PHILADELPHIA — Penny for your thoughts? Check the couch cushions. The U.S. Mint struck its final run of one-cent coins Wednesday, ending more than 230 years of continuous production.
Treasurer Brandon Beach pressed five commemorative pennies before staff at the Mint, a stone’s throw from Independence Hall, convert the machines to produce nickels, dimes and quarters, in line with President Donald Trump’s February social media post calling to abolish the penny.
PHILADELPHIA — Penny for your thoughts? Check the couch cushions. The U.S. Mint struck its final run of one-cent coins Wednesday, ending more than 230 years of continuous production.
Treasurer Brandon Beach pressed five commemorative pennies before staff at the Mint, a stone’s throw from Independence Hall, convert the machines to produce nickels, dimes and quarters, in line with President Donald Trump’s February social media post calling to abolish the penny.
The Trump administration says the move is a cost-cutting measure that will better align the U.S. money supply with consumer habits. It costs 3.69 cents to produce a penny, and ending production will save $56 million per year in reduced material costs, according to the Treasury Department.
“Given the rapid modernization of the American wallet, the Department of the Treasury and President Trump no longer believe the continued production of the penny is fiscally responsible or necessary to meet the demands of the American public,” Beach said.
Pennies won’t vanish overnight, though. They remain legal tender, and there could be close to 300 billion of them in circulation, Beach said.
The problem is, most of those pennies don’t actually, you know, circulate. They sit in piggy banks and car consoles, cash register drawers and gutters, said Robert Whaples, an economics professor at Wake Forest University who since 2007 has led the charge among academics to ditch the penny.
“Why do they get taken out of circulation? We won’t even waste our time to bring them back to the Coinstar or back to the grocery store,” Whaples said. “We won’t even reach down and pick up a penny we see on the sidewalk.”
Retrieving a penny is barely worth the time it would take to do it for many Americans. When Trump ordered the Treasury to stop minting pennies in February, the average private-sector hourly wage was hovering around $36, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Break that down, and it comes out to 1 cent per second.
“If we’re taking two extra seconds to use this,” Whaples said, by fishing a penny out of a pocket or bending over to pry one off the street, “you can see why that would be a bad idea.”
Stores nationwide have posted notices in recent weeks advising customers of penny shortages as the Mint wound down production and distribution of new coins.
The pennies Beach struck Wednesday will not circulate — they’re marked with an omega symbol and will be auctioned off in the coming weeks, with proceeds going to the Mint and the Treasury’s general fund, Treasury officials said.
The coins could easily bring more than $1 million each, said Richard De Rosa, a rare coin expert and owner of the Gold & Silver Refinery in Palm Bay, Florida.
“True rare coins — really true rare ones, not new ones that they’re calling rare — could easily top $1 million. A $100,000 coin is not high in today’s economy,” De Rosa said. “So the last five U.S. pennies, it’s a wild card.”
Meanwhile, consumers can expect retailers to round prices to the nearest five-cent mark, said Gabriel Mathy, an associate professor of economics at American University.
In some cases, Mathy said, that could lead businesses to raise prices by a few cents to make transactions easier.
But when rounding at the checkout counter, shoppers are just as likely to gain a few cents as they are to lose them, according to Whaples’s research. He published a study in 2007 in the Eastern Economic Journal based on transaction receipts from gas stations and convenience stores, finding that cashiers were just as likely to round down prices as round up.
“Eliminating the penny will not impose a ‘rounding tax’ on consumers,” the paper stated. “Eliminating the penny will have a negligible impact on inflation and on convenience store costs and profits, but it will save time for customers and clerks.”
Authorized by the Coinage Act of 1792, the penny was one of the first coins produced by the Mint. It began circulating the next year when production began in Philadelphia.
For most of the coin’s history, it was economical to produce and distribute. The Mint was able to control costs over time by swapping from a predominantly copper coin to a copper-plated zinc design.
Nickels could be the next coin on the chopping block, Whaples and Mathy said. It costs 13.78 cents to produce and distribute a single five-cent coin, according to the Mint.
“I think there’s less nostalgia about the nickel,” Mathy said. “I think the penny has its own kind of cachet, with the copper color and one of the best presidents in U.S. history. If we get rid of the penny, we might as well get rid of the nickel. And we could reconsider how much we want to use coins.”
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