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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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the fuck do you mean there is no plan?
stop making pennies. transactions in cash can be rounded to the nearest five cents. pennies are still legal tender
the fuck else do you need to do about it?
too bad nobody nearby has done anything like this recently, and could be studied
Canada phased out the penny from 2013-2013. It was an adjustment, but it was not chaos. Pennies of certain periods are still taken as legal tender and accepted by banks.
Per Wikipedia:
"Cash transactions in Canada are now rounded to the nearest multiple of 5 cents.[54] The rounding is not done on each individual item, but on the total amount, with totals being rounded to the nearest multiple of 5, i.e., totals ending in 1 or 2 round down to 0, totals ending in 3, 4, 6, or 7 round to 5, and totals ending in 8 or 9 round up to 10.[54] This is typical of cash rounding methods (not specific to Canada). While existing pennies will remain legal tender indefinitely, those in circulation were withdrawn on February 4, 2013.[55][48][56]
Based on technical specifications provided by the Mint Act, only pennies produced from 1982 to their discontinuation in 2013 are still legally "circulation coins".[57] The Currency Act says that "A payment in coins [...] is a legal tender for no more than [...] twenty-five cents if the denomination is one cent."[58] Nevertheless, once distribution of the coin ceased, vendors were no longer expected to return pennies as change for cash purchases and were encouraged to round purchases to the nearest five cents.[59] Goods can still be priced in one-cent increments, with non-cash transactions like credit cards being paid to the exact cent.[60] "
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penny_(Canadian_coin)
I wish the USG had published guidelines and regulations prior to discontinuing manufacture, like the Canadian government did.
It's unclear that rounding prices is legal everywhere in the US, particularly rounding up against the consumer in areas with preexisting truth-in-pricing regulation in place.
Eliminating the penny is good. The way the USG is doing it ensures the maximum chaos.
The article is about what to do with all the actual physical coins. I would assume the treasury will start gathering them and scrapping them. The old copper coins can be recycled easy enough as there's plenty of demand for copper, but I have no idea what they'll do with all the zinc (copper plated) coins. Apparently they don't know either as there isn't any plan in place.
Supposedly when the mint decided to start pulling the 1943 steel cents from circulation years ago they ended up dumping a bunch of them in the ocean to get rid of them. Some people consider that an urban legend but perhaps that could happen.
Steel was still steel. It would likely take more work to pack those on a ship and unload them in the ocean than just dumping them in a giant crucible and turning them into sheet or bar stock for industrial consumption.
This isn’t true. There’s transportation and refining costs. Steel being so cheap and considering the opportunity cost it absolutely could be cheaper to just use new steel and sell/trash/give away old shit.
Also depending on the price could have actually been less steel than they were worth, so selling/smelting would actually give out more cash than scrap value.
There are some wrinkles, like I think 10 states make it illegal to round to the nearest nickel on cash transactions. Normally this sort of thing might be accompanied by guidance or even a regulation to get everyone on the same standard. Under Trump it was done with no fanfare other than his usual "I did that." I think people still expect the old ways, where a muppet might come along and explain it to everyone.
They did stop making them, last week.