#253 makes cents

Earlier this month, the Canadian Royal Mint announced that it had ceased distributing pennies.  Even though the one-cent coin was a standard denomination for over 150 years, production has stopped.  Retailers are expected to round all transactions up and down to the nearest nickel increment.

The move by Canada is expected to save their taxpayers nearly $11 million.  

A similar move has been discussed (and discussed, and discussed) in America for years.   A West Wing sequence even made fun of the idea in 2001.  But, obviously, nothing has happened.

I think the penny debate is symbolic of the kind of thinking that caused our fiscal mess.  Even though there is a Super Committee specifically charged with cutting expenses, it failed to abolish a practice that loses money with each coin minting.  

In some ways, it is inconceivable to think of our country enacting such a change.  We are very "cent-imental" about our way of life and reluctant to have someone (let alone the government) mandate something new. 

Yet places like Canada -- and Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Costa Rica, Hong Kong, Hungary, India, Israel, Mexico, Malaysia, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Papua New Guinea, Singapore, Sweden and the United Kingdom -- who have all eliminated their lowest denomination coin -- seem to have more economic "cents".  

Is your organization holding on to the equivalent of your penny -- embracing something that is costly and outdated just because you have been doing it forever?  If it seems impossible to change that practice or policy, just look at the list above of countries who impacted every citizen and the economic structure of the nation -- and somehow still survived.  

What penny can you stop minting today?

-- beth triplett
leadershipdots.blogspot.com
@leadershipdots
leadershipdots@gmail.com

sources:  www.retirethepenny.org, pennyfreebiz.com and www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/02/04