The U.S. MINT in Philadelphia is set to strike the last penny on Wednesday as Donald Trump scraps the one-cent coin.
The US President has ordered death costs to rise to nearly four cents per penny and a one-cent valuation may no longer be possible.
The US MINT has been minting pennies in Philadelphia since 1793, one year after Congress passed the coinage act. Today, there are billions of them in circulation, but they are rarely important for financial transactions in the modern economy or in the digital age.
“It’s been a long time since miniscule states that literally pennies literally cost more than 2 cents,” Trump wrote in an online post in February, as the online boom continued. “It’s so weak!”
However, many people have a nostalgia for them, seeing them as lucky or fun to collect. And some sellers have expressed concerns in recent weeks as supplies run out and the end of production nears. They said it was sudden and there was no guidance from the federal government from the federal government on how to handle customer transactions.
Some round prices to avoid people ripping people off, others plead with customers to bring exact change and more subtle prizes, like a free drink, in exchange for a bunch of pennies.
“We are proposing to eliminate the Penny in 30 years. But this is not the way we want it to go,” Jeff LeNard of the National Association of Stores last month.
Some banks, began using rations, a more paradoxical result of the effort to meet what the majority saw in the coins. During the last century, about half of the coins produced by the US mints in Philadelphia and Denver were pennies.
The Treasury department expects to save $56m a year on materials by ceasing to manufacture them. But they have a better production cost to value ratio than Nickel, which costs about 14 cents to make. A shrinking dime, by comparison, costs less than six cents to produce a quarter for almost 15 cents.
Back in 1793, a penny would get you a cookie, a candle or a piece of candy. These days, many sit in drawers or glass jars and are basically discarded or collected as lucky keepsakes.