The US penny will disappear later today after a prolonged illness. It was 238 years old.
The final penny will be struck Wednesday afternoon at the U.S. Mint in Philadelphia, under the supervision of Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Treasurer Brandon Beach.. President Donald Trump announced via social media in February that he had asked the Mint to stop making the once-popular coin, citing the cost of production.
The coin costs almost four cents, more than the coin is worth. Once valuable enough to purchase “penny candy” like gumdrops and power parking meters or toll booths, the penny today lives primarily in coin jars, trash drawers, or “leave a penny/take a penny” trays.
The penny outlived its brother, the halfpenny, by 168 years. It has outlived the nickel, dime, quarter and rarely seen half dollar and dollar coins.
Despite its disappearance, the penny will remain legal.
For a coin that appears obsolete, removing it from circulation poses more problems than expected, especially for retailers.
Some merchants consider rounding prices to the nearest nickel, often a penny or two higher. Others ask customers to pay with pennies to help with supplies. But in some states, traders could face legal issues for rounding up or down.
Additionally, any savings from discontinuing the penny could be offset by the need to press more nickels, which cost the U.S. Mint more than the penny.
The government’s phasing out of the penny has been “a little chaotic,” said Mark Weller, executive director of Americans for Common Cents. The pro-penny group is funded primarily by Artazn, the company that supplies the blanks used to make the coins. “By Christmas the problems will be even more pronounced with retailers running out of money. »
Weller said other countries that have removed low-denomination coins, such as Canada, Australia and Switzerland, have guidance for next. This is not the case in the United States.
“We had a post (from Trump) on social media during the Super Bowl on Sunday, but no real plan on what retailers should do,” he said, referring to the president’s announcement in February.
Kwik Trip, a family-owned convenience store chain that operates in the Midwest, decided to round up its cash purchases at stores where it couldn’t find pennies.
“We didn’t want to charge (customers) 2 cents more because we didn’t think it was fair,” said John McHugh, a company spokesman. “I mean, it’s not their fault there’s a penny shortage.”
But with 20 million customers a year, and 17 percent of them paying with cash, the policy will end up costing Kwik Trip a few million dollars a year, McHugh said.
Businesses aren’t the only ones facing increased costs. Rounding to the nearest nickel will cost consumers about $6 million a year, according to a July study by the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond. That’s quite modest, amounting to about five cents each for 133 million American households.
And rounding is not a national solution.
Four states — Delaware, Connecticut, Michigan and Oregon — as well as many cities, including New York, Philadelphia, Miami and Washington, D.C., require merchants to provide exact change, according to the National Association of Convenience Stores (NACS).
Additionally, the law governing the federal food assistance program known as SNAP requires that recipients not be charged more than other customers. Because SNAP recipients use a debit card charged with the precise amount, if merchants round up prices for cash purchases, they could expose themselves to legal problems and fines, said Jeff Lenard, a spokesman for NACS.
“Rounding all transactions presents several challenges beyond the average loss of 2 cents per transaction,” Lenard said. “We desperately need legislation to allow rounding so retailers can give change to these customers. »
It is for this reason that NACS and other retail groups recently wrote to Congress requesting legislation addressing the issues raised by the end of coin production.
The penny was one of the country’s earliest coins, first minted in 1787, six years before the Mint itself was established.
Benjamin Franklin is widely credited with designing the first penny known as the Fugio cent. Its current form arrived in 1909, the centennial of Abraham Lincoln’s birth, when it became the first American coin to depict a president.
But since then its use and popularity have declined. The Treasury Department had said there were about 114 billion pennies in circulation, although they were “severely underutilized.” Thus, public outcry over his disappearance was muted.
Joe Ditler, a 74-year-old Colorado writer and historian, said he still has an old cigar box filled mostly with coins given to him by his grandfather. He remembers flattening coins on train tracks or souvenir machines at amusement parks.
However, he only occasionally uses a few cents to make a cash purchase. And he often throws the penny in the tip jar.
“They bring back memories that have stuck with me my whole life,” he said. “The penny had a wonderful life. But it’s probably time for it to disappear.”
