“We have been advocating abolition of the penny for 30 years. But this is not the way we wanted it to go,” Jeff Lenard of the National Association of Convenience Stores said last month.
Some banks, meanwhile, began rationing supplies, a somewhat paradoxical result of the effort to address what many see as a glut of the coins. Over the last century, about half of the coins made at mints in Philadelphia and Denver have been pennies.
But they still have a better production cost-to-value ratio than the nickel, which costs nearly 14 cents to make. The diminutive dime, by comparison, costs less than 6 cents to produce, and the quarter nearly 15 cents.
Back in 1793, a penny could get you a biscuit, a candle or a piece of candy. These days, many sit in drawers or glass jars and are basically cast aside or collected.
No matter their face value, collectors and historians consider them an important historical record that can be traced back for more than 200 years. Frank Holt, an emeritus professor at the University of Houston who has studied the history of coins, laments the loss.
“We put mottos on them and self-identifiers, and we decide — in the case of the United States — which dead persons are most important to us and should be commemorated," he said. “They reflect our politics, our religion, our art, our sense of ourselves, our ideals, our aspirations."