Why Produce Centavos?

Or perhaps more appropriately called "sentimo(s)" now? (Is this related to the Filipino vs Pilipino or standardizing the Filipino language thing? Don't know but seems the proper term is sentimo now.)
Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas - BSP Notes and Coins - Coins in Circulation

Is there a benefit to having 1, 5 and 10 centavo coins? I would think the cost of making and transporting them would outweigh any economical benefits they produce. In 2014 it cost the US Mint 2.4 cents to make 1 penny. I wouldn't think the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas wouldn't have as efficient technology/techniques/machinery/skilled workers as the US Mint does. Leading me to believe it would cost the Philippines much more than 1 centavos to produce a 1 centavos coin.

To put the value of these coins in perspective: a 1 centavo coin is barely worth the time it would take to pick it up off the ground.....even at Philippine day wages:

• If you make P200 a day, then you make about 1 centavos every four seconds. The time spent finding and pulling them out of the cash register doesn't even cover the wages of the employee.
• If you are a foreigner with a pension around $2k USD you are making almost 4 centavos every second.......by doing nothing. So would a 10 centavos coin that takes 2-3 seconds to pick up (or maybe even a 1 peso coin for some of you older guys that might take some extra time bending over) be worth the time it took to pick it up for you?

The time it takes to pull some of these coins out of your pocket and find it among the other coins is worth more than the coin itself.

It seems that the only purpose the coins really serve is to allow large corporations/gas stations to "earn" a bit of extra profit and to make their products look cheaper than they actually are: an item that is 999.99 pesos is really 1,000 pesos as the cashiers rarely has any 1 centavos coins to give out as change. Same thing applies to gas stations: they round out the change....usually in their favor). Though any extra profit they made on the coins is quickly lost by simply transporting them to a bank. Unless my math is way off here, it seems these things do nothing but cost the Philippines money. (Of course it is very possible my math is completely crap and all this is total nonsense.)

Maybe corruption and/or lies has something to do with why they still exist? Which is a big reason the US still produces pennies:

(Side comment: The difference between bribery and lobbying is purely semantics: with bribery you paid a politician to listen to your sales pitch and expect the money to influence them. With lobbying you claim not to expect anything in return for the money....you're just paying a politician to hear your sales pitch. But any fool could figure out that if you don't vote the way a person/corporation paid you to vote that money will very likely not be there the next time around....lobbying most definitely is quid pro quo and most people can see that it is a form of corruption.)

US and Philippines politics might not compare but it certainly raises the question of who is winning the contract to supply the raw material and if any politicians might be profiting from making these worthless, and largely unused, coins. My 2 cents. (pun intended )

 

I've never been in possession of enough of them at one time to buy anything only those coins. I'm sure the cashier wouldn't be too thrilled about counting all of it.

 

Melting them down would only be worth it if the coins were donated and you had a whole lot of them (several kilograms worth). The labor, energy need to melt and remove impurities from the coins and transportation to a buyer would make it a net loss. If you had enough coins to come up with a significant amount of metal to sell you would be better off lugging them to a bank to trade in for pesos.

 

Concerning smugglers:
I think the public is telling them everything they need to know. The coins are completely worthless and/or too big of a hassle to carry around in their pockets.

Hint: If the coins are only useful to smugglers who can get the coins out of country in quantities that fill up shipping containers to have them melted down (and the public refuses to use them) then you might be producing a coin that you don't need to produce.

Hopefully one of those "angles" is convincing lawmakers how much the they are wasting on having them produced.