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This is the web archive for Anthropology 125S, "The Anthropology of Money." Anthro 125S was a class at the University of California, Irvine, in Winter 2008 by Prof. Bill Maurer. Use the Label tags on the left to navigate around this site. Click on "Final Projects" to the left, below, to read the results of the students' research, and feel free to post your own comments!
8 comments:
I just watched this!
But wouldn't the nickel become the new penny? And wouldn't it be difficult to pay exact price with change? And would prices everywhere change to make sure the ending price is a number divisible by 5? Or whatever.
This was really interesting especially since I hate change. To see how much money is spent to make these coins in the first place is just-- wow, especially when most don't pay as much attention to coins--pennies-- as they would to dollar bills.
I do see a use for the penny when looking at it from an economic standpoint. An example would be an item priced at $1.99 versus $2.00. Somehow the $1.99 looks much cheaper than the $2.00 even though the difference is only a penny. There is some psychological thing going on with the penny but I don't think it's worth the production cost. The price it costs to produce these pennies is ridiculous. The government needs to gain some common sense or common cents (quarters, dimes, and nickels.) In other words, eliminate the penny.
If we stop producing the penny, and there is inflation right now, it might help the economy. I think from an economic standpoint, eliminating the penny and putting emphasis towards bills would more likely boost the economy.
I find this interesting because it would be interesting to see how exact change would work, and how tax in a store would work...would the government have to revamp the whole taxing system to get numbers divisible by five or just change the percentage taxed and assume that store owners and the like will change all their prices to numbers that, whether tax is included or not, will result in appropriate numbers. Then the question would be how this would affect marketing and consumerism, including the psychology behind many aspect of it.(i.e. 0.99 vs 1.00, etc. )
The production to the coins seems very inefficient and it makes sense from an economic point of view to stop both the production of pennies and nickels. I wonder at the efficiency of dimes and quarters; dimes seem questionable but quarters seem like they should be worth minting. I think that once a system that allowed the numbers to work out was figured out, it would be easier to have just bills and quarters(and maybe dimes).
there is no one centavo (one cent) coin in brazil. but this didn't change the price of things. lots of items were still $.99 or 19.99 even $1.07! From my experience there, whenever there was change required that wasn't divisible by 5- let's say 6 Reais and 13 centavos- I would either get 6.15 or 6.10 depending on the cash register. but for the most part, it was rounded up.
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