https://www.marketplace.org/story/2025/11/13/businesses-face...
In America this can be done - by 2028 or thereabouts :)
If there was a suitable and even less expensive metal, I think it might be reasonable to switch again. But if we have to rebuild coin handling to use a plastic penny, I think it's necessary to consider the costs and benefits of a vastly different material versus the costs and benefits of abandoning pennies.
The newer pennies are not really worth the effort as they are mostly zinc.
Ironically if they are no longer illegal to melt down (IANAL but I would think this is true?) they actually would be more worth it to scrap because of the negated risk.
I think however the problem would be the trouble in seperating the zinc from the copper, I think you would likely operate at a loss still but this is just a guess.
They're still worth $1 per lb., and you have to destroy them, anyway.
because the cost of seperation from the copper is greater than simply sourcing other materials.
The practicalities of their illegality then comes down to enforcement. Given the current executive branch's behavior related to enforcement of laws, that can mean anything from "melt them all down", to "don't do it", to "if our friends start doing it, it'll be legal, if our enemies start doing it, we'll enforce".
Also, pennies are still legal tender. Folks can take them to a bank or other venue and cash them in. They’re not “trash.”
FWIW my bank refuses to accept unrolled coins, long before this month's retirement of the penny.
This is all third-hand, through a game of internet-telephone, and my money (if you'll pardon the pun) is on there being additional factors though
As I understand it, coins are considered a government service. Banks and retailers pay to deal with them. Buying them from the public for face value actually saves them money.
*You don't think I'd go into combat with loose change in my pocket, do you?"
But I must admit that I never formed the habit of bringing change with me when I go somewhere. So it piled up at home. The quarters were easy: They got saved for parking, laundry, etc. But I ended up with a sack of pennies that I finally cashed in at the bank.
When I lived in Scotland there was a "loose change" machine at the local Tesco. You pour in your coins and it would give you a receipt you could take to a cashier to get cash back - but the downside was that it charged you something like 10% of the total as a fee. Which I wouldn't pay.
Edit: I just searched and the Tesco documentation says "There is a 25p transaction fee and an 11.5% processing fee on the total amount of coins you put in the Coinstar centre. For charity donations, this processing fee is reduced to 8.9%." (wow, how generous!)
Back in the day, I'd sift through my jar of change and keep the quarters, which were good for parking meters and laundry. The rest went into the Coinstar machine. The fee for counting dimes, nickles, and pennies seemed OK.
The machine always had some weird foreign coins or subway tokens left over by the previous customer in the reject bin, which was potentially interesting.
For myself, it's such a priority that I'll get upset with myself if I have more than 4 pennies.
Japan has more coins (in regular use) than USA, so giving the correct amount is even more important or you'll end up carrying a lot of coins. 1000 yen is the smallest bill so... Example: 999 yen. 500,4x100,50,4x10,5,4x1 yen coins, 19 coins total.
95% of the time the person serving me would clock on to what I was doing but the other 6% it'd take some persuasion, and occasionally they would insist on giving me back my overpayment before ringing it up.
Coinstar also often has zero commission options like gift cards that are an easy way to cash in extra change without paying fees.
In my childhood we'd hoard loose change then make a trip to the local po-dunk bank serving my neighborhood surrounded by corn fields, and even there they'd take our bucket of loose change and dump it into a counting machine for free.
It was a game to try guess the amount we'd get in paper cash...
Now you have to pay for this service at a grocery store using a cumbersome machine operated by Coinstar.
It seemed to generally coincide with the demise of retail in general, and of course the elimination of bank-teller interactions and emergence of ATM machines. All of these things are a blurry mess from my past...
My (edit: old) bank refused to accept unrolled coins back in the early 2000s.
So this is long overdue.
I live in the Eurozone. We had 1 and 2 cent coins for a while. Where I live these were quickly deprecated and I think in most other Eurozone countries too by now.
I have thrown any of these coins straight in the bin soon as somebody gave them. Too much hassle and requires too big a wallet to drag along, for literally pennies.
When I first realized dealing with coins was inversely proportional to their denomination I threw out less than a Euros worth.
I do not understand anyone who doesn't throw out their pennies.
Yes they’re impractical to carry and use but does anyone actually do that? Why not do the standard practice of accumulate them in a jar instead of throwing them in the trash like waste?
it’s easy to take them home and throw them in a jar until suddenly the jar is a Kg of metal that can be fed to whatever coinstar like machine is around.
But there is a wider point which i want to discuss. How long will physical cash last? I'm very fuzzy on this but i think in some of the Asian countries it is practically an endangered species. Tax people don't like large denomination notes. And virtually no legal big transactions take place in cash. America must profit massively from the fact that in many other countries dollars are the go to black market currency but that is a very singular advantage.
"A coin’s typical lifespan is 30 years. See https://www.gao.gov/assets/gao-19-300.pdf, page 6."
You have a probably-unintentional pun here. I'm explaining it since many people won't know the obscure word.
Is there some item that would be problematic to round to $0.1? I suppose anything that is fractionally priced at ≤$0.05 is now would have a minimum purchase of 2. Items bought in bulk could be priced fractionally.
We already round off fractional pennies all the time, e.g. in securities market prices, tax calculations, gasoline prices, etc. That's not a problem. And any electronic purchase could be for fractional amounts - but why?
(Once upon a time, you probably could sell the idea to IT people by pointing out how much memory and bandwidth it would save.)
So why? Maybe the vendors reckon it will work out in their favor this way.
Also, as a Brit, if I bought something for £9.99 and gave them a £10, I'd expect change. If they said they didn't have any 1p or 2p coins, I'd expect to receive a 5p coin instead. And when I say expect, I've been offered that a couple of times in the past in that situation, I've never had to ask for it.
For me, one of the nicest currency units right now is the Taiwanese Dollar - 31 TWD to 1 USD and 40 TWD to 1 GBP. They don't have any smaller coins now, so it's nice that everything is in integer units, but the numbers aren't crazily large.
Use dry beans for blind-baking. They are almost infinitely reusable with no harmful effects.
Anyway, I've done it a hundred times, and my brain and lungs still work good-ish?
(And a penny doesn't really have exposed zinc, I understand: its plating is pure copper).
I'd also note the combustion elements of stovetop gas burners are often brass (copper-zinc).
The last-ever penny will be minted today in Philadelphia
In Australia we got rid of our 1c and 2c coins more than 20 years ago.
Their disappearance was a damn nuisance for some. We used to drill a small hole in the centre of them and solder them onto semiconductor diode leads as heatsinks. At 1 and 2 cents each they were much cheaper than their commercial counterparts. Unlike the US cent both Oz coins were solid copper.
When the European Central Bank announced a new design for the euro bills nobody in my country really cared anymore because most payments are electronic. The danger to that ofcourse is that you risk overspending but retailers approve.
Favors, trust, and reputation cannot be taxed.
Reporters et al always want 'a plan,' which is ironic because they have problems planning more than a week in advance.
internet2000•2mo ago
This is way too much spite for an article about coins. Lord.
amanaplanacanal•2mo ago
adastra22•2mo ago
bccdee•2mo ago
rincebrain•2mo ago
Most recently, a stick in the SNAP benefits laws is that you can't charge SNAP recipients different amounts from other people - which was presumably intended to ensure you can't play games like charging SNAP recipients more for things, but in practice, means that if you, hypothetically, wanted to charge SNAP and credit card holders exact amounts (which you would likely want to do to avoid weird effects where SNAP recipients, who tend to be very price sensitive, find their bills going up), and charge cash users rounded up or down, you would be in violation.
Those are the kinds of warts you would hope to see a plan for before these things were announced, rather than having to figure out one in the middle.