WHAT NEXT FOR THE CENTS?

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V28 2025 INDEX E-SYLUM ARCHIVE

The E-Sylum: Volume 28, Number 47, 2025, Article 26

Len Augsburger passed along this article from The Atlantic about the lack of plans for the cent now that they're no longer being minted for circulation. -Editor

Many Americans—and many people who, though not American, enjoy watching from a safe distance as predictable fiascoes unfold in this theoretical superpower from week to week—find themselves now pondering one question. What is the United States going to do with all the pennies—all the pennies in take-a-penny-leave-a-penny trays, and cash registers, and couch cushions, and the coin purses of children, and Big Gulp cups full of pennies; all the pennies that are just lying around wherever—following the abrupt announcement that the country is no longer in the penny game and will stop minting them, effective immediately?

The U.S. Mint estimates that there are 300 billion pennies in circulation—which, if true, means that the Milky Way galaxy contains about three times more American pennies than stars. How, you ask, could the plan for 300,000,000,000 coins be"nothing"? The Mint, you say, issued a formal press release about striking the final cents. Surely, you insist, that implies some sort of strategy, or at least is evidence of logical human thought and action?

Let me take your round little face between my hands and squeeze it tight as I scream this:

It is my miserable fate to possess more miscellaneous information about U.S. one-cent coins than, possibly, any other person on this planet. This is not a boast. The information I command is data no one without a neurodevelopmental disorder would ever yearn to know; it is a body of knowledge with no practical use for anyone. I contracted this condition last year, as I spent several months attempting to ascertain why, in the year 2024, one out of every two coins minted in the United States was a one-cent piece, even though virtually no one-cent pieces were ever spent in the nationwide conduction of commerce, and, on top of that, each cost more than three cents apiece to manufacture.

In search of the answer, I interviewed former directors of the Mint, members of Congress, professors of metallurgical engineering and of law, economists, charity workers, multiple manufacturers of those machines that transform regular pennies into souvenir smushed pennies, scrap-metal recyclers, historians, lobbyists, the CEO of Coinstar, coin collectors, sociologists, government auditors, and the paranoid goblins who perform the opaque work of the Federal Reserve. The initial draft of the story I filed for a popular New York City–based publication was 20,000 words long...And what I learned was that there was no sane reason why.

Mint officials told federal auditors in 2019 that, if even a fraction of the nation's never-spent pennies were simultaneously spent or cashed in, the deluge of change would be"logistically unmanageable" for the federal government. For one thing, there would likely not be enough space to store them in our nation's bank vaults.

That's the first thing I thought of when I read the news that the Mint had produced its last pennies for circulation: What are they going to do about the vaults? I went to the Mint website and read its press release. Then I read through every item on the neatly formatted Penny FAQs page. Then I realized they weren't going to do anything about the vaults, because there was no plan at all to do anything except stop making pennies.

This isn't how it usually works when a smoothly running country elects to retire some portion of its currency. Canada, unsurprisingly, provides a seemingly perfect model: When the cost to manufacture Canadian pennies reached 1.6 cents apiece, in 2012, the government announced that it would cease production of the coins and gradually withdraw them from circulation. Simultaneously, the government debuted a robust public-information campaign, explaining to Canadians the logic behind its decision and publishing guidance (including little pictures) for how to round out cash transactions in the absence of pennies. To date, the Canadian Mint has recycled more than 15,000 tons of pennies, redeemed by the public for their face value.

So what's the plan, Stan? Wayne Herndon told me that pre-1982 U.S. pennies contain a few cents worth of copper, but there's still a law on the books making it illegal to melt them. If the law were repealed, is there enough profit incentive for buyers to appear? When Giant Eagle offered to pay two cents apiece, they were mobbed with takers and suspended the program after one day. Would we hear the giant sucking sound of pennies being vacuumed out of couch cushions and piggy banks? All I know for sure is that if people start taking these to their banks and the banks start refusing them, a lot of people are going to be upset and will maybe start throwing pennies at their Congresspeople at their next Town Hall. And those aren't aluminum Mardi gras doubloons, so prepare to duck fast. -Editor

To read the complete article, see:
Pennies Are Trash Now (https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2025/11/pennies-circulation-mint/684935/)