Today, Monday, February 4th, 2013 sees the historic end to the Canadian Penny.
Google is honouring Canadian Penny with a nice animated GIF Google Doodle:
“Last Day of the Canadian Penny” Google Doodle animated GIF, Feb. 4th, 2013.
Doug Peterson‘s blog post for today, “Penny Wise” alerted me to the connection to the Penny’s end this morning. Doug included a link to a 10-question trivia quiz about the Canadian Penny. I scored 6/10.
I’ve heard that retailers will still use prices marked to the nearest cent — I guess $3.99 is still better than $3.95 when it comes time to tabulate the bottom line at the end of the day.
The CBC website will tell you All You need to know about the Canadian Penny’s Withdrawl
I guess it makes sense to stop making pennies, given that they cost more to make than their actual face value.
“Rummoli board,” from Wikipedia
But I wonder, what will folks use for counters when playing Rummoli?
We always grabbed the penny jar for that when we were kids. Will we now start a nickel jar? Granted, we don’t play as much Rummoli as we used to. (And never, in my life, have I encountered a Crokinole board with Rummoli on the reverse. That they might still exist is nice to know.) But my sons were introduced to the game a couple years ago with a new purchase of the plastic mat version of the game. Somehow it won’t seem the same using some store-bought plastic counters. Maybe we’ll just keep our penny jar.
Not everything needs to be digital…
Searching “Crokinole Rummoli” brought me to a page on Find the Best, which offered some interesting comparative facts.
I suspect that a lot of people will hang on to pennies for at least a while in memory of a time gone by. Isn’t that weird that time gone by starts today? Of course, the memories will only mean something to old farts like us that use money. Today’s youth use Debit Cards and Smart Phones as their way to buy and sell….
I have a coin collector in the centre console of the car, as well as a jar on the dresser that I toss change into. Both of those see less and less coinage as more and more of my transactions are done using a debit card.
When I think about it, I’m fairly certain I’ve been using an ATM card since I was 16. I recall seeing an Interac debit card sign for the first time in an antique store up in Ottawa — that would have been in the early 90s, I’m thinking. And it’s only been in the last few years that I’ve pretty much stopped using cheques, as so much can be done these days using electronic banking.
But those fancy new polymer bills sure are something, aren’t they?