Pennies from Heaven—and pockets, cushions and Mason jars

‍I’m tired of the penny. 

At one time, I collected Lincoln head cents, spending hours going through the pocket change on my parents’ bureau. When I received change back from a dollar spent, I took precious time to see if any of the pennies held the dates that would fill in slots in my Whitman collection book. 

I picked up pennies in parking lots and from sidewalks and one time found an Indian head penny that popped out of somebody’s pocket near the giant fiberglass structure of Paul Bunyan when my parents brought me to the Great Danbury State Fair. 

I had it all (or so I thought) including Lincoln head cents with an S or D under the date, marking the cities of San Francisco or Denver where the coin was minted. Those cents were a bit more valuable. 

And it was a home run if I was lucky enough to find a 1943 steel cent minted during World War II because of the country’s need for copper during the war effort. I had visions of cashing in one day, collecting thousands of dollars—at the very least—when the time came. 

My delusion of riches eventually crashed down later in life when I realized that my collection was worth not much more than the collection book it was in. Even my 1909 penny is only worth a few dollars today. Unless one stumbles upon an extremely rare coin, old pennies are almost worthless. 

But even at a value of a few dollars, they are worth more than the current penny, made of 97 percent zinc and costing 3.7 cents to produce.

Who wants pennies anyway? What can you do with them? They’re just in the way. The days of painstakingly putting an index finger into a paper coin roller to wrap 50 pennies to eventually bring to the bank is long over. 

I have a Mason jar filled with pennies in my room. Am I going to sit there for hours wrapping up that pile and cashing it in for a grand total of $10? When I get change back at the grocery or hardware store, I just cringe if pennies are in the mix. Sometimes I’ll just tell the clerk to keep the change.

Unfortunately, there’s no getting away from pennies. They litter the floor of my car. I find them in pant pockets that have been through the wash and there’s plenty to be found between the cushions of my living room couch. 

The National Retail Federation, which represents major retail chains, estimates that the majority of minted pennies don’t circulate at all because a large portion of them collect dust in drawers, jars (like mine) or some long-forgotten place in the home. When was the last time you picked a penny up off the ground? If you did, it’s probably because your parents told you time and again not to waste money.

Hope, however, is on the horizon. It makes sense that the U.S. Treasury Department will stop producing the penny at the end of this year, ending a run of 230 years. That doesn’t mean that Lincoln’s head will be in short supply, however, because there are still 114 billion pennies in circulation. I can’t imagine how long it would take to roll that number of coins into stacks of 50! 

Even though a lot of pennies will still be out there, merchants will have to decide how to handle price adjustments. They could opt to round up or round down to the nearest nickel. The most commonly used approach, which Canada implemented in 2012, follows these general rules: Prices ending in 1, 2, 6, or 7 cents round up to the nearest nickel, while prices ending in 3, 4, 8 or 9 cents, round down to the nearest nickel.

This means a cup of coffee priced at $2.97 would be rounded up to $3, while an item priced at $4.94 would be rounded down to $4.90. Digital transactions would remain unaffected, but businesses dealing with high volumes of cash sales—such as convenience stores, coffee shops, and farmers’ markets—must determine how to handle pricing adjustments while maintaining fairness for both customers and the business.

Tricky, but I can live with that. Just getting change back without a bunch of bronze-colored faces of Abraham Lincoln looking up at me will be welcome. Receiving more coins with Thomas Jefferson’s profile would be a nice change and there’s no pun intended there. 

Maybe, if I’m really lucky, I’ll find one of those five-centers that have an Indian head on the front and a buffalo on the back. That would be cool, but the chances of it happening are slim. With the penny slated to go the way of the passenger pigeon, how much longer will the nickel be spared as creates even a bigger deficit, costing almost 14 cents to mint? Whatever happens, pennies will still be around for some time and, like it or not, I’ll probably need to start filling up another Mason jar.  

Dave Dunleavy was a longtime reporter and columnist for The News-Times in Danbury. He lives in Kent.