Last Friday, the one-cent coin, better known as the penny, met its end. After 232 years of production, the final penny coins were struck at the US Mint in Philadelphia.
In its prime, the penny wielded outsize influence: Tossed into fountains, it could answer unrealized wishes. A penny saved was a penny earned; it was pinched, pressed into loafers and placed on graves as a way of honoring the dead. Offered for one’s thoughts, it could elicit two cents, doubling its return.
Caroline Turco, assistant curator of the American Numismatic Association’s Money Museum in Colorado Springs, Colorado, said that whenever she spies a penny on the street, she still thinks of the rhyme, “Find a penny, pick it up, all day long you’ll have good luck.”
So mighty was the penny’s sway that legions of sales pitches would rely on marketing psychology built upon its mere absence. Why shell out 10 dollars when you can pay $9.99?
The penny had remade itself multiple times over the years, succeeding a one-cent predecessor authorized by the Continental Congress in 1787 and designed by Benjamin Franklin until the mint's creation in 1792. Made of pure copper, it featured a woman with flowing hair, symbolizing liberty.
Its name reflected the country’s colonial roots, a derivation of the British word “pence,” which the American founding fathers disposed of along with the English monarchy.
The one-cent coin is the oldest coin minted in the United States, having been in circulation since 1793. But they've increasingly become worthless over time. Nowadays, you can't buy anything with less than a heavy sackful of them, and if you show up at McDonalds with said sackful to pay for your Big Mac you're likely to be kicked out of the restaurant. Given that fact, as well as it cost almost four cents to mint each one-cent coin, it was well past time for its demise.
This isn't to say I don't understand the nostalgia involved; I'm old enough to remember penny gumball machines, which is to say I'm pretty old. But I can't say I've had any use for the coin since my childhood. For as long as I can remember, any pennies I've come across during the course of the day - received as change, or found lying about - would end up in a big jar that would later be dumped into the Coinstar machine at the local grocery store. These days, I hardly come across pennies at all, simply because I rarely engage in cash transactions anymore. A friend of mine said on Facebook better than I could: "bye bye, coin I have not used in decades."
The penny is not going to disappear - there are still something like 300 billion of them currently in circulation. The problem is, most of them are in coin jars, under couch cushions, or in your car's cupholder - not in your local retailer's cash register, which is where they need to be. One-cent coins, in fact, continued to be manufactured for as long as they did because of what The Atlantic's Caity Weaver calls the "Perpetual Penny Paradox:"
Most pennies produced by the U.S. Mint are given out as change but never spent; this creates an incessant demand for new pennies to replace them, so that cash transactions that necessitate pennies (i.e., any concluding with a sum whose final digit is 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 7, 8 or 9) can be settled. Because these replacement pennies will themselves not be spent, they will need to be replaced with new pennies that will also not be spent, and so will have to be replaced with new pennies that will not be spent, which will have to be replaced by new pennies (that will not be spent, and so will have to be replaced). In other words, we keep minting pennies because no one uses the pennies we mint.
It wouldn't surprise me if, over the course of a given year, millions of dollars worth of pennies are cumulatively thrown in the trash by people who simply don't want to deal with them. Which, if true, is just another reason to stop producing them.
Kuff has more, as does the NPR's L. Carol Ritchie.
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