If you’ve ever stood in a queue, awkwardly fumbling for a single copper coin while the queue behind you aged several years, you know the true cost of the US penny. It was the coin that nobody wanted but everyone somehow ended up with.
Well, good news, coin haters! The US Mint in Philadelphia has pressed its final circulating penny, ending the more than 200 year history of the one cent piece. The coin is dead.
The Great Copper Stockpile
The official discontinuation has been anything but smooth. After the Treasury announced the penny’s demise in May, shortages started mounting by late summer. Retailers, suddenly facing the prospect of having to give cash payers exact change using non existent currency, started to panic.
The result is a wonderful blend of corporate desperation and financial anarchy:
- The Double-Up Deal: Some large grocery chains began asking shoppers to exchange their pennies for gift cards worth double the value. Yes, you could literally trade 50 worthless pennies for a dollar’s worth of shopping credit. Finally, the penny had value!
- The Rounding Roulette: Most businesses are now rounding cash purchases to the nearest five cent denomination. But who wins? Convenience chain Kwik Trip decided to round down at penny less locations a move expected to cost them a couple of million dollars annually. A noble, if expensive, gesture.
The Problem with Loose Change
While retailers generally agree that the penny is obsolete (and let’s be honest, who misses it?), they feel the wind down has been far too fast and loose. Trade groups are now clamouring for federal legislation to standardise rounding rules. Because in America, where there’s financial ambiguity, there’s always the threat of a lawsuit from a customer who feels shortchanged by two cents.
There’s also a legal headache: Federal law requires SNAP recipients paying with debit cards not to be charged more than cash customers. If a store rounds a cash transaction up by four cents, they’re in breach of the law for debit users. It seems even in death, the penny finds a way to complicate everything.
The US Mint now has a bunch of spare penny moulds it can probably stick on eBay. As for us, we can finally stop digging for that copper disc at the bottom of our wallets. Now, if only they’d get rid of the five cent piece…
Related Topics: Money
