Cash physically wears out over time, so some amount needs to be re-minted each year to replace the ones that are too worn to be used as currency. In the case of bills, most countries also make updates to the design and materials in an attempt to deter counterfeiting. Coin usually gets small cosmetic changes every so often, like in Canada, every so often the “heads” side is updated with a new portrait of the monarch (currently King Charles)
I definitely see why paper money needs remade all the time. But coins do seem to last way longer. I don’t get how there could possibly be a shortage of pennies unless they are recycling them in mass, unnecessarily.
Maybe if it were a closed loop system, but my intuition says that’s far from the case. I’ve seen buckets of pennies saved… whole tens of dollars, taking up an entire shoebox vault, just to never be touched. I’ve seen pennies on the road, desert, forests, … people throw them into fountains, lakes… all that, and then yes they also wear down slowly too.
Cash physically wears out over time, so some amount needs to be re-minted each year to replace the ones that are too worn to be used as currency. In the case of bills, most countries also make updates to the design and materials in an attempt to deter counterfeiting. Coin usually gets small cosmetic changes every so often, like in Canada, every so often the “heads” side is updated with a new portrait of the monarch (currently King Charles)
I definitely see why paper money needs remade all the time. But coins do seem to last way longer. I don’t get how there could possibly be a shortage of pennies unless they are recycling them in mass, unnecessarily.
Maybe if it were a closed loop system, but my intuition says that’s far from the case. I’ve seen buckets of pennies saved… whole tens of dollars, taking up an entire shoebox vault, just to never be touched. I’ve seen pennies on the road, desert, forests, … people throw them into fountains, lakes… all that, and then yes they also wear down slowly too.
Hm… Yeah that’s something. But do you think that outpaces the use of physical money being replaced by digital. ?
Might be hard to know.