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Pennies Are Trash Now | The government has no plan for America’s 300 billion pennies.
(www.theatlantic.com)
this post was submitted on 17 Nov 2025
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Uh... ok? I wasn't expecting them to do anything about the ones in circulation.
Yeah, like, the government has longstanding rules for how to handle in circulation currency, to include removing old and battered bills and coins from circulation over time. I kinda just assume the plan is to do exactly what you would normally do without making any new ones.
What is the normal plan when not making new ones?
Take out the bad ones, just like they do now. Probably melt them down and sell the metal.
To expand on Testfactors statement, the banks help remove damaged currency but there’s no real plan to reclaim currency that’s already been circulated. It’s always been that way and creates scarcity in the collectors market over time. I’m not sure why this is a headline.
The only time I can think of where the US Mint had a plan to reclaim currency was during WWII when the US war machine needed the copper found in the Lincoln cent. The mint pressed steel pennies and banks were instructed to reclaim as many copper pennies as they could.
The article mentions that pennies almost never get pulled from circulation because they almost never get spent. New rolls of pennies get distributed, the coins are handed out as change and then... nothing. The vast majority of them never get used after that. Cant pull an old coin from circulation if it never makes its way back to a bank.
Here in the Netherlands, we use the Euro. Which has 1 and 2 cent coins. The Netherlands and a few other Euro countries basically stopped using those, instead rounding off to the nearest 5 cents when paying with physical money.
If you pay digitally, you still pay the exact amount without the rounding off.
Frankly, I was amazed that they thought those 1 and 2 cents were useful. You can buy nothing with them and they cost more to make than their worth.
wow, yeah. At least pennies have the excuse of being actually useful when they were first introduced.
Yeah,you can buy a thought with them!
Guess the US populous stopped thinking....
Can confirm, have a bowl of pennies in my house that never gets used. I don’t even know why at this point.
Interesting. Makes sense.
I'm sure some re-enter from, like, coinstar machines or something, but that's gotta be a tiny minority.
But that seems like another point in favor of discontinuing them. If people who get them literally never use them, seems like a pointless coin, lol.
But it seems like they'll probably self eliminate one way or the other over time. I guess the concern would be that they'd self eliminate too quickly, as no one who gets them ever spends them, so basically every distributed penny just instantly vanishes.
But I think the problems with cutting over will largely just be minor heartache. Like, it'll be minorly bumpy for a month or two, but by a year out everyone will have figured it out and no one will miss them.
Yeah, they effectively don't matter. People can do whatever they want with them. Most will continue to sit in the jar they have lived in the last 10 years.