I wrote about this on my other blog: Small Island, Big Hopes, Large Dreams when I realized that I wasn't making money from that blog. So I'll be moving a couple of articles from that site over to triond.com's satellite of sites. I'll expand the idea and show you that honestly speaking, its worth your while to bend over and pick up all the lose change that you come across.
The other day I was looking at the coins in my piggy bank when I realized that for every $1 coin, there were at least eight 5-cent coins. These tiny circular dirty orangey-brown coins seem to be everywhere. (The next time you go to McDonald's take a look at the Charity Box at the counter and look at the number of 1-cent coins in the container.)
To make ends meet, I clean for a living, and while vacuuming, I'll come across coins. I've started a little tipping jar for myself. Over the year, I've come up with close to AUD$8 worth of coins!
Consider the number of times you simply refused (i.e. said, "its alright, keep the change") to accept the balance every time you go to the supermarkets or top-up your fuel tanks by either throwing the coins away, dumping it in the charity box or (if you're like me, throw everything into 1 big bowl at the end of the day). Now multiply this action by the number of people who think the same way. 100? 1000? Maybe 10,000 in any given hour. Wouldn't it be great if we could tap the collective ability of people to throw away low denomination coins?
I had a deviant idea the other day. It goes like this, at the entrance of your office, maybe at the reception counter, you set up a little jar. You put a sign on it that says, "All the Coins in the Jar will go to XYZ/save a life/save a kid/save a whale etc Foundation." Now, every week or month or so, you take that money stick it in a savings account that gives you some form of interest: 7% should do it nicely as we do in Australia.
You don't keep the money in the jar, what you keep is the money earned from the interest.
I can't find the metallurgical data on the 1-cent coin but for the rest of this post I am assuming that the coin has a zinc core and is plated with copper.
There was a debate on USAToday.com dated 7 July 2006 "A penny saved could become a penny spurned" about the usefulness of the American 1-cent penny. The Americans are thinking of ditching the 1-cent penny.
The issue here is that for the first time in a long while, the price of metals and therefore the cost of manufacture of the coins far exceeds that of the face-value of the coin itself. (Copper's spot price $3.45/pound and Zinc at $1.50/pound.)
Here's the trend price of copper:
Here's the trend price of zinc:
If the price of metals keep going up because of China's insatiable hunger for commodity metals, how about collecting all the lose coins and melting it down for resale?
