The government has no plan for America’s 300 billion pennies | Hacker News Reader

The government has no plan for America’s 300 billion pennies

theatlantic.com

59 pointsJumpCrisscross141 comments

This is all a bit hyperbolic. Stopping minting pennies made sense and has precedent. There used to be half penny coins.

Also, pennies are still legal tender. Folks can take them to a bank or other venue and cash them in. They’re not “trash.”

*precedent

Thanks and fixed. Darn autocorrect.

> Folks can take them to a bank

FWIW my bank refuses to accept unrolled coins, long before this month's retirement of the penny.

Is that legal?

It seems more reasonable than the outright refusal of many businesses to accept cash at all, and plus this transaction isn't even a "debt" to which the penny would be legal tender.

As I understand it, more than X dollars worth of coins is not legal tender. I learned this due to an absurd case in Detroit, where someone stole bags of coins from an armored car, got caught, and claimed their crime was not a felony because it was below the dollar limit for a felony. Of course the judge treated their request with the disdain that it deserved.

There are multiple laws that could have been broken to make it a felony, but if the only reason it would have been a felony was the dollar amount, I'm actually less inclined to side with the judge.

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

So roll them?

I have like 2 dollars in coins, not even a roll of pennies. I just thought I'd try depositing it while running a different bank errand and they were like "naw, go to coinstar with your poor person money"

One of the reasons why I changed banks. My new bank has a coin counting machine in the lobby, you throw your coins in, it consumes them, and gives you a slip that you take to the teller.

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.

It's so easy to use coins, pennies included, in day-to-day transactions I never accumulate any. Accumulating pennies or other coins is a concept I don't understand. You can spend up to 4 pennies in any purchase you do, and if you don't can't never receive more than 4. For nickels, dimes, and quarters, the maximum is smaller.

Obligatory Dr. Strangelove reference:

*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.

Most of our supermarkets have at least one self service machine that accepts change. Once a week I pour any loose change in then settle the rest with a card.

I guess this might depend where you are.

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!)

I meant self service machines where you pay for your shopping. There are usually one or two that accept change.

Ahh, somehow I misunderstood. Thanks for the clarification!

Same here in the US.

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.

FWIW in the US many of those machines offer to skip the fee if you take the money in the form of a gift card for Amazon or Walmart or similar.

That actually never occurred to me, I assumed they only took bills. Welp, problem solved and I'm no longer out of milk.

If a person has good basic arithmetic skills and it is a priority for them, then yes they can use coins easily. However, a lot of people either can't do the math or are unwilling to use change correctly.

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.

When I used to use cash I used to do this all the time. I would nearly always overpay to minimise the number of coins in my pocket. For example I had a bill of £1.63 and I was paying with two £1 coins, I would get 37 pence in change, which would be a minimum of four coins (20p, 10p, 5p, 2p). So I would pay £2.13 to get a 50p or £2.03 to get two 20p coins.

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.

A lot of banks just have one of those coin counting machine things (like Coinstar but not Coinstar).

Coinstar also often has zero commission options like gift cards that are an easy way to cash in extra change without paying fees.

Average gift card has a discount of 8 to 20% built in. Looks like Coinstar is currently charging 12.9%, so a gift card could actually be more profitable for them.

If you're feeding it pennies you can also just give it one penny at a time to avoid the fees.

A credit union local to me waives the fee if you are a member.

Mine had the machines, then ripped them out, over the cost to them the regional bank they deal with imposed and other excuses. Coinstar (some) gift card is the only no-fee I've found in my area, but then you're stuck with a gift card instead of cash.

It's odd how banks have largely stopped operating change counting machines.

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.

COVID happened. However, all three of the banks I visit regularly (over branch of a national bank, two branches of a local credit union) all have coin counting machines in the lobby, though it took awhile for them to be added back to the branches that took theirs out.

No doubt COVID kicked skimpflation into high gear, but this was already a pattern I noticed long before 2019.

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...

Fun fact: modern dimes, quarters, and half-dollars all have the same value by weight -- about $20 per pound.

This is true by design (silver coins had a weight chosen by value of silver), not coincidence. Also while nickels and pennies don’t match.

I have talked to my bank and was told not to roll them, they just throw them in a machine to count them and deposit the money in my count. It is not uncommon to see people bring in a box of coins and the bank takes care of them.

Coin counting machines exist for decades (and I hope still produced), why not all banks have them?

In Canada, I've only ever seen these in grocery stores, operating for a fee (and they don't accept commissions) and a singular credit union branch (because they serve the underbanked at that particular location).

My bank used to have one, but it merged with another bank and the machine got taken away "to serve a larger branch"

> FWIW my bank refuses to accept unrolled coins, long before this month's retirement of the penny.

My (edit: old) bank refused to accept unrolled coins back in the early 2000s.

I think when the half penny was discontinued it had the same buying power as the dime does now or something like that.

So this is long overdue.

> They’re not “trash.”

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.

I stored some 1 and 2 cent coins in 2005 betting they will become collectible in a few decades.

There are many things that will become collectibles. I don't want to spend the energy and time storing various items on the chance they might become valuable.

Throwing out cent coins doesn’t seem like an environmental waste to you, like throwing out aluminum cans?

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.

Metals are separated here, but compared to all the other waste I generate, I'd say it's... pennies on the dollar. Storing and collecting things is by itself an expense too: space, energy (you probably store them in a controlled environment), and so on.

At least leave them on the counter, drop them in a charity box, or leave them somewhere else where someone will pick them up.

I refuse to accept them. I got them anyway. Never seen a charity box. The homeless person also doesnt want them.

> Many Americans—and many people who, though not American, enjoy watching from a safe distance as predictable fiascoes unfold in this theoretical superpower from week to week—find themselves now pondering one question.

This is way too much spite for an article about coins. Lord.

I took it at humorous rather than spiteful.

I fail to see the humor.

If the author of the article had done a bit of searching, they might know that Canadians (the primary predictable American ficasco spectators) phased out pennies years ago. We also "had no plan" for the remaining pennies, and we didn't really need one. They get deposited, lost, and thrown away over time—that's why the mint had to keep printing them. Now they've gone the way of the 50-cent piece. It's not a big deal. Frankly I'm surprised the US didn't do it sooner.

The problem is not strictly the pennies themselves, but all of the prices that rely on being able to quantize things to a cent, and a number of different laws about not playing games with prices.

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.

This rounds physical currency to the nearest $0.05, effectively. Why not round everything to the nearest $0.1? The math and adjustments (changes to every printed price, etc.) would be simpler. How much for the wine? "$19.9". It seems much simpler to me, though I'm sure it's been discussed ...

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.)

Things are still often priced in €xx.99 in Ireland, but since the 1 and 2 Eurocent coins are all MIA, if you pay in cash, you'll be paying the full €xy.00. Most of my transactions are by card, though, and thus not subject to rounding.

So why? Maybe the vendors reckon it will work out in their favor this way.

Haha, as a Brit, I have quite a few eurocent coins in my foreign loose change drawer.

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.

They don't call this "the rip-off republic" without reason

In Hong Kong, it's very common now to see prices with just a single digit after the decimal point. That said, they haven't had a 5c coin since 1989 and HK$0.1 isn't worth much more than US$0.01.

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.

By far the most common coin in the USA is 25¢. Changing that would be much more disruptive.

Ask {some number of} engineers: You have just been made a free gift of six thousand metric tons of zinc. What do you do with it?

Spend like an hour researching the most efficient way to sell six thousand metric tons of zinc for its scrap value, then do so. I don't need a bunch of zinc for anything I want to do and money is a generally-useful thing to have.

Zinc is very useful! I wouldn't want to imagine a world without zinc.

Thank goodness we still live in a world of telephones, car batteries, handguns, and many things made of zinc.

Sell it to someone who uses it to galvanize steel, I guess?

Value the mineral and prove ownership, get financing, start a company and sell it by unit wholesale.

Interesting how cash money still elicits such emotions.

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.

The actual danger is that you’re creating a system where the government will have the power to tell you what you can spend your money on.

Exactly this, and track every last cent you've spent, and where.

It's already a system where unaccountable private monopolistic moralizing multinational middle men have the power to tell you what you can spend your money on.

The government already has the power to tell you where (local vs bank transfer) and what (taxes, fines) you must spend your money on.

Favors, trust, and reputation cannot be taxed.

“The government already has too much power, so let it take even more” is not convincing.

Why do we need a plan for pennies?

Reporters et al always want 'a plan,' which is ironic because they have problems planning more than a week in advance.

Supposedly it cost gov 4 cents to mint 1. Does it have to be done with zinc tho? Why not plastic or some cheap material? Although you may be able to 3D print a penny at home (just like it being made from zinc can actually stop someone), but just like with a real one, its not like you will show up at your local bank with $1 million dollar worth to deposit.

Even if they were free to mint they're still effectively worthless trash to most of us. I've been waiting for the penny to die for decades, and it would be nice if we had a functioning government that could handle these nonpartisan issues smoothly, but we haven't had anything like that in a long time, so the rip the bandaid off I say

I have literally been throw them away for years, they’re annoying clutter

Zinc is the cheap material though. It replaced copper (except for the foil outer), when copper was too expensive.

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 other option would be to rebase the currency such that a single penny was a meaningful unit of money again. One potential such way would be to issue new paper notes which represent the old note with a decimal place move such that $10 becomes $100. This has been done before but might not be a great idea for the USA.

Wouldn’t the decimal place have to move in the other direction for the penny to become useful again?

That would be a nightmare, you're basically bringing in a new currency at that point because now all cash, every bank account and every price in the whole country needs to change. That's going to be probably hundreds of thousands of times more effort and expense than phasing out pennies!

I guess a reason to discontinue the penny is that it supposedly costs 3+ cents to mint one. I guess a nickel costs like 13 cents, though. I thought it would've been a better move to discontinue printing the nickel then just make all pennies worth 5 cents.

At minimum they're useful as makeshift pie weights when blind-baking a pie crust. After shaping the dough in the baking dish, cover it in aluminum foil and then fill it with pennies. They conduct heat well, and prevent the dough from bubbling or shrinking.

Oh my goodness please no one take this seriously. Heating pennies will result in harmful zinc off-gassing. You do not want to breathe this in.

Use dry beans for blind-baking. They are almost infinitely reusable with no harmful effects.

Using pennies has long been recommended by reputable cookbooks. Is there really a risk at 375 degrees F? I would think the everyday fumes from an unventilated gas oven are a much more significant problem, and that's fairly common in many parts of the US.

Anyway, I've done it a hundred times, and my brain and lungs still work good-ish?

Zinc boils at 1,180 K, so its vapor pressure should be negligible at room (300 K) or kitchen oven (500 K) temperatures. I suspect the GP comment is misapplying advice from a different context, like arc-welding.

(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).

Maybe if you had clean uncirculated pennies and lots of them(why?) but using pennies from my local gas station in my pies? How about no..... And washing them seems not worth the effort when a bag of dry beans is 70 cents .

They're easy to clean, and they don't come in direct contact with the dough at any point. America's Test Kitchen found that pennies work better than beans due to how they conduct heat. If you don't like the idea, that's fine, no one's forcing you.

Good to know! I had never read that America's Test Kitchen actually recommended them. I heard pennies minted after 1982 had too thin a coating of copper and when scratched would release zinc. I guess you need much higher temperatures though. Ha! I've always just used a bag of dry black beans and recycled them for years.

First they are coated in copper, and second nobody bakes pie crusts at a temp that would cause zinc to offgas and third zinc fever is not a big deal unless you're breathing a bunch every day.

The country is welcome to send me the 300 billion pennies. My bank will happily "dispose" of them with their "deposit to my account" service.

According to Marketplace.org, pennies are treasure for some businesses now because the regional Feds aren't distributing them.

https://www.marketplace.org/story/2025/11/13/businesses-face...

I've been listening to Marketplace less because of stories like this. The half cent went away, the penny went away, other countries have discontinued currencies. You keep accepting pennies and you round when people pay in cash. At some point, your register will do the rounding for you. There isn't really a story here.

The register might already do the rounding if it was designed to work in Canada, which got rid of the penny over a decade ago.

There's a bunch of regulations that need tweaking. AIUI, it's illegal to charge SNAP more than other customers. someone who paid cash and gets rounded down technically pays less than what the government got charged. It's only on the order of pennies, I don't think the law cares about that at all.

I don't buy the SNAP argument because there's already rounding when taxes are applied, and half cents are still legal tender, so you could go into a store, tell them they should have charged half a cent less, and then they'd be in a similar trivial violation of SNAP.

Yeah this is the kind of objection dreamed up by an engineer, who thinks that law is mechanically applied. In reality, if there are no other factors this spends two seconds in front of a judge, who then throws it out with prejudice for wasting the court’s time.

Is that a federal law or state law? Whichever jurisdiction it is, surely you'd only need a one-clause amendment to add an exception for rounding cash transactions by up to two cents to account for the discontinuation of pennies... I just can't imagine that taking more than a few weeks to resolve, surely your political systems in the US haven't become that dysfunctional where this couldn't be fixed that quickly?

> surely your political systems in the US haven't become that dysfunctional where this couldn't be fixed that quickly?

In America this can be done - by 2028 or thereabouts :)

That one is easy without regulatory changes: just round the SNAP transactions. The SNAP equal treatment rule only requires charging SNAP customers the same price as cash purchases, not the same price as credit or debit card purchases.

The last-ever penny will be minted today in Philadelphia

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45901904

You can make really cool flooring with lots of pennies in grids.

Why does the government need a plan for pennies? They stopped wasting money minting them, now the "problem" will sort itself out naturally.

If the cooper is worth more than the coin, would melting them down be profitable?

In Australia we got rid of our 1c and 2c coins more than 20 years ago.

It already was, a long time ago with the copper pennies. Not sure with the modern Zinc ones, however.

The Imperial Oz penny and halfpenny (currency before 14 February 1966) was always solid copper. Earlier 2/- (two shillings) used to contain silver but that was phased out sometime in the 1950s. If I recall correctly the first (the round) 50c also contained some silver whereas the current dodecagon one is mostly nickel (correct me if I'm wrong).

"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.

Several points: firstly i would assume every country has a process for disposing of bad and worn out notes and coins. If not i'm sure someone could work out how to profit from recycling dead pennies in true capitalist fashion. This leads on to my second point which is when the government has time they should get around to issuing a bill removing pennies (and maybe other smaller denominations) from legal tender.

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.

Per the U.S. Mint, the life span of a coin is 30 years:

     "A coin’s typical lifespan is 30 years. See https://www.gao.gov/assets/gao-19-300.pdf, page 6."

For paper money, depending on denomination, 5.7 to 24 years. (https://www.federalreserve.gov/faqs/how-long-is-the-life-spa...)

> endangered species

You have a probably-unintentional pun here. I'm explaining it since many people won't know the obscure word.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/specie (see 2).

https://archive.is/uel4S

100 fuses for $1, awesome! ;-)

Most people under the age of 50 will not understand this.

Do you not just shred them and send them to a scrap metal processor?

Only pennies before 1982 are worth scrapping as they are made of copper.

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.

We can turn them into suntan lotion!

hahah ok actually I love that.

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.

It's called Coppertone for a reason

> The newer pennies are not really worth the effort as they are mostly zinc.

They're still worth $1 per lb., and you have to destroy them, anyway.

It's their mix with copper I beleive that makes them less valuable than their raw value in zinc if thats what your number is based on...

because the cost of seperation from the copper is greater than simply sourcing other materials.

I read this as a joke ($1/lb because 100 pennies weighs about a pound - although online sources make it sound like it's closer to 200 pennies for a pound)

Someone producing brass (copper-zinc alloy) could presumably use them, as they only need to add extra copper.

No law in relation to pennies has changed. The executive branch has simply took the law stating the mint should create as many pennies as necessary, and decided that the necessary amount is 0.

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".

The value of my wheat pennies and war pennies just went up

The reason the government isn't warning people or slowing the withdrawal is because nobody cares. Any amount of money they can get for recycling is better than the loss now. (though the current admin is known to "chicken out" which probably explains them preparing to spin production back up if they need to)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com