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Is it really that hard to deal with pennies?
First, Chipotle outlets couldn't bother to count out cents because the chain claimed doing so slowed down customer interactions. Now, a store in Vermont has stopped dispensing pennies for change altogether.
Power Play Sports in Morrisville, Vt., put the new policy in place earlier this month. The sporting goods shop will still take customers' “outdated, outmoded, overpriced nuisance of coinage” owner Caleb Magoon told ABC News. However, the store is no longer “actively using them,” he said.
Unlike Chipotle -- which was caught rounding change down, cheating customers out of their pennies -- the Vermont store will round customers' change up to the nearest nickel. That means the store could lose a maximum of four cents on any cash transaction, Magoon tells NBC. No big, he implies.
Apparently it's just too hard dealing with all those shiny copper coins. ”I’m a small business with a few employees and we all work really hard and it’s just one more thing to deal with," says Magoo, who bought the 17-year-old store from its previous owners in 2011. He also told ABC that most of the store's transactions are conducted with plastic.
So far customers don't seem to mind. "I don't really want the pennies anyway," customer Jason Papadopoulos told Fox News. "They jingle in my pocket and end up on my couch or on my rug and I go to pick them up when I vacuum."
Magoo's hardly the first to malign the poor penny. Canada recently joined several countries that have already dropped pennies, or their equivalent, from their currency, including Australia, New Zealand, Brazil, Israel and South Africa.
In the United States, some anti-penny activists are also agitating to disappear the little Lincolns.
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