I have always heard it in movies but they move on too fast for me to process it.
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These explanations are terrible. “Pennies on the dollar” means that, percentage wise, someone is getting a very low percent value (since the value of a single penny is 1% of a dollar).
For instance, if your boss is paying you pennies on the dollar, your boss is paying you a very low percent of the money you’re making him and keeping the rest.
Usually when someone says this what they mean is that someone needed to sell something for a lot less than they thought they would.
More specifically, let’s say you bought something for $1, let’s pretend it’s a wheel barrow for your landscaping business. Your intention as a business is to use this $1 item to make $5 doing landscaping.
Now Let’s say your landscaping business did poorly and you needed to sell off all the things you bought. You sell the wheelbarrow for 10c. You sold that wheelbarrow for 10c per dollar you spent. “Pennies on the dollar”
Has everyone completely forgotten about Google? I feel like a lot of the posts on this sub are just silly. Why wouldn’t you just use the tried and true search engine? Is it some sort of attention-seeking thing?
This is the answer when your question was copy/pasted into Google.
“Pennies on the dollar” is a term often heard in money talks. It’s used to describe **a situation where you’re getting something for significantly less than its original price**. Suppose you find a brand-new bicycle that usually costs $100, but you snag it for $10. You just got a deal for pennies on the dollar!”
Basically a dumb way to say “fraction”. $1 being the denominator and cents being the numerator. “Pennies on the dollar” = sell it to you for a “fraction of the price”
I have a question.. is this a serious question? Like, the definition is literally in the statement
It’s a figure of speech that is better said as “you’ll pay a small percentage of the actual cost”. Being that 1 USD consists of 100 pennies, mathematically it’s easier to make that as an analogy for percentages.
It’s a phrase often used when referring to bankruptcies. Unsecured debt is often settled for “pennies on the dollar,” so if you had $10k in credit card debt the credit card company might only get paid $600. Pennies on the dollar.
“for a small ratio of the stated value”
Totally guessing here, but I think it probably started in the UK as “pennies on the pound”. In the US, we would say 1/4 as “one over four”; in the UK they would say “one on four”. So it would literally mean £(.01 + .01) / £1.
Am I the only one that finds it hilarious this needs to be explained?
Interesting to hear the other opinions, I’ve always heard it used to describe when you are doing work that generates your boss “a dollar” worth of value, but you are only earning a penny of it.
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