The official Goodbye to the one cent

[Tesorodeoro]

So here’s a plan for them to keep everybody happy.

1. Discontinue making cents.
2. Make nickels out of zinc with nickel plating. Zinc and nickel producers are still happy, and the cost of nickels drops back below face value.
3. Copper producers are still happy because other coins use it anyway.
4. Make larger denomination coins (dollar, five, ten and twenty dollar).
5. End the Fed and paper dollars
6. Profit!

Yeah I know. Never happen.

Let’s hold judgement till Rand Paul heads up an audit of the Fed. Reserve.

 

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[Chilli]

I know it will take years and years yet of digging them. But they're not not going to be minted anymore.

View attachment 2192743

Our 1 and 2 cents were taken out of circulation yrs ago.
What happened was shops started and still do sell things for say 98c. Or 99c.
At the checkout it's rounded up to a dollar. If it's 96c or 97c it's rounded down to 95c. Nobody sells anything under 98c. So everything is rounded up to a dollar. It's stupid, just advertise a dollar. I'm sure there is a reason they keep it this way though.

 

[robertk]

Nobody sells anything under 98c. So everything is rounded up to a dollar. It's stupid, just advertise a dollar. I'm sure there is a reason they keep it this way though.

It's perception. The same reason they price something $9.99 instead of $10. Because you tend to mentally ignore the fractional part, so your brain thinks it's a better deal - "less than ten bucks", "only nine bucks", etc.

 

[ARC]

I have always been perplexed by why they have never thought of going back to the steel penny.
OR.. even better a stainless steel penny.

It could made from recycled steels.... which cost around .01-.02 cents PER POUND.

I mean during the war effort they switched to steel so it can and has been done.

 

[ARC]

PS... I would like to add...
I think doing away with any currency is the dumbest thing ever conceived especially for the U.S.

I mean we are smarter than that... err or are we not ?

Well...... i mean we still have primitive traffic light systems worldwide as we make cars that drive themselves.
Talk about backwards arsed.
Want lower gas prices ?
Try stopping the wasting of it and see if that helps. heh

 

[pepperj]

It won't be allowed is because the zinc and copper mining companies will lobby the politicians to prevent it from happening. They're the only reason we've kept on minting them in the first place.

It probably will impact Jarden that supplies the blanks, but it's not going to impact the mining companies.
Zinc/copper mining it only represents a fraction of the total output.

Copper output in the USA is 1,232,000 tons.
The penny uses up 232 tons

Zinc output in the USA is 860,000 tons
The penny uses up 11,321 tons
( all the figures are in short tons)

 

[Sand Swinger]

It's perception. The same reason they price something $9.99 instead of $10. Because you tend to mentally ignore the fractional part, so your brain thinks it's a better deal - "less than ten bucks", "only nine bucks", etc.

You are correct, it's a psychological marketing technique and it works, lol. If I buy something for $9.99 and my wife asks me how much it cost, I always say 9 bucks or 9 bucks & change. It just seems closer to $9 than $10, lol.

But the whole penny thing apparently didn't start out to be a marketing ploy. I read an article years ago that said that around the turn of the century, newspaper boys would stand on street corners near stores to sell their newspapers, which at that time cost 1 cent. The merchants started charging .99 instead of 1 dollar, or .49 cents instead of .50 cents so their patrons would have a penny to buy a newspaper when they left the store. I wasn't there to verify, lol, but that's what the article said.

 

[Sand Swinger]

I’ve been saving them for a long time.
I have 8 two-pound coffee cans full of them and 1 partial jar. I’m not sure how many that is: all from 1960 up through 1981. Not really a fortune by any standard.
I’ll probably just keep them for the grandkids to have.👍🏼

Same here. When I was a kid (67 now), my dad was a machinist and worked at a can company that made soda cans. One day he came home from work and gave me 2 grocery store bags full of soda cans he made, except he made the cans with a slot cut out of the top, so it was basically a soda can piggy bank.

I remember reading an article about pre-1982 (and some 1982) pennies being copper, so I started going through my change every day and every 1982 or before penny I'd put into the can. Over the years, I've filled all of the cans in those 2 bags, probably a few dozen. I wasn't certain, but I just had a feeling that they might be worth something someday. Maybe stopping the production of pennies will cause the pre-1982 copper pennies to rise in value. If a zincoln costs 3 cents to make, I'd have to think that a real copper penny should be worth more just in metal value.

 

[beepbleep]

That's part of it. The fact that a dollar is worth so little is also part of it (you'd need to carry several rolls of them just to fill your gas tank, for example). The fact that it's a meaningless term on coins is another. (You can get a clad dollar coin that's worth a dollar, or you can get a US mint issued silver coin that also has a face value of one dollar.). But I suspect the biggest reason is it takes actual "stuff" to mint a dollar coin, where it takes nothing but ink and paper to borrow one (or a billion) from the Federal Reserve.

I've said the dollar bills add up like pennies in your wallet. I try to keep them culled down to three or four. I mainly carry just twenties and fifties now, some places won't take a hundred. All the change goes in a jar.

 

[Johnnybravo300]

This won't hurt the zinc miners.
Eventually the nickels will need the zinc treatment because they are worth too much now.
Who knows, they may be made of plastic in a decade.

 

[pepperj]

 

[beepbleep]

Most zinc is used elsewhere in industry. The cent is a boondoggle of waste. We won't miss it one bit.

 

[russau]

PSSSSST , I don't care and THAT'S MY TWO CENTS ON THIS SUBJECT!

 

[ConceptualizedNetherlandr]

PSSSSST , I don't care and THAT'S MY TWO CENTS ON THIS SUBJECT!

Speaking of 2 cents, if everyone carried 2 and 3 cent coins change could be made without one cent coins

 

[Sand Swinger]

Speaking of 2 cents, if everyone carried 2 and 3 cent coins change could be made without one cent coins

I wish we had coins like in Australia. There's a detectorist on YouTube in Australia who does head-to-head testing of detectors and usually does the test at his son's school. Seems every coin he finds is a $1 or $2 Australian coin. Those coins look gorgeous, they're a gold color and are a good size coin, bigger than a quarter, a bit smaller than a .50 piece. During one test, he picked up about $14 in those 1 & 2 dollar coins. In the U.S. we'd probably wind up with less than $1 in clad.

 

[pepperj]

I wish we had coins like in Australia. There's a detectorist on YouTube in Australia who does head-to-head testing of detectors and usually does the test at his son's school. Seems every coin he finds is a $1 or $2 Australian coin. Those coins look gorgeous, they're a gold color and are a good size coin, bigger than a quarter, a bit smaller than a .50 piece. During one test, he picked up about $14 in those 1 & 2 dollar coins. In the U.S. we'd probably wind up with less than $1 in clad.

What's wrong with Canadian $1 & $2 coins.
The Loonie was first struck in 1987
The Toonie was first struck in 1996

 

[Sand Swinger]

What's wrong with Canadian $1 & $2 coins.
The Loonie was first struck in 1987
The Toonie was first struck in 1996

Nothings wrong with them at all, I'll take em'. I only referenced the Australian coins since I recently watch the Australian Detectorists video and every coin he pulled up was a $1 or $2 coin, just wish we had those, or Loonie's, or Toonie's. I'm not picky, I'll take any $1 or $2 coin, lol.

Yeah, we have/had the Susan B. Anthony's, but I think the issue with those is there almost the same size as a quarter, so it was easy for people to get them mixed up and wind up overpaying by handing over a Susan B. Anthony when then meant to hand over a quarter.

 

[Louis14505]

With no intent to score any political points (and please refrain from that in any comment)...

Trump’s statement: "I have instructed my Secretary of the US Treasury to stop producing new pennies" does not in itself mean the end of the penny. He does seem to have the authority to stop new pennies being ordered, but complete discontinuation would seem to require an Act of Congress. Sure, he has control of Congress, but that doesn’t necessarily mean he will always get his own way.

Halting production of something that has a higher material cost than its ‘worth’ would seem to be a no-brainer, but it’s not quite as simple as that. The US Mint reported in 2024 that the unit cost for the one-cent coin is more than 3.69 cents and that “There are no alternative metal compositions that reduce the manufacturing unit cost of the penny below its face value.” The bulk of that cost is indeed raw materials, but also includes things like secure transport distribution and, crucially, manufacturing overheads. The overheads don’t simply disappear if one-cent production stops. They get re-allocated across everything else the Mint produces, although that could be offset in part by a reduction in employee numbers (principally at the Denver branch, which produces the majority of pennies).

Although Musk said that producing 4.5 billion pennies in Fiscal Year 2023 cost taxpayers more than $179 million, that’s not really true. The US Mint is part of the Department of the Treasury and sells currency to the Federal Reserve at face value. Since the 1996 creation of the Public Enterprise Fund, the Mint has been self-funded, covering its operating expenses and capital investments from the sale of circulating coinage to the Federal Reserve Banks and sale of numismatic items to the general public collector community. Revenues in excess of the amounts required by the PEF (known as “seigniorage”) are transferred to the United States Treasury General Fund and mostly used to help pay off the national debt.

Consequently, the US taxpayer is not directly impacted by the high cost of producing pennies (and nickels, costing 13.78 cents each). It just reduces the amount of excess revenue (generated from other coinage items) that can be transferred to Federal Reserve. So, any impact needs to be seen in terms of the overall financial ‘pot’.

Putting aside any possible inflationary effects arising from the disappearance of the penny (although most countries that have eliminated low-denomination coins say that the effects have been minimal), the overall ‘pot’ cannot be ignored, including the effects on employment numbers.

Jarden Zinc Products of Greeneville, Tennessee is the sole provider of zinc planchets (penny blanks) to the Mint, as well as being the only primary zinc producer in the United States. They have 204 employees and, apart from some niche products, the blanks are their primary revenue stream.

It’s also a mystery to me why the US has persisted with one-dollar bills when replacement with a more durable one-dollar coin could potentially save a much larger amount of money (at least $500 million per year) than any decision on pennies could.

Any money they stop spending is a plus for us! It's a good thing any way you look at it! Like all the other savings musk is finding! It's all good for us!

 

[camichael]

I had a client who was saving the memorial cents.. she thought they were valuable. I ended up taking them to a coin star since the bank wanted them rolled. She ended up having 330,000 pennies! I filled up a coin star and had to find another one
Lucky for her, she also saved about $750 bi-centennial quarters and half dollars. They brought in double face value!

 

[Red-Coat]

Any money they stop spending is a plus for us! It's a good thing any way you look at it! Like all the other savings musk is finding! It's all good for us!

Only up to a point, in that what needs to be properly considered is the overall net financial impact... including effects on employment, viability of companies continuing in business, import costs for other products that they might have been producing and the effect on trading surplus/deficit plus a whole host of other factors.

I'm a long way from convinced that those calculations are actually being done for a lot of what is currently happening in the US. Time will tell.