How do you spend a penny?
Older (British) readers of NightHawk will remember that using a public toilet used to cost one (old) penny – hence the expression “to spend a penny” when using the toilet. More recently, using a toilet on a railway station could cost you up to 50 (current) pence, but now all toilets on London stations at least are free at last.
Meanwhile we have the situation that the use of the penny (and two penny) is decreasing rapidly and indeed the use of cash itself is falling fast. This week, I bought a medium latte on a railway station for £2.99 and I paid with cash because I wanted to get rid of heavy coins. I put the penny change in a charity box.
So do we still need cash? A government consultation has found that 2.2 million people in Britain are still reliant on cash, so an earlier proposal to scrap the 1p and 2p has been abandoned. That leaves the problem of what most of us do with those pesky little copper coins. This BBC web page has eight suggestions.