12 Things We’ll Be Saying Goodbye To Soon

10. Ethanol-based Flex Fuel

You may have seen E85 fuel at the pump—it’s the one with the yellow nozzle. Perhaps you’ve been tempted by a price per gallon that’s lower, sometimes much lower, than unleaded. Maybe you’ve even bought some if you owned one of the millions of cars in North America capable of running on “flex fuel.”

E85, a blend of mostly ethanol (a type of alcohol) with a just a splash of gasoline, is one of a number of efforts by farmers (and the federal government, among others) to get you burning more corn in your car. (Oil companies are opposed—it’s one of those classic Washington battles).

Here’s the hitch: Running your car on E85 usually means a 15% to 30% mileage penalty, since ethanol produces less energy than petroleum gasoline. If the price discount isn’t bigger than the loss of fuel mileage, you’re probably spending more. The plummeting price of petroleum is making it harder and harder to find a discount that makes economic sense.

So why does E85 continue to sell? Enough folks like the up-front discount but aren’t doing the math. The National Association of Convenience Stores dug deep into the prospects for E85 in a study last year. Among their conclusions: “Consumers are focused on the absolute price differential, not the percent change, and that price discount need not be equal to the energy differential.”

Or, as one analyst of the renewable fuels market gently put it, “The consumer is a strange animal.”

11. The Penny

A penny for your thoughts isn’t much of a bargain these days. Not only is a pennyworth less than ever thanks to inflation, but the cost of minting each Lincoln has been more than its face value for almost a decade.

Canada, Australia, New Zealand and other countries have deep-sixed their smallest coin, but the U.S. penny endures, as the U.S. Mint continues to churn out millions per year to replace the coins vanishing into change jars, vacuum cleaner bags, and your car’s floorboards.

Noted economists and the editorial pages of major national newspapers and journals continue to call for the penny’s retirement. But it has been years since anyone in Congress made a bid to kill the penny. One reason: While penny opponents are a diverse bunch, one group that’s deeply interested in its continuance is the zinc industry (a penny is actually 97.5% zinc and only 2.5% copper). And yes, Washington has a penny lobby, in the form of Americans for Common Cents (which is largely funded by zinc manufacturers).

But it’s not just lobbyists. As an article in the Harvard Political Review put it, Americans’ “general apathy and resistance to change” is also keeping the penny around.

12. The Paper Check

We now have credit cards, debit cards, prepaid cards, PayPal, ApplePay, Venmo, Bitcoin and who knows what else. But the woman ahead of you in the grocery store checkout line just pulled out her checkbook!

Electronic means have displaced checks as the primary alternative to cash, particularly among businesses paying consumers (automatic deposit for paychecks, for example.) But Americans cling to their checkbooks, more than in other developed nations.

Just as there are early adopters of new ways to pay, there are resisters. For businesses, the ability to delay payment for a day or two while the check is in the mail is an opportunity to make money on the interest—the “float.”

And for consumers? “Old habits die hard,” says Gareth Lodge, a senior analyst with Celent, a research consultancy. Plus, he notes, “some of the alternatives aren’t really alternatives. Can you imagine your grandmother using PayPal? Can you use Venmo to pay your utility provider? Can you use Bitcoins at Walgreens? All of them will take checks.”

Credits: Kiplinger

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