Huh? You just spend them, the government didn’t outlaw the penny lol they just stopped making it, they don’t need a “plan”
They are still legal tender, the Mint just isn’t producing them anymore. If things stay that way, eventually they will just become rarer and rarer until no one really sees them anymore (we stopped caring about them decades ago). Why bother with some convoluted, expensive plan to do anything about them? It’s really a problem that will solve itself for the cost of someone a bank occasionally delivering a bag of them to the Mint as they do with any currency which is old and should be taken out of circulation.
Right, big nothing burger if that’s the case. The headline made it sound like not only did they stop minting new ones but that existing ones were also suddenly worthless.
The existing one’s are worthless and trash, you could get more money off them as scrap metal they just also are legally required to take them at stores.
$0.0085698 is the melt value for the 1982-2014 zinc cent on November 17, 2025.
But if you have 100 pre-1982 pennies they’re worth $3.188!
Time to get melting. I’m sure I have a few hundred older pennies from grandpas old basement. Just gotta weed out any special ones, or not.
You can gravity sort them fairly easily and quickly
Depends on how much actual thought was put in. The poorest segment of the population uses a fuckton of cash. There could be a massive implicit transfer of wealth going on if the Dollar Generals of the world are allowed to construct prices around an implicit $0.04 gain from rounding up.
Not how it works…
Not how what works? If you don’t think stores are going to round up thier prices, i got a nice bridge for you.
The US made half sent coins for quite a while. Most people have no idea.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Half_cent_(United_States_coin)
If people still know about the British half penny (pronounced haypenny) it’s because it’s mentioned in that xmas carol. There’s a ton of old currency that no one cares about and no one will miss the penny. I thought it only survived as long as it did because it’s got Lincoln on it and IL (his birthplace) didn’t want the symbol to go away
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halfpenny_(British_pre-decimal_coin)
Fun fact! The hapenny had a decimal version as well. I have about 300 of the damn things.
Just wait till copper goes up in value a little bit. In the 00’s gangsters were melting pennies down by the ton for the small amount of copper in them. Wouldn’t call them “trash” exactly…
They’re not copper anymore
Yes. I know.
Since 1982 Pennys are zinc with a thin (2.5%) copper cladding.
You mean copper coated zinc. Which can’t be recycled, and already has about 5 cents of metal in them
I assume by recycled you mean melted down into an alloy similar to what it was before? I.e., aluminum. During the Great Recession the gangs that were melting down pennies were very much doing so to separate the copper from the zinc. and the zinc wasn’t that worthless either.
It had a lot of folks worried. This was back when the US Federal Government actually did things and wasn’t controlled by horrible, stupid people. Even GWB saw some value in the concept, but I digress.
This article was super interesting to me. Especially the part about how the system wouldn’t be able to handle it if everyone tried to turn in their pennies all at once.
Just deposit them in the bank. Simple
they are at the ripping copper out of the walls stage of “draining the swamp”.
As Josh Johnson says… This is crackhead behavior
Collect them, make rolls, and then stuff them in your pants to impress
I’m trying to imagine how having what looks like a bunch of small dicks in my pants would impress. Or, more accurately, who.
I would be impressed
Polyphallophiles, if that’s a word that exists
It does now.
Someone who likes small dicks, obviously.
Aren’t 300B pennies like… 3B dollars?
The government has no plan-
They have concepts of a plan.
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no, it’s $30,000,000 worth of pennies.
We’ll take all the pennies, melt em all down, and make a giant statue of me!
Paging Timothy Dexter
the fuck do you mean there is no plan?
stop making pennies. transactions in cash can be rounded to the nearest five cents. pennies are still legal tender
the fuck else do you need to do about it?
too bad nobody nearby has done anything like this recently, and could be studied
There are some wrinkles, like I think 10 states make it illegal to round to the nearest nickel on cash transactions. Normally this sort of thing might be accompanied by guidance or even a regulation to get everyone on the same standard. Under Trump it was done with no fanfare other than his usual “I did that.” I think people still expect the old ways, where a muppet might come along and explain it to everyone.
The article is about what to do with all the actual physical coins. I would assume the treasury will start gathering them and scrapping them. The old copper coins can be recycled easy enough as there’s plenty of demand for copper, but I have no idea what they’ll do with all the zinc (copper plated) coins. Apparently they don’t know either as there isn’t any plan in place.
Supposedly when the mint decided to start pulling the 1943 steel cents from circulation years ago they ended up dumping a bunch of them in the ocean to get rid of them. Some people consider that an urban legend but perhaps that could happen.
Supposedly when the mint decided to start pulling the 1943 steel cents from circulation years ago they ended up dumping a bunch of them in the ocean to get rid of them. Some people consider that an urban legend but perhaps that could happen.
Steel was still steel. It would likely take more work to pack those on a ship and unload them in the ocean than just dumping them in a giant crucible and turning them into sheet or bar stock for industrial consumption.
This isn’t true. There’s transportation and refining costs. Steel being so cheap and considering the opportunity cost it absolutely could be cheaper to just use new steel and sell/trash/give away old shit.
Also depending on the price could have actually been less steel than they were worth, so selling/smelting would actually give out more cash than scrap value.
Canada phased out the penny from 2013-2013. It was an adjustment, but it was not chaos. Pennies of certain periods are still taken as legal tender and accepted by banks.
Per Wikipedia:
"Cash transactions in Canada are now rounded to the nearest multiple of 5 cents.[54] The rounding is not done on each individual item, but on the total amount, with totals being rounded to the nearest multiple of 5, i.e., totals ending in 1 or 2 round down to 0, totals ending in 3, 4, 6, or 7 round to 5, and totals ending in 8 or 9 round up to 10.[54] This is typical of cash rounding methods (not specific to Canada). While existing pennies will remain legal tender indefinitely, those in circulation were withdrawn on February 4, 2013.[55][48][56]
Based on technical specifications provided by the Mint Act, only pennies produced from 1982 to their discontinuation in 2013 are still legally “circulation coins”.[57] The Currency Act says that “A payment in coins […] is a legal tender for no more than […] twenty-five cents if the denomination is one cent.”[58] Nevertheless, once distribution of the coin ceased, vendors were no longer expected to return pennies as change for cash purchases and were encouraged to round purchases to the nearest five cents.[59] Goods can still be priced in one-cent increments, with non-cash transactions like credit cards being paid to the exact cent.[60] "
I wish the USG had published guidelines and regulations prior to discontinuing manufacture, like the Canadian government did.
It’s unclear that rounding prices is legal everywhere in the US, particularly rounding up against the consumer in areas with preexisting truth-in-pricing regulation in place.
Eliminating the penny is good. The way the USG is doing it ensures the maximum chaos.
Uh… ok? I wasn’t expecting them to do anything about the ones in circulation.
Yeah, like, the government has longstanding rules for how to handle in circulation currency, to include removing old and battered bills and coins from circulation over time. I kinda just assume the plan is to do exactly what you would normally do without making any new ones.
What is the normal plan when not making new ones?
Take out the bad ones, just like they do now. Probably melt them down and sell the metal.
Melt them down to make novelty pennies
Time to go to your closest museum and get a penny squished and imprinted!
To expand on Testfactors statement, the banks help remove damaged currency but there’s no real plan to reclaim currency that’s already been circulated. It’s always been that way and creates scarcity in the collectors market over time. I’m not sure why this is a headline.
The only time I can think of where the US Mint had a plan to reclaim currency was during WWII when the US war machine needed the copper found in the Lincoln cent. The mint pressed steel pennies and banks were instructed to reclaim as many copper pennies as they could.
The article mentions that pennies almost never get pulled from circulation because they almost never get spent. New rolls of pennies get distributed, the coins are handed out as change and then… nothing. The vast majority of them never get used after that. Cant pull an old coin from circulation if it never makes its way back to a bank.
Can confirm, have a bowl of pennies in my house that never gets used. I don’t even know why at this point.
Here in the Netherlands, we use the Euro. Which has 1 and 2 cent coins. The Netherlands and a few other Euro countries basically stopped using those, instead rounding off to the nearest 5 cents when paying with physical money.
If you pay digitally, you still pay the exact amount without the rounding off.
Frankly, I was amazed that they thought those 1 and 2 cents were useful. You can buy nothing with them and they cost more to make than their worth.
wow, yeah. At least pennies have the excuse of being actually useful when they were first introduced.
Yeah,you can buy a thought with them!
Guess the US populous stopped thinking…
Interesting. Makes sense.
I’m sure some re-enter from, like, coinstar machines or something, but that’s gotta be a tiny minority.But that seems like another point in favor of discontinuing them. If people who get them literally never use them, seems like a pointless coin, lol.
But it seems like they’ll probably self eliminate one way or the other over time. I guess the concern would be that they’d self eliminate too quickly, as no one who gets them ever spends them, so basically every distributed penny just instantly vanishes.
But I think the problems with cutting over will largely just be minor heartache. Like, it’ll be minorly bumpy for a month or two, but by a year out everyone will have figured it out and no one will miss them.
Yeah, they effectively don’t matter. People can do whatever they want with them. Most will continue to sit in the jar they have lived in the last 10 years.
We could always go back to melting this shit.
Melting a modern penny is actually kinda neat. The zinc on the inside melts first, which turns the whole thing into a blobby copper flask. Then at some point the copper rips and all the zinc pours out.
You can do it with any small torch.
