1 and 2 cent pieces, what do you think about removing them?

I am all for it. Though here in Germany it would probably give quite a number of people a heart attack not being able to pay an exact amount to the cent.

I feel called out.
No, seriously. Last season I bought some plums from my Turkish greengrocer, he put them on the scales which said 1.01 Euro which he commented with "one Euro". I gave him 1.01 Euro, and got a "can you believe those Almans" look.
They could by paying with card.
- Lol. Have you been to Germany? IF you can pay with a card, it has to be a specific card, not everyone accepts credit cards.
- They could pay with card, but it's something special here with many of the old folks and cash. Part of the ancient shopping ritual to put out the small coins and delay the queue as long as possible. Why? No idea, apart from "Das haben wir schon immer so gemacht!" (We always did it like this)
Now that's good German humor.
- Come on now, you know you can only have one at a time. So is it German, or is it humor?

There are European countries that have no 1 and 2c coins (Netherlands, Belgium, Ireland, Finland). The prices are the same, when you buy something the sum is simply rounded up to the next 5 cents.

Works fine.

Here in NL the amount gets rounded to the nearest multiple of five, so for 1.92 you have to pay 1.90 in cash and 1.93 will become 1.95. This so on average you are not overpaying. Digital payments are always exact.

Get rid of them. I just throw the small coins in a box regularly. A couple if years ago I tried to get rid of them. I found out that my bank would not accept them so easily and when I tried to pay with rolls of cent coins, store owners would be pissed. What the hell am I supposed to do?

Self Checkout machines! take them!
Nooo! My poor Sparschwein will die of hunger :(
Some supermarkets have machines where you can just toss them all in and get a coupon you can use in the market. But I think they take a 5% cut or something, so not ideal.
- It's 9,9% for our local Rewe Coinstar.

Yep, I'm a big fan of the approach of getting rid of smaller coins and just rounding at the register. The Netherlands already do this and I don't think anyone there misses the small coins.

Absolutely! I carry only a small wallet and hate coins in general. Totally could pass on 1 and 5 Cent coins. Throw them in a box at home (even 10 Cent coins) and have no idea on what to do with them. Brought them to a store once, but they would take 10% and you could only use the money in the store. Found a bank where you can bring them in for 5%, but you would have to roll them up yourself (definitely not gonna do their work and still give them 5%). Maybe I will put it in a chest and bury it somewhere in the forest near a playground so kids can go treasure hunting :D
- making it a kid's game is a good idea, but you could also try to go around local shops and ask if they are low on coins, they'd probably give you 1 to 1
Denmark did it too. Worked fine.

Children in elementary schools use coins as an example to learn calculating. They need the 1 cent coins. Is nobody here thinking about the children?

Well, they sure can learn with something else.
- Woooosh
  ^(the ^joke ^being ^that ^the ^adage ^is ^a ^trope ^at ^this ^point)

We should have gotten rid of them some time ago.

Good riddance! I never use them, collect them and bring them to one of the few banks that still accept coins.

I only use them when I empty my wallet in a self checkout to get rid of them

Aren't there already some Euro-Countries that abolished 1 and 2 cent coins?

Just looked it up: Finland, Netherlands, Belgium, Italy and Ireland.
- what happens if you pay 5 Cents with 5x1 cent from other countries in those countries?
- I haven't seen them a lot lately in Austria...

It hasn't been a thing in Ireland since 2015. We have a rounding system in place for cash transactions

Canada got rid of pennies (one-cent pieces) over 10 years ago. Now millennials can't buy houses. Coincidence? ;)

Hungary has in the recent past got rid of 1 and 2 HUF coins. Prices can still be XX99, only total transaction amounts have to be rounded according to official rounding laws, but only if in cash.

It works.

What are the rules for rounding?
- If the price ends on 1 or 2 HUF, it goes down to the nearest ten, if it's 3,4,6 or 7 it rounds to 5, if it's 8 or 9 it goes up to the nearest ten.
  No one really cares that much, as 1 HUF is worth around a third of a cent.

I am in favour. But let's go ever further and get rid of cash entirely.

Privacy and transactions without internet connection?
- GNU Taler
- There are ways to do anonymous payments without cash. Just see the other comment. Relying on cash forever is just some libertarian fever dream.

As a swiss person, I get surprised every time the price doesn't automatically round to the next multiple of 5 cents when I'm in the EU. So yes, get rid of them.

As a swiss, you're used to find it the first prices in Europe, not you don't think about other economies.
There's a comment in here from someone whose country recently switched to euros, and many small items there cost under 10 cents. Rounding down would make them free, rounding up doubles their price...
The measure is reasonable if the local economy is suited - Belgium and the Netherlands have been rounding bills for a good while now, but it's not something that should be pushed from the European level.
Not that I said rounding bills - individual items are stille priced to the cent. When paying by card, you pay the exact total, but when paying cash it gets rounded to the nearest 5 cent.

croatian here, we recently, in january of this year, switched to euro. im still mindblown by how much 1 cent is (like, 7.5 times more than 1 lipa was). and since i already carry 10 times more coins now then when i did when we used kunas, i really dont mind the 1 and 2 cent coins. in fact, a lot of things here cost x.x3 or x.x7 €, so its quite convenient to have some cents in your wallet

Damn that's interesting. In Germany you can maybe get something for 10 cent somewhere, but everything else is at least 20 or 50 cent ^^

I don't have them when paying with my Amex… And if I have too much of them, I'm kindly asking at the drinks store if I can throw them into their coin counter for payment when not many customers are there. If everything fails I wait until I have 11800 one-cent coins or a mix with 2 cent to pay that €118 every 10 years for ID card and passport. Which astonishingly is machine-payable with One and Two-Cent coins.

If you need ways to get rid of them:

gift them to me, :D Or I'll PayPal it back to you.
have a bank account at one of the old, expensive classical banks here in Germany, they usually take them. Don't have the cheapest account there. Take their kind of all-inclusive account model.
Go to your nearest "Deutsche Bundesbank" and take your foreign coins and banknotes with you, they have to exchange it for you as long as all the money you bring is or was valid payment money somewhere.
supermarket self-service machines
Get to your nearest Späti (in Berlin) or kiosk store and ask the owner if he needs 1 Cent coins. Some give a small discount for you being the person, making sure they'll not get into trouble with missing 1 Cent coins. And some just trust that the thousands of coins you bring is roughly what you counted.

Avoid:

Coinstar, 10+ % fee (or any other machine that's not a self-service cash register)
rush hour on counting machines not fully used as self-service – ask the store when it's okay to come with so much money – those machines take some time to count your thousands of coins.

So in conclusion: Stores would want to do €,99 prices, because that's why you can steal a whole other Euro for every item the customer grabs. Doing .95 would change that unless everyone does it or is forced to do that. Because the lobby from these businesses is too big, we will not see the 1-cent and 2-cent pieces disappear. Milk business will complain that they can't afford selling at 4 cent less and all the others would just make everything + €1, so €1.99 becomes €2.95 and so on.

You shouldn't force the economy to change prices if you don't see them illegally changing prices. Because everything will be getting unnecessarily more expensive then. Enforced pricing should always be a price decrease.

Bundesbank didn't do foreign currency last time I checked. But yes, they'll exchange Euro coins for notes

Does anyone else think it's a little backwards that the large denominations are fragile paper bills, but the small ones are metal coins sometimes worth less than the metal in the coin? Shouldn't the large denominations be coins, which last longer, and the small denominations be bills, which are easier to carry in large quantities?

Making a fake coin is a lot easier than making a fake "paper" bill.
- Even better 🏴‍☠️😂
- Isn't that only because so much effort is being made to improve paper bills - like transparent windows, holograms, UV print, microprint, raised print, embedded metal strips, etc. etc.?
  Nothing is preventing anyone from implementing better protections into coins - integrating polymers, transparent rings, multiple metal rings, even integrating chips... it's just currently not worth the effort.
- Sure, but for low denominations, it doesn't make sense to develop and incorporate advanced security measures. Coins could support cryptographic technology that would make counterfeiting impossible. Hobbyists have figured out how to do it for $23 a piece. A national mint could probably do it for less.
I would guess that small denominations are used more frequently in cash transactions and are worn down much quicker. Therefore, it is probably reasonable to use the more durable coins for those instead of having to replace paper bills all the time in large quantities
- Yes, but I think the premise of the OP is that frequently transacting with coins is a PITA. Even if paper is less durable, people will be happier not having to deal with coins as much.

I just put 1,2 and 5 cents in my kid's piggybank instead of carrying em around.

your poor kid xD
- They would be even poorer if I wouldn't do it

fuck inflation

yes fuck inflation like the last few years, but "normal" inflation like a few percent never bothered me.

I never accept 1,2 and 5 cent coins. This probably adds up to 3€ a year, which is affordable to me

Yeah it's always so weird to me, people pay 100x that for other minor conveniences.

Yes, please remove 1, 2 and 5 cent coins. I'd argue for also removing 10 and 20 cent. How do you get rid of them? I feel ridiculous paying with them. So I just don't.

Aren't 10p pieces now worth less than the ½p when it was removed from circulation? It's not just 1 and 2 that are overdue

They are annoying. I save up a big jar of just 1 and 2 pieces and go to the marts that have self checkouts and take coins and just dump em all in. Otherwise useless

Do you know if there is such a mart in Germany?
- self checkouts are less common than in other countries, but larger REWEs and Kauflands and often Edekas have them.
- Kauflands have them

The problem gets worse if you realize that the material value of the copper is greater than the coin value itself with 1 cent.

They're not made from copper in Europe though.
- I actually looked it up. They are 5,65% copper, the rest ist iron. But because they are not 100% copper, they are less valuable then 1 cent. https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eurom%C3%BCnzen

In Romania we have Lei and Bani. Works the same as Euro and cents. We only have 10 and 50 bani coins. And generally we round to the nearest 50 bani.

In Canada we've removed them and I'm just left wondering why we have 5 and 10 cent pieces now. They're also absolutely useless.

I have a big jar at home putting all copper coins into it out of my wallet from time to time ...

Some stores provide the possibility to round up the sum and donate the difference to a charity. I think this is also a good idea.

Some banks also have coin deposit machines

I think it's been a decade since I last used them in Holland. It's just unnecessary.

Doesn't make sense. You could just throw away all 1 and 2 cents for yourself and round everything up if you really wish not having to worry about them anymore. Problem solved :)

what? so if my bill is 1,96 euro i should pay 2 euro and the store will get the 4 cent? no way. that sounds not like much but its like per custumer per day lot. i even hate it that on gas stations there is a .cent. for example gas 1 euro 59,9 cent. what is this bullshit? just money making for the gas stations and oil companys.

I think the idea is that on the other hand the store will only get 2€ if the bill is 2,04€. On average there shouldn't be any difference for both sides. About the gas stations I agree 100%.
- new chalange for me always buy thinks that cost x,x4 euro :)
- The Stores will all do 1,96 then and no store will do 2,04 since that would make a loss on their side.
I refuse to believe that anyone pays for gas in cash anymore.
What makes you think you'd have to round up instead of down?
Ah those arguments have already been done to death in the countries that did implement it. It really doesn't change a thing in the grand scheme of things. Even the shops were worried that they'd lose money on it, so no, it's not a money making scheme, it averages out perfectly fine.

ha yes, cut one zero off the Euro.

a

Throw them all in a well.

What if they just stopped minting them

I'd be in fervor
- I'm in the UK and we have so many 1 penny coins dating back to like the 70s, don't see why we need to continue minting them

What I'm questioning myself is If we would remove the 1 and 2 cent pieces Would they in the future increase in value because of them being rare.

Nah, the 1 and 2 cent pieces of the currency Germany had before the Euro isn't worth shit. I bet that people still find a bunch of them in couches etc ^^
- We can do the "Glückspfennig" stuff again. Make 'em into "lucky cents" or smth.