They are still legal tender, the Mint just isn’t producing them anymore. If things stay that way, eventually they will just become rarer and rarer until no one really sees them anymore (we stopped caring about them decades ago). Why bother with some convoluted, expensive plan to do anything about them? It’s really a problem that will solve itself for the cost of someone a bank occasionally delivering a bag of them to the Mint as they do with any currency which is old and should be taken out of circulation.
The government has no plan-
They have concepts of a plan.
Huh? You just spend them, the government didn’t outlaw the penny lol they just stopped making it, they don’t need a “plan”
the fuck do you mean there is no plan?
stop making pennies. transactions in cash can be rounded to the nearest five cents. pennies are still legal tender
the fuck else do you need to do about it?
too bad nobody nearby has done anything like this recently, and could be studied
Canada phased out the penny from 2013-2013. It was an adjustment, but it was not chaos. Pennies of certain periods are still taken as legal tender and accepted by banks.
Per Wikipedia:
"Cash transactions in Canada are now rounded to the nearest multiple of 5 cents.[54] The rounding is not done on each individual item, but on the total amount, with totals being rounded to the nearest multiple of 5, i.e., totals ending in 1 or 2 round down to 0, totals ending in 3, 4, 6, or 7 round to 5, and totals ending in 8 or 9 round up to 10.[54] This is typical of cash rounding methods (not specific to Canada). While existing pennies will remain legal tender indefinitely, those in circulation were withdrawn on February 4, 2013.[55][48][56]
Based on technical specifications provided by the Mint Act, only pennies produced from 1982 to their discontinuation in 2013 are still legally “circulation coins”.[57] The Currency Act says that “A payment in coins […] is a legal tender for no more than […] twenty-five cents if the denomination is one cent.”[58] Nevertheless, once distribution of the coin ceased, vendors were no longer expected to return pennies as change for cash purchases and were encouraged to round purchases to the nearest five cents.[59] Goods can still be priced in one-cent increments, with non-cash transactions like credit cards being paid to the exact cent.[60] "
The article is about what to do with all the actual physical coins. I would assume the treasury will start gathering them and scrapping them. The old copper coins can be recycled easy enough as there’s plenty of demand for copper, but I have no idea what they’ll do with all the zinc (copper plated) coins. Apparently they don’t know either as there isn’t any plan in place.
Supposedly when the mint decided to start pulling the 1943 steel cents from circulation years ago they ended up dumping a bunch of them in the ocean to get rid of them. Some people consider that an urban legend but perhaps that could happen.
Supposedly when the mint decided to start pulling the 1943 steel cents from circulation years ago they ended up dumping a bunch of them in the ocean to get rid of them. Some people consider that an urban legend but perhaps that could happen.
Steel was still steel. It would likely take more work to pack those on a ship and unload them in the ocean than just dumping them in a giant crucible and turning them into sheet or bar stock for industrial consumption.
There are some wrinkles, like I think 10 states make it illegal to round to the nearest nickel on cash transactions. Normally this sort of thing might be accompanied by guidance or even a regulation to get everyone on the same standard. Under Trump it was done with no fanfare other than his usual “I did that.” I think people still expect the old ways, where a muppet might come along and explain it to everyone.
I normally enjoy The Atlantic but WTF is this?
Wow—you are talking like a baby angel raised by puppies in a beachfront palace with no right angles, who has never attempted to wrench useful information out of a government agency’s public-affairs officer. I would give anything to spend 30 narcotic minutes in your gumdrop world. Let me take your round little face between my hands and squeeze it tight as I scream this
I couldn’t get through the article with this writing style…
AI slop
checked out the author’s wiki and she originally came from gawker writing things like “My 14-Hour Search for the End of TGI Friday’s Endless Appetizers”. Not all slop is ai
The author has 4 other pieces written, and before that she wrote for Gawker, New York Magazine (like not even the Times) and GQ. I’m going to venture that there’s some nepotism going on somewhere.
Jesus. This article is like getting through a recipe blog. The first third (at leas, I didn’t make it further) is about the author’s knowledge of pennies.
I can only assume, as a person with a functioning brain who has lived on planet earth for nearly 50 years, that the pennies are not in fact trash but perfectly legal tender. I was hoping to find a line in this story to contradict its initial bold claim but…
The initial draft of the story I filed for a popular New York City–based publication was 20,000 words long. (Sadly, all of the best parts everyone would have loved were cut by my psychotic editor, whose No. 1 passion in life was removing 13,000 perfect words from my first drafts; I’m not worried about him reading these words, because a low-class butcher like that doesn’t possess enough humanity to subscribe to The Atlantic—though, if you happen to know William, I would thank you not to send him a gift link to this article.) And what I learned was that there was no sane reason why.
This article should be title: Journalism is Trash.
News Is Trash Now | Journalists lose all integrity as they go all-in on generating click-bait nothing burgers to drive up ad revenue
Plus the articles are unreasonably long, repeats and finally gets to the point at the end, which I think is to fit more ads.
Gimme all your pennies so I can make ingots please and thank you
Just deposit them in the bank. Simple
Collect them, make rolls, and then stuff them in your pants to impress
Excellent source of zinc. I can’t imagine a world without zinc.
I remember the first time as a kid I melted a penny wanting to craft my own electrical connectors for a homemade electronic battleship game, and was so confused. I went “This… this doesn’t look like copper!?” and thus began many decades of disillusionment and disappointment.
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Use them as screw washers.
they are at the ripping copper out of the walls stage of “draining the swamp”.
As Josh Johnson says… This is crackhead behavior
I will take all of your unwanted pennies. Preferrably pre 1983, but ill take them all
