines don’t take pennies. I wasn’t happy. The vending machine guy probably wasn’t either. Through the years, some reports have shown that the cost of producing a penny is more than 1 cent. So other than “find a penny, pick it up, all day long, you will have good luck,” why do we keep it as part of our monetary system? One answer is obvious. Unless we want tax increases in 5-cent increments, we better hold on to the penny.
The nickel is my favorite coin. If you are a regular reader of this column, you may remember this past musical reference from my childhood. The nickel is a hearty coin without those annoying ridges. It is easy to blindly locate inside your pocket. Good luck finding “nickel candy” today. Much like the penny, the nickel has become mostly useless.
The dime is the most interesting coin. Small, light and flimsy, it is the coin most susceptible to, literally, falling through the cracks. As a teenager in the 1980s, my friends and I discovered an interesting perceived value of a dime through a series of experiments. When we asked people for a dime, they would give it to us without question or expectation of repayment. When asking for a quarter or more, those expectations changed. The greater challenge with that experiment today would be finding someone who actually has a dime. Dime stores now being called dollar stores pretty much says it all.
Let’s jump to the quarter, and quite a jump this is. Why not a 15-cent coin or a 20-cent coin? We may never know. Meanwhile, here is some fun that my same dime-experimenting teenage friends did. Take a quarter and lay it on a piece of paper. Draw around the perimeter of it with a pencil multiple times, and then challenge a person to roll that quarter off his or her nose and see how close it can be dropped inside the circle. The participants will become obsessed with the challenge and not notice the lines of graphite they mark down their nose. It’s all about the ridges. Don’t try this with a nickel.
And you thought pocket change was useless?
Have a marvelous Monday, and thanks for reading.
Shane Goodman
President and Publisher
Big Green Umbrella Media
shane@dmcityview.com
515-953-4822, ext. 305
