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Pennies Are Trash Now | The government has no plan for America’s 300 billion pennies.
(www.theatlantic.com)
this post was submitted on 17 Nov 2025
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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 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_%28British_pre-decimal_coin%29
Fun fact! The hapenny had a decimal version as well. I have about 300 of the damn things.
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 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