Canada recently decided to stop making pennies. “What will
they do?” Apollonia wondered.
“Presumably,” I said, “they will start rounding prices at
the five-cent point.”
She grimaced. “I wouldn’t like that.”
“No one much cares what you’d like,” I said. “Pennies are a
curiosity, a thing of the past. Get modern, babe.”
In Tunisia we had aluminum coins worth five millimes: five one-thousandths
of a dinar, less than an American penny in those days. It was the smallest change
available on a daily basis. Street vendors sold single cigarettes for a few of
those coins, which were called “durus.” Quite a few people didn’t bother to
spend them. I knew people who had huge
jars full of them. Some people actually threw them away.
Smaller coins – worth one or two millimes – were available,
but you seldom saw them. Everything in the market was generally priced in a
rounded amount – 1 dinar 500 millimes – but your electric bill was always
precise: 7 dinars 879 millimes. And, when you paid it (say, with a ten-dinar
note), they gave you exact change, in coins smaller than the nail of your
little finger.
Ah! That was fun.
Also back in those days, when the Italian lira was 2000 to
the American dollar, they gave you change in hard candy. If your change came to
25 or 30 lira, they’d gesture to the bowl of hard candy on the counter and say,
“Take one!”
All things considered, Canadians (and Americans, eventually) can live without the penny.
Who doesn’t like a little piece of candy once in a while?
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