Does anyone remember when you could send a first class letter for three cents? That's right, 3 cents. That was in the 1940s and 50s of the last century. Now, to send a first class letter, you have to cough up seventy three cents! Quite a change in less than a century.
Old sayings that don't mean as much as they used to:
Pennywise and pound foolish.
A penny saved is a penny earned.
The latter is the most striking in its modern futility.
If you save a penny, so what? How many do you have to save to make a difference? The same goes for nickels and dimes.
Go into a store, what can you buy for a penny? Answer: Nothing Go into a store, what can you buy for a nickel? Answer: Nothing
Go into a store, what can you buy for a dime? Answer: Not much
Yet when you buy something, it is priced in cents and you are handed back pennies and dimes and nickels which are a waste of time.
Maybe it is time for the government to lop off one decimal place. Even then a postage stamp for first class would cost seven cents.
As it is now, pennies are a nuisance for all concerned, the merchant, the customer, and the bank. Nickels and dimes are questionable. We all have a stash of this stuff. We look at it and think, wow!, how did we accumulate so much of it? We ought to count it and see what it is worth. Then we look again, and think, nah, there must be something else we can do to waste our time. The solution, if the change you get back adds up to less than a quarter, is to tell the cashier to put it back in the drawer or put it in the tip jar.
