Pennies. Do we really need them? They’re only worth one cent. Most people won’t even bother to bend over and pick up a penny they see on the ground.
What if we didn’t have pennies? Walking through a store, have you noticed how many items are priced one cent lower than a dollar amount… $4.99, for example? Without pennies, the price would have to be $4.95 or $5.00.
The amount of money that would be spent if even half of everything priced at 99¢ went up to $1.00 would be a fortune. If every American paid one cent more on only one item, they’d spend a total of $2.7 million more! (That‚s 1¢ multiplied by 270 million Americans.)
In the late 1970s, the government did a major study to find out if people wanted to eliminate the penny. The answer was “NO!”