Get rid of pennies please! (and any coin worth less than 0.10 USD/GBP/EUR)

Greg Mankiw mentions a USA Today article by Don Campbell that explains why keeping pennies (US$ 0.01) in circulation is not worthwhile:

• The cost of producing the one penny is greater than $0.01. Making 1 cent costs 1.26 cents.
• Handling pennies makes each cash transaction slower (2.5 seconds). And time is money of course.

The same argument applies also for pound sterling pennies and eurocents.

I find the existance of eurocents particularly irritating. $0.01 and £0.01 coins have always been around for a long time and it’s certainly difficlut to remove them from circulation because people are so used to them.

I can’t think of a sane reason for introducing the €0.01 coin in 2002. Finland and the Netherlands showed to be more sane than the other contries and do not produce €0.01 and €0.02 coins, although they are oblged to accept coins brought in from other countries.