By NATHAN MORLE
We're all familiar with the old adage, 'a penny saved is a penny earned.' Some BYU students take the saying to heart while others, in spite of a recent national penny shortage, feel 'a penny saved is a nuisance in my pocket.'
'When I come home at night I empty my pockets. I put the silver change in a jar, and the pennies in the garbage. Pennies are too hard to redeem. I would rather smash them on a railroad track than have them around as an eye sore,' said Tyson Creer, a senior from Richland, Wash. majoring in business (of all things).
Creer estimates that in the last year, he has thrown away 40 or 50 dollars worth of pennies.
For Tiffany Hollist, a junior from Ann Arbor, Mich., majoring in statistics, the penny issue promotes a different response.
'After hearing Sally Strothers say, 'lives can be saved for only pennies a day,' I feel terribly guilty if I throw a penny away. I save them in my elephant bank,' she said.
If a penny is ugly or corroded, however, Tiffany, who is attracted to new, shiny pennies, does not hesitate to throw a penny away.
Newly married Shawn King, a junior public relations major from Caldwell, Idaho, used to be a penny tosser until his thrifty wife convinced him to save.
'If my wife's not around, I will walk right by a penny on the street. If Shauna is with me, though, I'll pick it up. I like to have exact change,' King said.
'It's a luck thing,' Shauna King said.
Brent Crandall, a junior double-majoring in economics and Chinese from San Jose, Calif., will not pick up a penny on the street.
'The monetary value is not worth the strain on my back to bend over and pick up a penny,' Crandall said.
Even so, Crandall and his wife Amy are penny savers. He explains: 'my wife is a server and gets lots of pennies, so we put them in rolls and deposit them.'
Robert Crawford, associate professor of economics in the MBA program at the Marriott School of Management, feels penny-saving is the most economically sound decision.
'I pick up pennies myself and put them in a dish on my tie rack,' Crawford said.
The monetary value of the penny has declined over the past several years.
Crawford said, 'When the metallic value of the penny exceeds the monetary value, pennies will disappear. I think pricing will eventually be done in increments of $.05 and pennies will be done away with.'
Maybe we should value that corroded penny we see on the sidewalk a little more. After all, pennies may not be around forever.