A Penny Saved Could Be Five Cents Earned

A snippet from Yahoo! caught my attention this morning. Reuters reported that since price for metals such as cooper has been rising sharply every day, people may stop using pennies but would rather pile them up and sell them as metals. As such, economists in US Federal Reserve Bank have suggested raising the value of the pennies to 5 cents each to deter people from melting or exporting them for a much higher profit.

I say we start doing spring cleaning to collect all those pennies laying around at our kitchen counter, kitchen cabinet, living room, study room, couch and all those places we had leisurely tossed the worthless 1-cent to. I can imagine Bree of the Westeria Lane immediately stops polishing her silvers and instead storms into Andrew’s room, not so much to clean up the mess, but to find, again not Andrew and his ‘mates’, pennies (gee.. this would make a good script in Desperate Housewives).

Shall we also stop leaving 1-cent to the little so-called donation box every time we receive small change when shopping at Giant, Tesco, etc or eating at McDonald’s or KFC? Wait till we see the cashier’s face when we demand the balance for the groceries or fastfood we bought be paid in 1-cents.

The Elite toll collectors will be smiling broadly at me next time, because I stop giving them 1-cent. And, they still dare increasing the toll fee every year!

I once saw a local fashion designer producing a beautiful evening gown made from 1-cent coins, how much would the dress worth now? Would Datuk Datin Siti Nurhaliza prefer dazzling in this 1-cent dress over Rizalman’s and the like for her wedding fiesta last year? No comment!

We often say “… tak guna satu sen…” here when referring to something (or someone) we perceive as less worthy. But since the global economy has set that one cent is gonna worth at least 5 times its face value, what shall we change our cynical phrase to?

And what about those who have hit the ASBs’ maximum saving of RM200,000.00? If they really wanna exercise their rights in this country by converting it into 20,000,000.00 cents, it could make them millionaires instantly!

Ok, enough rambling!