It is time to retire the penny from circulation. All of them. In this expensive modern age we no longer have a need for something as worthless as a penny. They are expensive to mint, a waste of time for everyone using them, bad at being money and get less valuable every single year. I hope by the end of this column you will be, at the very least, sympathetic to the idea of letting the penny go and relinquishing it to history books and coin collections. Like another coin we will discuss later.
Pennies are expensive to make. More expensive than they’re worth. According to the 2020 mint biennial report to congress it was reported that the cost of making each individual penny is about 1.76 cents. This means every year with millions of new pennies being minted we just waste millions of dollars on coins that nobody wants nor finds useful or valuable.
They are literally not worth your time to use. If you go in and try to pay for anything in pennies, at best you’ll get confused and angry looks from a cashier, but there is a good chance they just won’t accept your money. You can’t spend them at vending machines or parking meters. The only time they are useful is finding exact change. Which is almost completely irrelevant in the age of electronic banking, debit, and credit cards. When they are used for exact change it wastes the time of the person paying that it takes to count it all out. It wastes the time of the cashier and the business who cannot complete other, simpler transactions. And it wastes the time of everyone unfortunate enough to be stuck behind them.
The time it takes to use them is just one reason why they are bad at being money. The point of money is simple; to be a medium of exchange for various goods and services. Because pennies are so invaluable and such a waste of time to count, store and transport, they lose their value as money and become simple waste. It is almost guaranteed that picking up a penny off of the ground is literally not worth the time it takes to do so.
These problems are made worse every year by inflation. Things get more and more expensive and pennies become less and less valuable. As prices continue to rise, the penny will become even less useful than it already is. I know that many people are nostalgic about the penny and its various designs and Lincoln on the front, but I would contest the idea that this warrants keeping it around. Coin collectors will find their rare coins become more valuable as pennies are no longer produced and Lincoln will still be on the five dollar bill. The penny should go the way of the half penny. A coin I doubt many people nowadays know about. It was discontinued in 1857 because it was seen as worthless compared to what it took to mint and keep in circulation. Interestingly enough, when it was discontinued, the half penny had similar buying power to a modern dime.
Blu Thomas can be reached at [email protected]