As a business owner how can I help?
We love to hear “how can I help” when talking to business owners in our community. The answer is pretty simple. But before I get those details think about the following.
- $100 in pennies weighs around 55 pounds. Ouch to that heavy lifting.
- Less than 20% of all transactions are done using cash
- An even smaller number of those transactions include pennies.
- And many of those end up in a dish at your checkout counter
- The rest head home with your customer only to be sitting around unused. To the tune of over 240 BILLION as of last count.
So to the fun part. Join us for January Leave The Penny Month where businesses leave the penny behind. Skip ordering pennies from your bank or credit union. Then of the 1 out of 5 customers that pay in cash and require pennies just give them a nickel. Tell them about www.LeaveThePenny.com and how it costs around 3 pennies to make one penny. I promise you your customer will be happy as you just saved them from carrying around more coins and gave them a little financial bump.. albeit small.
At the end of the day, week or month figure out how many pennies you avoided handling and handing out and you may be surprised how little it cost you as a business owner. It will even speed up those transactions just a little. And isn’t it really just a small marketing expense as you will most certainly differentiate yourself with your customer.
Challenge #2
You are at the checkout counter and you decide to pay in cash. Another fun fact. Only 18% of all transactions are cash. So you have cash but likely not any pennies in your pocket since you left them in the dish or at home to later someday haul 55 pounds of pennies to the coin machine.
Knowing you aren’t carrying around pennies in your pocket or purse you pull out your dollar bills to pay. At this point you could try to do the painful math of using any pennies in the dish to round out your purchase but you give up and hand over your dollars for the purchase. The employee hands you your change and you decide to put your pennies in the dish to save your car, junk drawer and lower back from dealing with those wasteful little coins.
Days later you are still part of the 18% minority still carrying cash around and at the store checkout. At this point this is where the game is going to change (get it change as in pennies). You don’t even consider the coin dish and immediately pay with your dollars and when you receive pennies back you LEAVE THE PENNY in the dish. Tell the employee how it costs three pennies to make each one and tell them to visit our site for more information.
Now doesn’t the feel a whole lot easier than trying to do the math in your head, finding those little copper pennies (now mostly zinc.. story for another time) in a drawer or even worse hauling around 55 pounds of them to try to buy something years from now?
