They are still legal tender, the Mint just isn't producing them anymore. If things stay that way, eventually they will just become rarer and rarer until no one really sees them anymore (we stopped caring about them decades ago). Why bother with some convoluted, expensive plan to do anything about them? It's really a problem that will solve itself for the cost of someone a bank occasionally delivering a bag of them to the Mint as they do with any currency which is old and should be taken out of circulation.
this post was submitted on 17 Nov 2025
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Pennies Are Trash Now | The government has no plan for America’s 300 billion pennies.
(www.theatlantic.com)
Right, big nothing burger if that's the case. The headline made it sound like not only did they stop minting new ones but that existing ones were also suddenly worthless.
The US made half sent coins for quite a while. Most people have no idea.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Half_cent_(United_States_coin)
If people still know about the British half penny (pronounced haypenny) it's because it's mentioned in that xmas carol. There's a ton of old currency that no one cares about and no one will miss the penny. I thought it only survived as long as it did because it's got Lincoln on it and IL (his birthplace) didn't want the symbol to go away
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halfpenny_%28British_pre-decimal_coin%29
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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.
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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.
The government has no plan-
They have concepts of a plan.
Huh? You just spend them, the government didn't outlaw the penny lol they just stopped making it, they don't need a "plan"
I normally enjoy The Atlantic but WTF is this?
Wow—you are talking like a baby angel raised by puppies in a beachfront palace with no right angles, who has never attempted to wrench useful information out of a government agency’s public-affairs officer. I would give anything to spend 30 narcotic minutes in your gumdrop world. Let me take your round little face between my hands and squeeze it tight as I scream this
I couldn't get through the article with this writing style...
AI slop
Even if they're generating articles, I'd have thought that they'd at least be reading them before publishing them.
It's fine. They have AI reading them too.
checked out the author's wiki and she originally came from gawker writing things like "My 14-Hour Search for the End of TGI Friday's Endless Appetizers". Not all slop is ai
The author has 4 other pieces written, and before that she wrote for Gawker, New York Magazine (like not even the Times) and GQ. I'm going to venture that there's some nepotism going on somewhere.
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] "
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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.
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Collect them now so that in a few generations they are extremely valuable for copper when your great grandchildren are living in the sun-scorched wasteland.
They've been copper-coated zinc for decades.
They switched to zinc after the value of a penny became worth less than the value of the copper they were made of.
Then when they became worth less than the value of the zinc they were made of, they just asked people not to buy a million pennies and melt them down for metal.
That's just how valuable the small amount of copper in the coating will be worth.
Just deposit them in the bank. Simple
Collect them, make rolls, and then stuff them in your pants to impress
I'm trying to imagine how having what looks like a bunch of small dicks in my pants would impress. Or, more accurately, who.
Someone who likes small dicks, obviously.
I would be impressed
Reminds me how I visited relatives in Russia and they were just throwing their change away. Literally in the garbage. There was barely a place that would take them anyway so why keep it. It still feels very weird to toss money like that, even if it is not even a cent.
Weird. Do they not have the equivalent of CoinStar there? It's a nice occasional boost when the coin jar gets full.
It is weird, and I don't know if they had something like that. My guess is that getting small change in the first place was rare and it was not worth bothering for most.
Just for context, I am talking about копейки (kopek). Around 2003, the ruble was actually rather strong, with up to 23₽ to 1$. So 23 kopek would be 1 cent.
The last time I was there was in 2019 (for two obvious reasons). Back then the exchange rate was shit, with about 60-80₽ to 1$. The thing was that few places even gave you change in coin form. I remember relatives telling me that pharmacies are basically the only place that had prices with kopeks. The way it would work when shopping - apart from the fact that 99% paid with their phones and not with cash, I was the exception since I didn't have a Russian bank account and couldn't get one with my Russian passport - was that they would round prices, usually in your favor. So if you owe 2763 rubles (or 2762.88), and you gave them 3000, they would return either 240 or even 250, depending on how much change they have. They would also get majorly annoyed if you didn't have "760" on you since they usually didn't have change. I rarely got change back to the ruble (in this example 237). I definitely never got kopeks in a supermarket and just couldn't use them there.
So maybe accumulating change would take long time?
Please note that I am not a local, so my knowledge of Russian money culture and habits aren't the best or most reliable source. It's my experience but there are surely more qualified people around here to chime in.
Where I live, In Europe, these machines take a 10% commission.
When I have a sizeable amount of coins, I take bags to my local big box store, and use the self checkout. Some registers take cash. I just dump a handful, and top up with bills.
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News Is Trash Now | Journalists lose all integrity as they go all-in on generating click-bait nothing burgers to drive up ad revenue
Plus the articles are unreasonably long, repeats and finally gets to the point at the end, which I think is to fit more ads.
We could always go back to melting this shit.
Melting a modern penny is actually kinda neat. The zinc on the inside melts first, which turns the whole thing into a blobby copper flask. Then at some point the copper rips and all the zinc pours out.
You can do it with any small torch.
Excellent source of zinc. I can't imagine a world without zinc.
I remember the first time as a kid I melted a penny wanting to craft my own electrical connectors for a homemade electronic battleship game, and was so confused. I went "This... this doesn't look like copper!?" and thus began many decades of disillusionment and disappointment.
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Use them as screw washers.
they are at the ripping copper out of the walls stage of "draining the swamp".
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Canada: "First time?"
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