Most pennies produced by the U.S. Mint are given out as change but never spent ...

I spend my pennies all the time when I’m paying cash.  I try to give exact change if I can.  If I see a penny on the sidewalk I’ll  pick it up too.  About 6 months ago David and I were on a walk and we spotted a quarter at the same time and we both bent down to pick it up.  We then noticed a trail of coins that stretched for almost a block, and we each picked it all up.  When we got home and counted it out it came to over $9.00.  Some people are just plain careless with coins, can’t be bothered to spend them.

When I was still working about 25 years ago I was eating my lunch in the break room and I heard all this racket behind me and turned around to see where it was coming from.  I saw my Lead Worker throwing handfuls of pennies into the garbage can.   I asked her what she was  doing and she said she was cleaning out her purse and getting rid of all the change.   I told her she’ll always have money problems if she literally threw it away.

Now mind you, this was a young woman that was always crying poor mouth.  She’d refi her mortgage at the drop of a hat to pull the equity out for some foolishness, like going on a Disney Cruise!  

Doesn’t surprise me at all that there are so many pennies out of circulation.  Cash is fast becoming something many don’t use anymore, scan a card or touch your phone to the POS.

I’ll bet if you were to stop several young people on the street and show them a handful of coins they couldn’t even count out how much they totaled and some might not even know the difference between a nickel and a quarter.

Eddie

I  seldom pay with cash anymore, instead I use my credit union VISA or debit cards which give 1.5 reward points for every dollar that I charge on them.  Collect 2500 reward points or more and I can convert them to $25 cash back for every 2500 points.  So far this year I’ve received $150 in cash back and with the current 7100 points I have after I pay the semi-annual car insurance premium later on this month I’ll have enough to get another $75 cash back and have a have  remainder to start on my next $25 cash back.

But I still always carry a small black leather change purse in my pocket with anywhere from $0.50 to $2.00 in coins and never more than $100.00 in bills, but usually only $20.00 just for emergencies or for small purchases.

I believe that doing away entirely with coins would be onerous for many poor and homeless  people and others that just can’t maintain or open bank accts. or obtain credit cards.  Without coins in circulation all prices would need to be rounded up to the nearest dollar and the only ones that would benefit from this change would be merchants and corporations because their profits would soar.  People think that everything costs too much now, without pennies, nickels, dimes and quarters everything would instantly cost more.

It would make better sense for the US Treasury to air spots on TV regularly to encourage citizens to either regularly spend their coins during small purchases or to periodically cash them in for folding money.  If there were readily available change counting machines that folks could dump their coins into and receive bills in exchange this could be easily accomplished.

 For these reasons I would be against doing away with coins.

Eddie

Hi John,

In all honesty I must admit that I didn’t read the entire article about doing away with pennies.  If only pennies were done  away with I suppose that it wouldn’t be that difficult to adapt to the change.  Everything could be rounded to 5 cents.

There are way more important things that need to be changed in America than doing away with pennies.  If the copper is so expensive why not just mint pennies out of pot metal like was done during WWII in  1943?  Or mint them out of aluminum.

The fact that people don’t value pennies is a sign of how careless some Americans are with their money.  Charge up a storm and then just file bankruptcy.  I’m old school and still believe that if you watch the cents the dollars will take care of themselves or a penny saved is a penny earned.  It’s worked for me during my life.  I’ve never been broke and never been to proud to bend down and pick up a penny.  I’ve had a checking acct. since 1969 and I’ve balanced it to the penny every single month for over 55 years.  If this makes me an old skinflint I’ll own it.

 I was raised that way.  I remember my Mom asking my brother once how he liked the sandwich that she’d packed for his school lunch when he was 8 years old?  He told her that he threw it away!  To which she said, for cryin’ out loud Joey that’s like throwing away a nickel!  She never got over the deprivation of the Depression.

Eddie

As far as those penny crushing machines where you put the penny in and a dollar's worth of quarters for making souvenirs, I have a collection of that crushed copper somewhere maybe at my dad's place...

If there are still those and people are content to invest $1.01 like that, then there are still a lot more pennies than the world or at least US knows what to do with...

The people who waste the most in terms of food must have too much more than they need to eat that it goes bad, so it gets thrown out and out they go again to replenish only to whine about how high grocery prices are and how much they have to spend...

They might be the same people who throw coins into wishing wells and fountains, so they compensate however well they can, if they spend the least amount of money buying things (maybe even stealing) from those who make just as little money working in making and selling what they basically need...

-- Dave

I spotted the reverse side of what's known as a "wreather" penny (minted from 1909 - 1958) among all of those pictured.  I thought maybe it was an old image, but then I spotted one of the newer reverse sides with the shield, so that old "wreather" could have been anywhere from 66 to 115 years old!  I received one in change within the last couple of years, which was surprising.  When I was a kid I collected coins, and as I recall there were only a handful of Lincoln pennies that were worth very much.  I think my 1933-D was worth the most.  The big hitters were 1909-S VDB and 1955 "double die obverse" strikes.

I don't think pennies make sense anymore, so to speak.  I'll once in a while grab one out of a dish by the cash register to avoid receiving more of them in change, but otherwise I don't carry them with me.  I used to always carry 99c in loose change, but that was back in the days before debit cards.  These days, if you hand a cashier folding money with an extra penny or whatever, they freeze up.  And nobody counts out your change as they hand it to you.  Simple arithmetic seems to have vanished from the retail landscape.