{"id":1159,"date":"2011-04-15T02:14:58","date_gmt":"2011-04-15T08:14:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.keloland.com\/lund\/?p=1159"},"modified":"2023-07-20T21:00:09","modified_gmt":"2023-07-20T21:00:09","slug":"pennies-from-heaven","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.jodystaples.com\/main\/pennies-from-heaven\/","title":{"rendered":"Pennies From Heaven"},"content":{"rendered":"

I shelled out the most I\u2019ve ever paid for a tank of gasoline last weekend in Minneapolis; $3.99.9 a gallon. How stupid do they think we are, to fall for that old penny pricing trick? \u201cYah, it\u2019s high alright but at least it hasn\u2019t gotten up to four bucks yet.\u201d\u00a0 \u00a0Although I admit I once tried to talk Linda into letting\u00a0 me buy a new HDTV by telling her it was only $999.99 instead of a thousand. She didn’t buy it..nor did I. \u00a0<\/p>\n

I really think it\u2019s time to do away with pennies in our U.S. currency.<\/p>\n

\"pennyYou never have one when you need one at the store; then end up with a bunch of them you don\u2019t want from all the change you get back. Oh, sure, lots of retail places have a little dish of pennies by the check-out stand for customers to use but it’s\u00a0usually empty by the time I’m there\u00a0so when the clerk says \u201cThat\u2019ll be $4.01 sir,\u201d I end up leaving the place a half pound heavier because of all the change in\u00a0my pocket.\u00a0 Sometimes I’ll be\u00a0three or four cents short and, even if there are pennies in the dish, I feel guilty about taking more than one or two\u2026especially if they\u2019re the LAST two.<\/p>\n

No\u2026I say it\u2019s time to round all prices off to the nearest nickel. It seems to me that stores would still come out about the same and people would certainly\u00a0be less stressed out not having to scramble for pennies all the time. Or,\u00a0worse yet, be standing BEHIND someone\u00a0 in line\u00a0who won’t give up until they find that penny they know is buried somewhere in their pocket or purse.<\/p>\n

\u00a0Pennies lost their luster a long time ago when we\u00a0 first decided\u00a0it was more trouble than it was worth to bend over and pick one up off the street. \u00a0<\/p>\n

Although I must admit, they once proved to be a real blessing when I worked full time at Keloland. \u00a0Years ago, one of our guest cooks on Monday Menu left an empty two gallon glass jug in the studio. When I showed up for work the next day, somebody had put that jar on the corner of my desk with a little note\u00a0that said \u201cDoug Lund\u2019s retirement fund, pennies only.\u201d There were even a few coins inside to\u00a0prime the pump. I decided that rather than take offence I\u2019d play along promising that once the jug was full of pennies, \u00a0I\u2019d cash them \u00a0in and buy pizza for everybody in the newsroom.<\/p>\n

\"pennyBefore long my desk became like a toll booth as co-workers walked by and unloaded their pennies; often by the handful. After every donation I got into the habit of saying, \u201cGod bless you.\u201d It was fun watching the pot grow and speculating as to how much money was in there. But then Steve Hemmingsen would show up, give the jar a shake, which settled the coins way down, then he\u2019d walk off laughing. Eventually, though, after a huge donation from photographer Kevin Kjergaard and his brother, Buddha, who apparently cleaned out their\u00a0dresser drawers at home, the jug was full to overflowing.\u00a0 Now, this was at a time when the government was talking about a penny shortage and urging people to stop hoarding them. So, I decided to make a Lund at Large report out of it and called Sioux Merchant Patrol who sent over an armed guard to accompany me, a photographer and the penny jar to Home Federal where bank employees played along as we dumped the money into the coin counter. I don\u2019t remember the exact total but we were pleasantly surprised to find it was just over 62 dollars; more than enough to fill everybody up with pizza the next day. I thought that would be the end of it but employees kept dropping their pennies in\u00a0and Hemmingsen kept torqueing contributors off with his regular settling shakes. After a couple more years and a few thousand \u201cGod Bless Yous\u201d it was full again. This time we ordered Chinese food. \u00a0We were well on our way to filling it a third time when Hemmingsen, now retired, stopped by the newsroom to say hello, drop in a few cents and\u00a0just had to shake the jar for old times sake. This time,\u00a0the stress was too much. The\u00a0glass broke sending thousands of little coins rolling all over the floor. We\u00a0found a smaller replacement jug which eventually was filled up and cashed-in for one last pizza party.\u00a0 Then\u00a0I actually DID retire.<\/p>\n

As I think back on those seven or eight years that\u00a0the penny jar sat on my desk, I remember that it wasn’t\u00a0just my workmates who donated. Senator Tom Daschle, Mayors Hanson and Munson along with a lot of other politicians and notable people\u00a0who passed through the newsroom would smile,\u00a0toss in a few coins and\u00a0get a blessing just like everybody else. Come to think of it, maybe pennies aren\u2019t so bad after all.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I shelled out the most I\u2019ve ever paid for a tank of gasoline last weekend in Minneapolis; $3.99.9 a gallon. How stupid do they think we are, to fall for that old penny pricing trick? \u201cYah, it\u2019s high alright but at least it hasn\u2019t gotten up to four bucks yet.\u201d\u00a0 \u00a0Although I admit I once…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[60],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1159","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-lund-at-large","category-60","description-off"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jodystaples.com\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1159","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jodystaples.com\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jodystaples.com\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jodystaples.com\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jodystaples.com\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1159"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.jodystaples.com\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1159\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11801,"href":"https:\/\/www.jodystaples.com\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1159\/revisions\/11801"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jodystaples.com\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1159"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jodystaples.com\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1159"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jodystaples.com\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1159"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}