BACKROUND AND FACT SHEET
Concord Teacakes, West Concord, MA (www.concordteacakes.com) is starting a campaign of civil disobedience at 9:00 AM February 12, 2009 committing a federal crime by becoming the first retail establishment in the United States to refuse to accept pennies as payment and "rounding down" all cash transactions so as not to give them out in change.
We (Al Lewis) also intend to drop pennies on the sidewalk in full view of Concord's police force, to get a citation for littering, thus proving that federal law requires businesses to accept litter as legal tender.
We are only two small businesses, a bakery and a blog, but we stand ready to take on the powerful, environmentally disastrous, mining lobby and succeed where several attempts in Congress have failed, to get the penny out of circulation. Rather than wait for Congress to stand up to the mining interests, we are going to do it ourselves.
Some facts:
- February 12 is Lincoln's 200th birthday. We believe that Lincoln himself would support our emancipation from the slavery of the mining lobby, which is the impetus behind continued minting of pennies.
- Concord is the birthplace of Civil Disobedience. Thoreau went to jail for non-payment of poll taxes, which were being used to finance the Mexican War.
- This will be the second time in which an American revolution has started in Concord
- Unless the price of zinc is unusually low, it costs more than a penny to mint a penny
- Almost 100-billion pennies have been minted in the last 10+ years even though the US population has grown only by about 30-million people. That's 3000 new pennies per new person. Where do they all go? People lose them, throw them away, or store them in coffee cans. Occasionally the price of metal gets high enough for people to melt them down and sell them back to the government, to start the process all over again.
- 3000 new pennies is a "tax" of about $30 per person. But unlike every other tax, the government raises no money from it.
- It also costs retailers much more than a penny to handle a penny. Explicit costs are counting out the change. "Hidden costs" include the delays while people fish them out of their pockets in the checkout line, the delay when a cashier runs out of pennies and has to get someone from customer service over to provide a new roll, and dropping them.
In particular, it makes sense for Concord Teacakes to do this because they serve a large rail commuter crowd. People want to get in and out as quickly as possible. Anything which slows down the line, such as counting out pennies in change, inconveniences customers and reduces sales because some people won't risk missing their train to wait in line.
THE GOAL OF CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE
We would like the law changed to allow any retail establishment which agrees to round down cash purchases, to refuse to handle pennies. That's it. It appears that an Act of Congress might not even be needed. It may be that this can be done through Executive Order in which case we are one signature away from our goal. (We are checking this now.)
THE ROLE OF WWW.THINKOOB.COM
Concord Teacakes got the idea to do this from www.Thinkoob.com - the Website for Thinking Out Of the Box. ("America's Marketplace of Ideas") ThinkOOB's Al Lewis proposed the "rounding down" civil disobedience in its posting "Pennies from Hell: How America is Being Crucified on a Cross of Zinc." ThnkOOB also calls for innovative new legislation to do exactly what Teacakes is doing but make it legal: allowing retailers who agree to "round down" to refuse to handle pennies. ThinkOOB has many other original ideas too, mostly in the new field of "stimulus economics," none of which require new government spending and all of which save consumers money.
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