US Mint in Philadelphia presses final pennies as the 1-cent coin gets canceled
PHILADELPHIA (AP) — The U.S. Mint on Wednesday ended production of the penny, a change made to save money and in recognition of the growing irrelevance of the 1-cent coin.
The last pennies were struck at the mint in Philadelphia, where the country’s smallest denomination coins have been produced since 1793, a year after Congress passed the Coinage Act.
President Donald Trump ordered the penny’s demise as costs climbed to nearly 4 cents per penny and the 1-cent valuation became somewhat obsolete. Billions of pennies remain in circulation, but they are rarely essential for financial transactions in the 21st century economy.
“For far too long the United States has minted pennies which literally cost us more than 2 cents,” Trump wrote in an online post in February, as costs continued to climb. “This is so wasteful!”
Still, many people have a nostalgia for them, seeing them as lucky or fun to collect. And some retailers have voiced concerns in recent weeks as supplies ran low and the end of production drew near. They said the phase-out was abrupt and came with no guidance from the federal government on how to handle customer transactions.
Some rounded prices down to avoid shortchanging people. Others pleaded with customers to bring exact change. The more creative among them gave out prizes, such as a free drink, in exchange for a pile of pennies.
“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 U.S. Mints in Philadelphia and Denver have been pennies.
Treasurer Brandon Beach was in Philadelphia for the final production run. The Treasury Department expects to save $56 million per year on materials by ceasing to make them.
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 as lucky keepsakes.
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 of that through line when it comes to the penny.
“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.”
