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We gather here today to grieve the slow, jingling demise of a copper-clad coin that was never worth much, yet somehow meant everything.
Yes, the penny — America’s humble one-cent piece will be given its final summons by Congress, so long as Congressman Frank Lucas’ MINT Act continues to steamroll its way through the legislative process.
While some may greet the news with a shrug, grunt, and a pocketful of lint, some of us are pouring one out, lighting a candle and digging through the couch cushions, money jars and automotive floorboards to pay our respects.
The penny, that tiny, shiny disk with Abe Lincoln’s profile in relief has been a part of America’s story since 1909. That’s 115 years of enduring service — clanking in piggy banks, disappearing into grocery-store coin-op horses, and enduring indignity after indignity in the name of frugality.
This may be all she wrote for the penny.
According to the U.S. Mint, it costs $3.69 to make and distribute a single penny. That’s like eating celery to build muscle mass. The math doesn’t math.
Last year, the US Mint cranked out more than three billion of those gleaming buggers, losing $85 million in the process. That makes 2024 the 19th straight year the penny has cost us more to make than it’s worth.
It’s not that the penny didn’t try. It just got left behind. Inflation rendered it practically meaningless — a third of a third of its 1909 value, which is a polite way of saying it’s now closer in worth to a garden slug than as legal tender. In stores, it’s just a rounding error.
Still, we loved it. Or at least, we tolerated it warmly.
The penny was the last remaining coin with soul. Nickels are bland. Dimes are tiny chips. Quarters are useful, but they’ve got so many personalities now, they’ve lost their identity.
The penny, though — the penny was unpretentious. It didn’t pretend to be more than it was. It was the people’s coin, even when the people had little use for it. But we all can remember when it redeemed itself as we spent our Sunday evenings emptying the money jar and rolling 5,000 of them so we could buy a tank of gas Monday morning and make it ‘till payday.
Let us not forget the penny’s golden era. There was a time when you could buy a Coke for five of them, leave another one on the diner counter as a tip and still feel like a high roller. Abe’s coin anchored the phrase “a penny saved is a penny earned,” even if most of us ignored that advice and impulse-bought candy cigarettes at the gas station.
You could stick one into a machine at the five-and-dime and get a gumball. In the 40s and 50s people bought shoes with a slot where they could stick a penny, because back then, a penny was enough to make a call from a payphone — it was a security thing — penny loafers were born.
It wasn’t just in spending that the penny shined. It became a unit of measurement for honesty. “A penny for your thoughts.” “I’ll give you my two cents worth.”
It gave us idioms: “pennywise and pound-foolish.” “Pennies from heaven.”
It even came with negative connotations. “Not worth one red cent.” “He keeps turning up like a bad penny.”
It lived in piggy banks, church collection plates, and the pockets of Oshkosh B’gosh overalls from Okeene to Okemah.
It even made appearances in art and folklore. You could put one in a contraption at Yellowstone National Park, crank a handle and your penny would be returned to you smashed, elongated and rebranded as a souvenier, embossed with the Yellowstone National Park Logo.
We nefariously pitched it against walls in middle school, as our introduction to gambling.
It was flipped to determine the fate of millions of disputes.
It was the centerpiece of “Find a penny, pick it up — all day long you’ll have good luck,” in some circles, only if you found it heads up — a superstition passed down through schoolyard lore.
So how did we get here? Congressman Lucas (R-Cheyenne), the man wielding the Congressional penny slayer, puts it bluntly: “The one-cent piece has run its course… the world has changed.”
He’s not wrong. In fact, his bill — the Modernize and Improve our National Tender (MINT) Act (see what he did there? Those folks in DC are clever with their acronyms if nothing else) — passed through committee with bipartisan support. Even the United Steelworkers Union, which opposes basically everything, supported it, citing job preservation and taxpayer savings.
Still, it’s hard to see the penny go without a touch of sadness. It’s like saying goodbye to the 19-year-old family cat — dark, dull, mostly useless, but still somehow comforting in its presence.
It will be a slow death. Under the new law, pennies already in circulation will remain legal tender, but production will cease. They’ll slowly vanish — forgotten in old junk drawers, and lost in the dark recesses of center consoles.
When the last penny is spent, it won’t go out with a bang. There won’t be a parade. No one will lower a flag. It will go quietly.
A cashier somewhere will glance at the register, then at you, and say, “Got a nickel?”
That’s how eras end — with a silent death no one notices.
It won’t stop there. The nickel, our last smooth-edged coin, is teetering on the brink. These days, it costs nearly 14 cents to make a 5-cent coin. The Mint lost $18 million on nickels last year. So perhaps this isn’t just the end of the penny — maybe it’s the start of something bigger. A slow, silent reckoning for the metal money we’ve long taken for granted, their rattling in the dryer becoming ghost sounds one day. The quarter’s next, it’s only remaining use is freeing up a cart at Aldi’s.
But today... we remember the penny.
We honor it — not for what it was worth, but because of what it meant. It was always there. In mason jars and under jukeboxes. In aprons and ashtrays. People collected them and placed extreme values on the rarest ones.
Pennies clung to our lives in ways that were too small to notice — until now.
It was just a cent, but it made sense of the senseless. It stood for saving, for luck, for effort. It was the coin you tossed into a fountain, not because it would buy something, but because it was a wish, and a wish worth wishing required a penny.
So we say goodbye to a coin that mattered more than it should have.
Pennies were, in many ways bigger than their worth and I, for one, will miss them when they go.
Thanks for reading, Shop local