The United States is quietly heading into a massive change of the type we haven’t seen for 170 years. It sounds scary, but don’t worry: I’ve lived through it already, and it’s not so bad.
We are discussing here the slow demise of the penny, the dark-brown coin beloved of mottos (nobody says “a nickel saved is a nickel earned”) and hated by cashiers.
The U.S. Mint ended production of the coin last week on the order of President Donald Trump, and while they remain legal tender and something like 125 billion are still in active circulation, pennies will slowly disappear in coming years just like the half-cent coin did after it was discontinued in 1857, the last time the U.S. nixed a coin.
That leads to the question of how we’ll pay for a item that costs 93 cents or $7.48 without pennies. Which leads, in turn, to my story.
My father was stationed in England before that country decimalized its currency. Things then were still priced in pence, shillings (worth 12 pence) and pounds (worth 20 shillings). The British penny was a giant copper coin larger than our quarter, but the workhorse coin was the sixpence, at the time worth about 14 U.S. cents.
Unfortunately, or fortunately depending on your point of view, the sixpence was exactly the size and weight of the U.S. penny. This meant you could use a penny in British vending machines as a counterfeit sixpence and get a 14-to-1 benefit.
So, U.S. military forces were forbidden from owning pennies even though we used all other U.S. currency when shopping on military bases. We lived the penny-free existence that America is about to enter. It was, you will be heartened to learn, no big deal.
But a little adjustment was in order.
For example, you may wonder how I was able to buy comic books on the base at the then-price of 12 cents? Simple: The price was rounded to the nearest nickel — in that case, down to 10 cents. A comic priced at 13 cents would have been rounded up to 15.
This is basically what U.S. retailers are going to be doing over the next months or years: They will round all their prices up and down to the nearest multiple of five. If we ever get rid of the nickel, another coin rendered pointless by inflation, they’ll have to round prices to multiples of 10.
Most stores haven’t done this rounding yet and a few retailers, realizing they can no longer order up a new batch of pennies, are getting nervous about a potential mismatch between supply and demand. The supermarket chain Price Chopper, for example, is stocking up by offering 2-for-1 deals: bring in 50 pennies and get a dollar off your purchase. Expect to see your favorite retailer printing up signs asking you to bring in any pennies they find.
To be honest, few people other than numismatists are going to miss the penny, which isn’t worth the effort to collect, count and store, let alone the cost to make (3.69 cents per penny as of 2024). Consider that Canada stopped making their penny in 2012 and I haven’t heard any collective anguish in either English or French.
Even if there was any anguish, the continuing shift to cash-less shopping via smartphones and credit/debit cards would lessen it. There are probably teenagers walking the streets today who have never used pennies to buy anything in their lives, so they won’t miss them.
Not even oldsters, like me, who just barely remember penny candy that actually cost a penny will mind. I’m happy to slip into nostalgia mode when it’s called for, but there are limits to rose-colored glasses.
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