One of the reasons why I changed banks. My new bank has a coin counting machine in the lobby, you throw your coins in, it consumes them, and gives you a slip that you take to the teller.
As I understand it, coins are considered a government service. Banks and retailers pay to deal with them. Buying them from the public for face value actually saves them money.
It's so easy to use coins, pennies included, in day-to-day transactions I never accumulate any. Accumulating pennies or other coins is a concept I don't understand. You can spend up to 4 pennies in any purchase you do, and if you don't can't never receive more than 4. For nickels, dimes, and quarters, the maximum is smaller.
If a person has good basic arithmetic skills and it is a priority for them, then yes they can use coins easily. However, a lot of people either can't do the math or are unwilling to use change correctly.
For myself, it's such a priority that I'll get upset with myself if I have more than 4 pennies.
Japan has more coins (in regular use) than USA, so giving the correct amount is even more important or you'll end up carrying a lot of coins. 1000 yen is the smallest bill so... Example: 999 yen. 500,4x100,50,4x10,5,4x1 yen coins, 19 coins total.
Most of our supermarkets have at least one self service machine that accepts change. Once a week I pour any loose change in then settle the rest with a card.
*You don't think I'd go into combat with loose change in my pocket, do you?"
But I must admit that I never formed the habit of bringing change with me when I go somewhere. So it piled up at home. The quarters were easy: They got saved for parking, laundry, etc. But I ended up with a sack of pennies that I finally cashed in at the bank.
I have like 2 dollars in coins, not even a roll of pennies. I just thought I'd try depositing it while running a different bank errand and they were like "naw, go to coinstar with your poor person money"
It's odd how banks have largely stopped operating change counting machines.
In my childhood we'd hoard loose change then make a trip to the local po-dunk bank serving my neighborhood surrounded by corn fields, and even there they'd take our bucket of loose change and dump it into a counting machine for free.
It was a game to try guess the amount we'd get in paper cash...
Now you have to pay for this service at a grocery store using a cumbersome machine operated by Coinstar.
COVID happened. However, all three of the banks I visit regularly (over branch of a national bank, two branches of a local credit union) all have coin counting machines in the lobby, though it took awhile for them to be added back to the branches that took theirs out.
No doubt COVID kicked skimpflation into high gear, but this was already a pattern I noticed long before 2019.
It seemed to generally coincide with the demise of retail in general, and of course the elimination of bank-teller interactions and emergence of ATM machines. All of these things are a blurry mess from my past...
As I understand it, more than X dollars worth of coins is not legal tender. I learned this due to an absurd case in Detroit, where someone stole bags of coins from an armored car, got caught, and claimed their crime was not a felony because it was below the dollar limit for a felony. Of course the judge treated their request with the disdain that it deserved.
There are multiple laws that could have been broken to make it a felony, but if the only reason it would have been a felony was the dollar amount, I'm actually less inclined to side with the judge.
This is all third-hand, through a game of internet-telephone, and my money (if you'll pardon the pun) is on there being additional factors though
It seems more reasonable than the outright refusal of many businesses to accept cash at all, and plus this transaction isn't even a "debt" to which the penny would be legal tender.
> Many Americans—and many people who, though not American, enjoy watching from a safe distance as predictable fiascoes unfold in this theoretical superpower from week to week—find themselves now pondering one question.
This is way too much spite for an article about coins. Lord.
This rounds physical currency to the nearest $0.05, effectively. Why not round everything to the nearest $0.1? The math and adjustments (changes to every printed price, etc.) would be simpler. How much for the wine? "$19.9". It seems much simpler to me, though I'm sure it's been discussed ...
Is there some item that would be problematic to round to $0.1? I suppose anything that is fractionally priced at ≤$0.05 is now would have a minimum purchase of 2. Items bought in bulk could be priced fractionally.
We already round off fractional pennies all the time, e.g. in securities market prices, tax calculations, gasoline prices, etc. That's not a problem. And any electronic purchase could be for fractional amounts - but why?
(Once upon a time, you probably could sell the idea to IT people by pointing out how much memory and bandwidth it would save.)
Spend like an hour researching the most efficient way to sell six thousand metric tons of zinc for its scrap value, then do so. I don't need a bunch of zinc for anything I want to do and money is a generally-useful thing to have.
At minimum they're useful as makeshift pie weights when blind-baking a pie crust. After shaping the dough in the baking dish, cover it in aluminum foil and then fill it with pennies. They conduct heat well, and prevent the dough from bubbling or shrinking.
Using pennies has long been recommended by reputable cookbooks. Is there really a risk at 375 degrees F? I would think the everyday fumes from an unventilated gas oven are a much more significant problem, and that's fairly common in many parts of the US.
Anyway, I've done it a hundred times, and my brain and lungs still work good-ish?
I've been listening to Marketplace less because of stories like this. The half cent went away, the penny went away, other countries have discontinued currencies. You keep accepting pennies and you round when people pay in cash. At some point, your register will do the rounding for you. There isn't really a story here.
There's a bunch of regulations that need tweaking. AIUI, it's illegal to charge SNAP more than other customers. someone who paid cash and gets rounded down technically pays less than what the government got charged. It's only on the order of pennies, I don't think the law cares about that at all.
Is that a federal law or state law? Whichever jurisdiction it is, surely you'd only need a one-clause amendment to add an exception for rounding cash transactions by up to two cents to account for the discontinuation of pennies... I just can't imagine that taking more than a few weeks to resolve, surely your political systems in the US haven't become that dysfunctional where this couldn't be fixed that quickly?
I don't buy the SNAP argument because there's already rounding when taxes are applied, and half cents are still legal tender, so you could go into a store, tell them they should have charged half a cent less, and then they'd be in a similar trivial violation of SNAP.
Only pennies before 1982 are worth scrapping as they are made of copper.
The newer pennies are not really worth the effort as they are mostly zinc.
Ironically if they are no longer illegal to melt down (IANAL but I would think this is true?) they actually would be more worth it to scrap because of the negated risk.
No law in relation to pennies has changed. The executive branch has simply took the law stating the mint should create as many pennies as necessary, and decided that the necessary amount is 0.
The practicalities of their illegality then comes down to enforcement. Given the current executive branch's behavior related to enforcement of laws, that can mean anything from "melt them all down", to "don't do it", to "if our friends start doing it, it'll be legal, if our enemies start doing it, we'll enforce".
I read this as a joke ($1/lb because 100 pennies weighs about a pound - although online sources make it sound like it's closer to 200 pennies for a pound)
I think however the problem would be the trouble in seperating the zinc from the copper, I think you would likely operate at a loss still but this is just a guess.
The reason the government isn't warning people or slowing the withdrawal is because nobody cares. Any amount of money they can get for recycling is better than the loss now. (though the current admin is known to "chicken out" which probably explains them preparing to spin production back up if they need to)
Trump obsession really got major news outlets trying to outcompete themselves on who could create the most apocalyptic text about... pennies.
I've already seen a lighter version of this level of madness when G. W. Bush was re-elected, but at the time I was quite young and more permeable to the concerted propaganda. This time around is just funny, to say the truth.
It would be really great if the media could at least try to keep up with the appearance of some neutrality, and started publishing some actual news again.
Supposedly it cost gov 4 cents to mint 1. Does it have to be done with zinc tho? Why not plastic or some cheap material? Although you may be able to 3D print a penny at home (just like it being made from zinc can actually stop someone), but just like with a real one, its not like you will show up at your local bank with $1 million dollar worth to deposit.
Zinc is the cheap material though. It replaced copper (except for the foil outer), when copper was too expensive.
If there was a suitable and even less expensive metal, I think it might be reasonable to switch again. But if we have to rebuild coin handling to use a plastic penny, I think it's necessary to consider the costs and benefits of a vastly different material versus the costs and benefits of abandoning pennies.
Even if they were free to mint they're still effectively worthless trash to most of us. I've been waiting for the penny to die for decades, and it would be nice if we had a functioning government that could handle these nonpartisan issues smoothly, but we haven't had anything like that in a long time, so the rip the bandaid off I say
The other option would be to rebase the currency such that a single penny was a meaningful unit of money again. One potential such way would be to issue new paper notes which represent the old note with a decimal place move such that $10 becomes $100. This has been done before but might not be a great idea for the USA.
That would be a nightmare, you're basically bringing in a new currency at that point because now all cash, every bank account and every price in the whole country needs to change. That's going to be probably hundreds of thousands of times more effort and expense than phasing out pennies!
Several points: firstly i would assume every country has a process for disposing of bad and worn out notes and coins. If not i'm sure someone could work out how to profit from recycling dead pennies in true capitalist fashion. This leads on to my second point which is when the government has time they should get around to issuing a bill removing pennies (and maybe other smaller denominations) from legal tender.
But there is a wider point which i want to discuss. How long will physical cash last? I'm very fuzzy on this but i think in some of the Asian countries it is practically an endangered species. Tax people don't like large denomination notes. And virtually no legal big transactions take place in cash. America must profit massively from the fact that in many other countries dollars are the go to black market currency but that is a very singular advantage.
This is all a bit hyperbolic. Stopping minting pennies made sense and has precedent. There used to be half penny coins.
Also, pennies are still legal tender. Folks can take them to a bank or other venue and cash them in. They’re not “trash.”
> Folks can take them to a bank
FWIW my bank refuses to accept unrolled coins, long before this month's retirement of the penny.
One of the reasons why I changed banks. My new bank has a coin counting machine in the lobby, you throw your coins in, it consumes them, and gives you a slip that you take to the teller.
As I understand it, coins are considered a government service. Banks and retailers pay to deal with them. Buying them from the public for face value actually saves them money.
It's so easy to use coins, pennies included, in day-to-day transactions I never accumulate any. Accumulating pennies or other coins is a concept I don't understand. You can spend up to 4 pennies in any purchase you do, and if you don't can't never receive more than 4. For nickels, dimes, and quarters, the maximum is smaller.
If a person has good basic arithmetic skills and it is a priority for them, then yes they can use coins easily. However, a lot of people either can't do the math or are unwilling to use change correctly.
For myself, it's such a priority that I'll get upset with myself if I have more than 4 pennies.
Japan has more coins (in regular use) than USA, so giving the correct amount is even more important or you'll end up carrying a lot of coins. 1000 yen is the smallest bill so... Example: 999 yen. 500,4x100,50,4x10,5,4x1 yen coins, 19 coins total.
Most of our supermarkets have at least one self service machine that accepts change. Once a week I pour any loose change in then settle the rest with a card.
Obligatory Dr. Strangelove reference:
*You don't think I'd go into combat with loose change in my pocket, do you?"
But I must admit that I never formed the habit of bringing change with me when I go somewhere. So it piled up at home. The quarters were easy: They got saved for parking, laundry, etc. But I ended up with a sack of pennies that I finally cashed in at the bank.
A lot of banks just have one of those coin counting machine things (like Coinstar but not Coinstar).
Coinstar also often has zero commission options like gift cards that are an easy way to cash in extra change without paying fees.
So roll them?
I have like 2 dollars in coins, not even a roll of pennies. I just thought I'd try depositing it while running a different bank errand and they were like "naw, go to coinstar with your poor person money"
It's odd how banks have largely stopped operating change counting machines.
In my childhood we'd hoard loose change then make a trip to the local po-dunk bank serving my neighborhood surrounded by corn fields, and even there they'd take our bucket of loose change and dump it into a counting machine for free.
It was a game to try guess the amount we'd get in paper cash...
Now you have to pay for this service at a grocery store using a cumbersome machine operated by Coinstar.
COVID happened. However, all three of the banks I visit regularly (over branch of a national bank, two branches of a local credit union) all have coin counting machines in the lobby, though it took awhile for them to be added back to the branches that took theirs out.
No doubt COVID kicked skimpflation into high gear, but this was already a pattern I noticed long before 2019.
It seemed to generally coincide with the demise of retail in general, and of course the elimination of bank-teller interactions and emergence of ATM machines. All of these things are a blurry mess from my past...
Is that legal?
As I understand it, more than X dollars worth of coins is not legal tender. I learned this due to an absurd case in Detroit, where someone stole bags of coins from an armored car, got caught, and claimed their crime was not a felony because it was below the dollar limit for a felony. Of course the judge treated their request with the disdain that it deserved.
There are multiple laws that could have been broken to make it a felony, but if the only reason it would have been a felony was the dollar amount, I'm actually less inclined to side with the judge.
This is all third-hand, through a game of internet-telephone, and my money (if you'll pardon the pun) is on there being additional factors though
It seems more reasonable than the outright refusal of many businesses to accept cash at all, and plus this transaction isn't even a "debt" to which the penny would be legal tender.
I think when the half penny was discontinued it had the same buying power as the dime does now or something like that.
So this is long overdue.
*precedent
Thanks and fixed. Darn autocorrect.
> Many Americans—and many people who, though not American, enjoy watching from a safe distance as predictable fiascoes unfold in this theoretical superpower from week to week—find themselves now pondering one question.
This is way too much spite for an article about coins. Lord.
This rounds physical currency to the nearest $0.05, effectively. Why not round everything to the nearest $0.1? The math and adjustments (changes to every printed price, etc.) would be simpler. How much for the wine? "$19.9". It seems much simpler to me, though I'm sure it's been discussed ...
Is there some item that would be problematic to round to $0.1? I suppose anything that is fractionally priced at ≤$0.05 is now would have a minimum purchase of 2. Items bought in bulk could be priced fractionally.
We already round off fractional pennies all the time, e.g. in securities market prices, tax calculations, gasoline prices, etc. That's not a problem. And any electronic purchase could be for fractional amounts - but why?
(Once upon a time, you probably could sell the idea to IT people by pointing out how much memory and bandwidth it would save.)
Ask {some number of} engineers: You have just been made a free gift of six thousand metric tons of zinc. What do you do with it?
Spend like an hour researching the most efficient way to sell six thousand metric tons of zinc for its scrap value, then do so. I don't need a bunch of zinc for anything I want to do and money is a generally-useful thing to have.
At minimum they're useful as makeshift pie weights when blind-baking a pie crust. After shaping the dough in the baking dish, cover it in aluminum foil and then fill it with pennies. They conduct heat well, and prevent the dough from bubbling or shrinking.
Oh my goodness please no one take this seriously. Heating pennies will result in harmful zinc off-gassing. You do not want to breathe this in.
Use dry beans for blind-baking. They are almost infinitely reusable with no harmful effects.
Using pennies has long been recommended by reputable cookbooks. Is there really a risk at 375 degrees F? I would think the everyday fumes from an unventilated gas oven are a much more significant problem, and that's fairly common in many parts of the US.
Anyway, I've done it a hundred times, and my brain and lungs still work good-ish?
According to Marketplace.org, pennies are treasure for some businesses now because the regional Feds aren't distributing them.
https://www.marketplace.org/story/2025/11/13/businesses-face...
I've been listening to Marketplace less because of stories like this. The half cent went away, the penny went away, other countries have discontinued currencies. You keep accepting pennies and you round when people pay in cash. At some point, your register will do the rounding for you. There isn't really a story here.
The register might already do the rounding if it was designed to work in Canada, which got rid of the penny over a decade ago.
There's a bunch of regulations that need tweaking. AIUI, it's illegal to charge SNAP more than other customers. someone who paid cash and gets rounded down technically pays less than what the government got charged. It's only on the order of pennies, I don't think the law cares about that at all.
Is that a federal law or state law? Whichever jurisdiction it is, surely you'd only need a one-clause amendment to add an exception for rounding cash transactions by up to two cents to account for the discontinuation of pennies... I just can't imagine that taking more than a few weeks to resolve, surely your political systems in the US haven't become that dysfunctional where this couldn't be fixed that quickly?
> surely your political systems in the US haven't become that dysfunctional where this couldn't be fixed that quickly?
In America this can be done - by 2028 or thereabouts :)
I don't buy the SNAP argument because there's already rounding when taxes are applied, and half cents are still legal tender, so you could go into a store, tell them they should have charged half a cent less, and then they'd be in a similar trivial violation of SNAP.
You can make really cool flooring with lots of pennies in grids.
If the cooper is worth more than the coin, would melting them down be profitable?
In Australia we got rid of our 1c and 2c coins more than 20 years ago.
https://archive.is/uel4S
Do you not just shred them and send them to a scrap metal processor?
Only pennies before 1982 are worth scrapping as they are made of copper.
The newer pennies are not really worth the effort as they are mostly zinc.
Ironically if they are no longer illegal to melt down (IANAL but I would think this is true?) they actually would be more worth it to scrap because of the negated risk.
No law in relation to pennies has changed. The executive branch has simply took the law stating the mint should create as many pennies as necessary, and decided that the necessary amount is 0.
The practicalities of their illegality then comes down to enforcement. Given the current executive branch's behavior related to enforcement of laws, that can mean anything from "melt them all down", to "don't do it", to "if our friends start doing it, it'll be legal, if our enemies start doing it, we'll enforce".
> The newer pennies are not really worth the effort as they are mostly zinc.
They're still worth $1 per lb., and you have to destroy them, anyway.
It's their mix with copper I beleive that makes them less valuable than their raw value in zinc if thats what your number is based on...
because the cost of seperation from the copper is greater than simply sourcing other materials.
I read this as a joke ($1/lb because 100 pennies weighs about a pound - although online sources make it sound like it's closer to 200 pennies for a pound)
We can turn them into suntan lotion!
hahah ok actually I love that.
I think however the problem would be the trouble in seperating the zinc from the copper, I think you would likely operate at a loss still but this is just a guess.
It's called Coppertone for a reason
100 fuses for $1, awesome! ;-)
Related:
The last-ever penny will be minted today in Philadelphia
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45901904
The reason the government isn't warning people or slowing the withdrawal is because nobody cares. Any amount of money they can get for recycling is better than the loss now. (though the current admin is known to "chicken out" which probably explains them preparing to spin production back up if they need to)
The value of my wheat pennies and war pennies just went up
Trump obsession really got major news outlets trying to outcompete themselves on who could create the most apocalyptic text about... pennies.
I've already seen a lighter version of this level of madness when G. W. Bush was re-elected, but at the time I was quite young and more permeable to the concerted propaganda. This time around is just funny, to say the truth.
It would be really great if the media could at least try to keep up with the appearance of some neutrality, and started publishing some actual news again.
Supposedly it cost gov 4 cents to mint 1. Does it have to be done with zinc tho? Why not plastic or some cheap material? Although you may be able to 3D print a penny at home (just like it being made from zinc can actually stop someone), but just like with a real one, its not like you will show up at your local bank with $1 million dollar worth to deposit.
Zinc is the cheap material though. It replaced copper (except for the foil outer), when copper was too expensive.
If there was a suitable and even less expensive metal, I think it might be reasonable to switch again. But if we have to rebuild coin handling to use a plastic penny, I think it's necessary to consider the costs and benefits of a vastly different material versus the costs and benefits of abandoning pennies.
Even if they were free to mint they're still effectively worthless trash to most of us. I've been waiting for the penny to die for decades, and it would be nice if we had a functioning government that could handle these nonpartisan issues smoothly, but we haven't had anything like that in a long time, so the rip the bandaid off I say
The other option would be to rebase the currency such that a single penny was a meaningful unit of money again. One potential such way would be to issue new paper notes which represent the old note with a decimal place move such that $10 becomes $100. This has been done before but might not be a great idea for the USA.
That would be a nightmare, you're basically bringing in a new currency at that point because now all cash, every bank account and every price in the whole country needs to change. That's going to be probably hundreds of thousands of times more effort and expense than phasing out pennies!
Wouldn’t the decimal place have to move in the other direction for the penny to become useful again?
Several points: firstly i would assume every country has a process for disposing of bad and worn out notes and coins. If not i'm sure someone could work out how to profit from recycling dead pennies in true capitalist fashion. This leads on to my second point which is when the government has time they should get around to issuing a bill removing pennies (and maybe other smaller denominations) from legal tender.
But there is a wider point which i want to discuss. How long will physical cash last? I'm very fuzzy on this but i think in some of the Asian countries it is practically an endangered species. Tax people don't like large denomination notes. And virtually no legal big transactions take place in cash. America must profit massively from the fact that in many other countries dollars are the go to black market currency but that is a very singular advantage.
Per the U.S. Mint, the life span of a coin is 30 years:
For paper money, depending on denomination, 5.7 to 24 years. (https://www.federalreserve.gov/faqs/how-long-is-the-life-spa...)