A Thought for Your Pennies – Watts Up With That?

News Brief by Kip Hansen —  11 February 2025 – 550 words

LOST:  Maybe as many as 250 billion pennies.  That’s a lot of pennies.

♫ Where have all the pennies gone?  Long time passing? ♬ [apologies to Pete Seeger]

The most likely locations are:  1) Wishing wells all over the world. 2) Public fountains.  3) In the slots found on penny loafers  and, coming in as most likely,   4) The coin jar on your bedroom dresser and millions of other similar coin jars and piggy banks.

I admit — mea culpa —  I have a coin jar into which any coin smaller than quarter (25¢) ends up in the coin jar – including all those nearly worthless pennies. 

The New York Times, last year, published a long piece in The New York Times Magazine:  “America Must Free Itself from the Tyranny of the Penny”.   A very interesting read, by the way.

Yesterday, the Times had this: “Trump Orders Treasury Secretary to Stop Minting Pennies”.

“On Sunday night, Mr. Trump said he had ordered the Treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, to stop producing new pennies, a move that he said would help reduce unnecessary government spending.

“Let’s rip the waste out of our great nations budget, even if it’s a penny at a time,” he said in a post on Truth Social, adding that pennies “literally cost us more than 2 cents.”

Actually, pennies currently are thought to cost 3.69 cents each, to be minted and distributed.

“Last year, the Mint issued over three billion pennies, according to its annual report, at a loss of about $85.3 million.” [ source ]

And it is about time:

“Countries around the world have eliminated their smallest-denomination coins in recent decades.

“In 2012, Canada stopped producing pennies, describing them as essentially a waste of time and space and arguing that the move would save millions of dollars a year. Since then, cash transactions have been rounded to the nearest nickel, after federal and provincial sales taxes are added.Australia withdrew its one- and two-cent coins from circulation in 1992, citing inflation and production costs. Even earlier, countries like Sweden and New Zealand stopped minting their one-cent coins.

In Australia, the elimination of those coins “hasn’t mattered at all,” said Andrew Stoeckel, an honorary professor at the Australian National University’s Centre for Applied Macroeconomic Analysis.”  [ source ]

People who code programs for modern cash registers and all the downstream (upstream?) accounting programs will be busy for a while as the penny falls out of use, as in other countries, and are simply rounded out of existence. 

Rounded out of existence….what a way to go.

R.I.P. Penny, I for one won’t miss you.

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Author’s Comment:

I always kept myself supplied with pre-signed hall passes which allowed me to spend many an hour in my ghetto high school pitching pennies with the gang toughs instead of attending class.   Alright, I admit, the hall passes were forged but no one would ever have challenged me about them. The only problem was that I was far too good at pitching pennies, so often had to quit before the guys got mad.

Maybe that’s all pennies will be good for in a few years time.

Let’s hear your stories about the penny.

Thanks for reading.

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