Sporting Goods Store Makes Waves By Refusing to Use Pennies — Dollars and Sense

Most businesses are doing their best these days to save all the pennies they can, while others are going through painstaking efforts to phase them out altogether.

Power Play Sports, in Morrisville, Vermont says that beginning this month it will quit handing out pennies when making change.

Owner Caleb Magoon, 29, says that the store still accepts the “outdated, outmoded, overpriced nuisance of coinage” from their clientele, yet, it's not actively using them, according to Magoon.

So, how is the store making change?

They round up to nearest nickel in favor of the patron. For example, purchases with 27 cents change due to the customer will go into their pockets as 30 cents.

Magoon says the reason he opted for the elimination of pennies was to simply get away from using a pointless currency.

“I think pennies are unnecessary on a larger scale,” he said. ”Eighty-five percent of my transactions are by credit card or check, that’s why it was an easy thing to do,” he said. It doesn’t cost me much money because no one pays in cash currency anymore.”

Pennies have been the target of extinction tactics for many years. Canada minted its last penny in March of this year, and several bills have been introduced throughout recent years as an attempt to bury old Abe forever.

However, Magoon says he is not actually getting rid of pennies altogether, since they will still be calculated in credit card and check payments.

“If the most that can be lost on a single sale is 4 cents, then the average per sale loss is 2 cents,” he said. ”It’s a lot easier since we’ve been using the nickel. Customers are excited. They see pennies as unnecessary as well.”

[ABC News]