A Big Fat Penny

In 2012 the Canadian Mint got tired of producing one cent coins for an ungrateful population. Pennies’ only use in life was to make change. You couldn’t buy anything with a single penny, or even two or three. They were a nuisance for merchants and for banks. A penny on the ground never got picked up. So in a rare moment of decisiveness, the government cancelled the Canadian one cent piece.

When I was a kid, we did pick up pennies, because you could actually buy stuff with them, including “penny candy” at the corner store. But even then, the old folks grumbled that a penny wasn’t worth much anymore. Back in their day, a penny would buy a newspaper or send a letter across the continent.

One sign that the penny was fading as a coin of value came in 1920 when the size of a Canadian penny was reduced from something nearly as big as a loonie to something just larger than a dime. Still, a small handful could still buy you an ice cream cone or a soft drink. But ultimately, inflationary creep caught up with the one cent piece and it was more trouble than it was worth.

But not every penny in Grandma’s coin jar is of no value. It is not unusual that some examples are worth a few dollars, even a few thousand dollars, and the choicest of all is the 1936 “dot” penny (https://www.coinsandcanada.com/coins-prices.php?coin=1-cent-1936&years=) , which sold in 2021 for $445,600
. Don’t get too excited, though, as far as we know there are only three still in existence.

Two of the greatest enemies of commercial value are ubiquity and obsolescence. These also happen to be the two greatest enemies of professional value. If the services you’re offering are the same as you were offering ten or twenty years ago, there’s a really good chance that somebody is going to eat your lunch. If you’re no longer the only game in town, but your clients and customers now have four or five or twenty choices, you are in a world of price competition– and that’s a race to the bottom.

Is your value proposition what it was five or ten years ago? Are you a run of the mill penny, or a 1936 “dot”?

A penny for your thoughts.