BRIDGETOWN, Barbados — Had I begun collecting cent coins when first the idea occurred to me, I would have had considerably more financial resources than the current paucity; but there are some ideas which, though easy to conceive, are very difficult to execute.

The thought of collecting coins to gain value through volume (as distinct from persons who collect specialised and rare coins as a hobby, and, sometimes, as good investment) first came more than 20 years ago as I stood on Fifth Avenue in New York’s plush shopping area and witnessed a young woman, who had just emerged from a store onto the sidewalk, and was standing there plucking cent coins from among the ‘change’ in her open hand, and dropping them.

“Why are you doing that?” I asked, thinking that it might have some significance in American superstition, and she replied: “I don’t want these pennies.” None of the other pedestrians took any notice, but it was to me such a strange sight, which I had never witnessed anywhere previously.

The Americans, as is their wont in trying lamely to remake the English language, call cent coins ‘pennies’, although on the reverse side of the coin, it is clearly stated ‘one cent’.

Some people, in cricket mostly, refer to that side of a coin as the ‘tail’ as opposed to the head (in the case of the US coin, Abraham Lincoln’s profile) on the obverse side, so that when a coin is ‘tossed’ upwards, the captain with the prerogative of ‘calling’ would say either ‘head’ or ‘tail’ (in my cricketing days, we said ‘heads’ or ‘tails’), in trying to anticipate which side would be up when the coin settles on the ground.

The English have their oddities, too; although, on reconsideration, I really should not generalise and say ‘the English’, for the type of occurrences to which I will now draw attention are almost always with those immigrants who seem increasingly to control the small businesses on London’s high streets, e.g., the general store-cum-newspaper agency, etc.

While visiting London, I tendered some ‘change’ in purchasing a newspaper, and the vendor said: “Sorry, sir, you’re one pence short…” And, teasingly, I replied: “I can’t be one pence short, because pence is plural… you mean I’m one penny short.” But he did not seem to understand, as don’t many others who speak of ‘one pence’ and suchlike.

But, back to New York. In the years since the Fifth Avenue experience, such coin discard seems to have grown into a fad. I see coins lying around in Miami and New York; and Boston appears to be awash with them. Nickels and dimes, too, are coming into play, and, infrequently, also quarters.

As with other incomprehensible American fads and quirks, fashion or speech, this coin-discard craze has crossed the Atlantic to the Caribbean islands, certainly Barbados.

Recently, just off the entrance to Jordan’s Supermarket on Queen’s Street, Speightstown, in the parish of St. Peter, I saw the identical scene being repeated by an overweight upper-teen with a flamboyant, and clearly expensive hairdo, and wearing U.S. designer gear. I have seen it, too, outside the town’s other major food vendor, Eddie’s Supermarket, in and outside Fisherman’s Pub and Restaurant, and in the areas of the stalls of roadside fruit and food vendors.

Some conductors on minibuses plying the west coast highway, I understand, separate out cent coins and throw them through the windows when en route. And on the publicly-owned Transport Board buses, it is clearly stated that passengers’ $1.50 fare should not include more than five-cent coins.

Anyone who frequents Bridgetown, the Barbados capital city in the south-west; Oistins, a bustling and rapidly-expanding fishing centre in the south-east; Holetown, in the west coast parish of St. James, where English settlers first landed in 1627; and Speightstown, might attest how frequently they notice cent coins on the ground or sidewalk, and pass them by.

It seems that nobody, just nobody, picks them up. Maybe some people do, surreptitiously, though I have never witnessed anyone so doing. Even those vagrants who beg, who occasionally pollute the environment with body waste, and often pester tourists for handouts, seem to have no need of the cent coins. The least they would ask a target for is a dollar (the equivalent of 50 US cents… ooops! pennies).

This issue of collecting, or more aptly scavenging, coins off the street is not so much a question of mode; rather, it is one of mind. Just the thought of people seeing you bending to pick up a cent from the public thoroughfare…. Come on! Not in Barbados, which boasts of itself as the world’s leading developing nation, and which may very well find ready support in the statistics compiled by the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (World Bank), the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the United Nations Human Development Index.

As said, an abhorrence to collecting cent coins off the streets is psychological, not a matter of mode, for there were various examples of mode which I could have utilised, some dating back to my teenage years when vagrants on the streets of Georgetown were especially ingenious in their methods of collecting scraps of food, cigarette butts, and coins (the latter a rarity then) from refuse bins and wherever else they might find them along the roadway.

One artful fellow walked around with a slim bamboo rod about a meter-and-a-half long (around five feet), from the bottom end of which protruded a stiff piece of wire, sharpened to needle point. Any cigarette butt he saw he would deftly impale with a swordsman-like manoeuver, then slide it off the wire into a bag hung across his shoulder.

Those were the days of ‘Lighthouse’ and ‘Clipper’ cigarettes in Guyana (then British Guiana) before such commodities were embellished with filter tips, so that discarded butts tended to be longer (at times, depending on the smoker, a quarter of the cigarette’s length: Cigarette-smoking was a social habit and status symbol, and any upper or middle-classer who dared smoke down too low, risked the embarrassment of cohorts’ jibes for having heat-discoloured middle and index finger tips).

At day’s end, the seeker of discarded butts would roll cigarettes with the accumulated tobacco for his own use, and also to sell to or trade with other vagrants who had none.

Another one had an equally long stick, but rather than wire, had a piece of tree gum at its end for retrieving cigarette butts and other small objects. Just a tender touch and they stuck.

A third had an empty ‘Milk Maid’ milk container attached to a stick for scooping up whatever caught his fancy.

And a fourth devised a long wooden tweezer-like implement with two flattened ends, between which he grabbed and secured objects.

Those among these perennial roadside dwellers who were lacking in style were content with picking up everything they wished from the streets with their ‘bare’ hands.

Coins in circulation then, which would have been lying on the street only if the owner had accidentally dropped them, were: One cent (half-penny or haip’nee); two cents (penny or big- jill); six cents (three-pence/troppunce or three-jill); eight cents (four-penny, four punce or bit); 12 cents (six-penny/six-punce, or bit-and-a-half/bit-na-haf); 24 cents (shilling or 12-pence/12-punce); 48 cents (two-shillings); 60 cents (half-crown); 120 cents (crown).

Given a choice, I think the gum implement would be the most effective for retrieving today’s cent coins and other small discards.

It is remarkable the lowly status now accorded the cent coin, which in times past, in some jurisdictions, had much greater value and pride of place in commercial and financial transactions.

Why people should want to embrace the new ‘culture’ of treating the one cent coin as of having little or no value is beyond me. It is only rarely in Barbados that a purchaser would tender 99 cents for a good worth a dollar, and be told by the vendor: “Don’t worry with the cent.” Almost always, the purchaser would have to find that cent.

And merchants appreciate the magical value of a cent, as demonstrated by their pricing techniques: Goods advertised at $2.99, $3.99, $4.99, $9.99, and so on and so forth, will sell much more rapidly than had those prices carried the additional cent to ‘round-off’ the figure.

There are numerous other examples in the marketplace — and this refers to not only the public market but all places where financial transactions are undertaken — where vendors are inflexible, and the one cent still has value.

One of the most glaring examples of the power of a cent came to the attention of the Barbados media in 2006, from the USA itself, where a utility client had her home service disconnected because there was an outstanding arrear of one cent on her bill. She had to bear the time/money cost of journeying to the utility company, pay the cent to ensure service reconnection, and bear the time/money cost of returning to her home.

That is a way-out example of the value of a cent; and to those who might wonder why could not the utility company have applied the cent to the customer’s next bill, that thought had struck me, too, but my immediate presumption was that with computers virtually in control of billing and other technological systems at utilities, discretion is a human virtue, but not a computer option: A thousand-dollar arrear and a one-cent arrear will likely trigger the same automated treatment — disconnection.

But let’s for a moment forget the value (proven) of one cent, and look at the cost of producing these small coins.

The Central Bank of Barbados, the competent authority for the acquisition, custody, control and issue of monetary notes and coins on the island of about 275,000 population, must react with some dismay at the volume of one-cent coins that disappear from the system following every new issue. The Bank must certainly be nearing the point of seriously considering whether use of the coin should not be discontinued.

Frankly, I do not think that it will be. What I expect is that the Central Bank will have to redesign and produce something much like the cent coin of the East Caribbean Central Bank (ECCB), which came into circulation in 2002, made of aluminium alloy, weighs 1.03 grams (about one-third the weigh of the Barbados cent — so light (maybe too light) that it is easy to forget there is something in one’s hand.

The Barbados cent has been part of national coinage since first issued in 1973 on establishment of the Bank as a national institution, in preference to the Eastern Caribbean Currency Authority (ECCA) whose jurisdiction, services and currencies Barbados had shared with countries now grouped within the Organisation of Eastern Caribbean States (OECS).

The Barbados currency notes ($5, $10, $20, $50, $100) have printed on them the name of the manufacturer, the famous English firm, de la Rue & Company, PLC, which was begun as a small printery in 1813, and has expanded and diversified into an international conglomerate, also doing considerable business in printing currency and postage stamps for the English-speaking CARICOM countries. The maker of the Barbados coins is not immediately evident on the product, but is known to be, from the start in 1973, the Royal Canadian Mint.

Although there is rapidly increasing use of personal cheques, credit cards and other types of technologised plastic, some people still prefer to pay wages/salaries and conduct other transactions in hard cash, and that being so, the authorities may have to consider the introduction of a denomination much higher than the $100 note, perhaps a $500 note, on which they might suitably imprint the likeness of the island’s first female governor-general, the late Dame Nita Barrow, as all of the other currency notes have male visages. To do so would also place Barbados several rungs higher on ‘history’s page’ as the only country with a brother and sister on its national currency.

Some sources here estimate that almost 230 million of the cent coins have been issued between then and now, though there was uncertainty as to the total cost to the Bank. The coin’s size is 19 millimeters, its weight 3.1 grams, and its true worth is supposed to be the value of its weight in bronze; though it is questionable whether, with the international metals markets being as buoyant as they have become recently, the cent is still worth the metal of which it is made, or justifies to the Bank the cost of its minting.

New one-cent coins have had to be issued every year since 1973, reaching the phenomenal level of 14.6 million coins minted and supplied in 1980 alone. Of the likely 230 million coins issued in the past 36 years, it would be an absolute guess to try to estimate how many are currently in circulation.

So, where have all the tossed-out cent coins been going? Probably slowly rusting and restoring some of their mineral properties back to the soil of Barbados. A few people here, as do an increasing number of people in the U.S. (especially migrants), store coins in large bulbous bottles and other convenient containers at home, and periodically take them to the counting machines at banks. They store their own small coins, rather than join the tossers, but would not deign to pick coins off the streets.

On the other hand, minting for Barbados of its red-brass five-cent coin and the cupro-nickel 10-cent coin seems seldom to have exceeded the four million volume in any one year, and on occasion, four years have elapsed between orders of new such coins by the Central Bank. Both of these coins, as well as the fairly weighty 25-cent and one-dollar coins will, like the one-cent coin, have to be seriously re-evaluated, perhaps redesigned, and produced from much cheaper alloys to arrest the burgeoning imbalance between their manufacturing cost and their market value.

If it is that the people of Barbados now think that having to deal with cent coins has become too much of a bother in the conduct of their business and that its use should be abolished, the Government should bring some finality on the matter by adding a relevant section on that issue to a referendum (which it had solemnly promised for 2006} on whether the country should change its constitutional personality to republicanism, with a Barbadian as President, rather than the present monarchical system under which the Queen of England is the Head of State.

If Barbados acts for change and the cent coin is abolished, the people must know that the immediate upshot will likely be an upsurge in prices, for rapacious businessmen will not miss the opportunity to adjust prices upwards for convenient calculation in multiples of five, so that anything worth between six and nine cents will very likely be adjusted to 10; between 11 and 14 adjusted to 15 cents; and between 16 and 19 adjusted to 20 cents; and so on and so forth.

But if the Central Bank/Government decides not to take action and things are to remain as they are, those who wish to recoup on opportunities lost over the years can resort to using a gum-ended stick with compelling financial effect… or any of the many types of plastic gloves so widely available for a pittance.