Let’s scrap 1p and 2p coins!
They’re really annoying
First of all, they’re incredibly annoying. There are few things in life more frustrating than waiting to be served in a shop or a pub but you have to wait longer because a customer has paid with cash and is now receiving change which invariably tends to contain 1p and 2p coins. I appreciate that this may sound like a minor issue but it’s important. Queuing might be a Great British Tradition but there is an opportunity cost associated with it as time spent waiting to be served is time which you could have spent doing something more fun or productive with your life. What is more, minor annoyances over the day can cause stress which is bad for our health and makes us far less productive.
Just imagine a world without 1p and 2p coins.
It’s the economy, stupid
This links to the next point: they’re bad for the economy. It places an extra burden on businesses and their staff who have to process the coins and means they can’t serve as many customers as quickly as they would like. As such, productivity takes a hit which means profits, wages, and the overall economy all suffer.
Moreover, the metals used in the minting of 1p and 2p coins increases demand for these metals. This demand increases the costs for businesses which use them and so are forced to spend more money to pay for them and so make less of their product or have less money to spend on other things such as investing in their firms. Alternatively, they simply increase their own prices which then pushes up costs for other businesses and consumers. All of this is bad for productivity and economic growth. We’re all poorer thanks to 1p and 2p coins.
Scrapping 1p and 2p coins would mean we have more of the stuff we want and need.
Schrodinger’s Coins
1p and 2p coins are simultaneously both worthless and expensive.
You can’t buy anything for 1p and 2p and so those coins have no value. You need to combine them with other coins (often lots of them) to be able to purchase anything with them. As such, they serve no real purpose.
They are also expensive. The Royal Mint refuses to reveal how much it actually costs to mint the coins (hence the clickbaity headline). However, we do know that in the US it costs more to mint the penny than it is actually worth and so we should expect it to be a similar situation in the UK.
Given that the Royal Mint is owned by the government, it receives its funding from taxpayers. This is money which could be spent on a whole range of other more useful services.
An objection often raised is that it would surely raise prices for consumers (which would obviously be bad). However, there is no evidence for this.
In an ideal world we’d scrap cash completely. Unfortunately we do not live in a perfect world and so I don’t expect we’ll see this anytime soon. Scrapping 1p and 2p coins would, however, be a step to achieving a cashless society.