The Change Burden: Yours or Theirs?
Does your bedroom dresser resemble that coin pusher game at the arcade or casino, coins cascading off the side?
Your cash is most weight-efficiently stored in lightweight, easily carried paper notes. Coins are necessary, but excess should be unloaded and converted to bills whenever possible. Customers and cashiers struggle with each other to shift the coin burden between cash register drawers, and bedroom dressers across the nation.
By giving accurate change, you’ll reduce that pile of coins at your home. You’ll walk lighter without so many coins weighing you down. Your retail transactions will be less stressful.
You need to become a coin cowboy, remorselessly unloading your coins at every cash register showdown. Your new Coin Sorter is the perfect weapon. Now you need the proper mindset and a sound strategy.
Mindset: Aspire to be Penniless
Take matters into your own hands,
and pennies out of your hand
Pull out the coins in your pocket or purse. Examine the coin pile on your dresser. How many of those coins are copper?
Now compare the actual monetary value of those proliferating pennies to the rest of your coins. Those nearly worthless pennies are weighing you down!
Dimes and quarters carry over eleven times the cash value per ounce than do pennies.
If you were to put a one-ounce weight on one side of a scale, the red figures in the table below show you how many cents are stored in the coins required to balance that scale.
Pennies hold the least monetary value for their weight of the four major U.S. coins. Nickels are about 2.5 times more valuable per ounce than pennies. Half dollars and dollar coins are inconsequential here; nobody uses them.
Naturally, the U.S. government focuses its minting efforts on the lowest-value coin. In 2014, the U.S. government minted almost twice as many of the low-value pennies than quarters, dimes, and nickels combined. (Source: United States Mint, Production and sales figures)
All these pennies in circulation are hot potatoes. If you’re not playing the penny-unload game, you’re being played. Even dumb machines that dispense sugary snacks won’t accept pennies.
Don’t be a victim. Ruthlessly burden other humans with your heavy, low-value pennies at every chance.