Persuasive Essay

Is the Penny Really Useful?

In most situations, pennies are useless. Don’t agree with me? Do you have a penny jar in your house, but instead of spending it, you just put in more pennies? I thought so. Abolishing the penny would improve the economy, and make it easier to purchase things.

The most important thing is that it costs around two cents to make a one cent coin. Yep, every time we make a penny, we lose money. You must think, “ Well, two cents isn’t a lot of money to lose.” However, around two billion pennies are produced each year in one state alone. That means we are losing 2 million dollars every year in pennies. That little one cent loss adds up pretty quickly.

Something that also hurts the economy is, 1.2 million pennies are thrown away yearly. So, more than half of the loss of making pennies goes to the landfill. Either we reduce the number of pennies made per year until we stop throwing them away, or stop making them entirely.

Some of the annoying things about the penny comes from stores, or rather, goes toward stores. You can’t buy anything with a penny. This may sound a little far out, but how many times have you bought something under five cents? You can’t even buy a pressed penny. That takes an additional quarter or two. It only acts as bait for six year-olds to do chores. But then it goes into the giant mess they call their room, never to be seen again.

The most annoying thing, is that clerks and cashiers have to put up with pennies as change every single work day. They have to count through all the pennies, sometimes starting over because they forgot the number. If they have the customer count the change instead, they get mad and start lecturing the cashier on laziness. Pennies only serve as an annoyance in convenience stores, for everyone. Can you see yourself as a cashier at, lets say, wal-mart. A mom and her son walk up and dump a pile of pennies in front of you. They say it’s a thousand pennies, equal to ten dollars. They also say you have to count through it to make sure its all there. Would you want to be in that situation frequently? No one would.

So, what do you think? Keep the negative one cent coin, or get it out of the nation’s system, so we don’t lose two million dollars a year? Its up to you. I can’t vote. I’m only twelve.