\n The American penny will pass away later today after a prolonged illness. It was 238 years old.\n <\/p>\n
\n The last penny will be minted Wednesday afternoon at the US Mint in Philadelphia, overseen by Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Treasurer Brandon Beach. <\/em>President Donald Trump announced via social media in February that he instructed the Mint to stop making<\/a> the once-popular coin, citing the cost of production.\n <\/p>\n \n The penny costs nearly four cents to mint, more than the coin\u2019s worth. Once valuable enough to buy \u201cpenny candy\u201d like gumballs and feed parking meters or toll booths, today the penny lives mostly in coin jars, junk drawers or \u201cleave a penny\/take a penny\u201d trays.\n <\/p>\n \n The penny outlived its sibling, the half-penny, by 168 years. It\u2019s survived by the nickel, dime, quarter, and rarely seen half-dollar and dollar coins.\n <\/p>\n \n Despite its demise, the penny will remain legal tender.\n <\/p>\n \n For a coin that seems obsolete, its removal from circulation is causing more problems than expected, especially for retailers.\n <\/p>\n \n Some merchants plan to round prices to the nearest nickel, often a penny or two more. Others are asking customers to pay with pennies to help supply. But in some states, merchants could face legal trouble for rounding up or down.\n <\/p>\n \n Additionally, any savings from discontinuing the one-cent coin could be offset by the need to press more nickels, which costs the US Mint more money<\/a> than the penny.\n <\/p>\n \n The government\u2019s phasing out of the penny has been \u201ca bit chaotic,\u201d said Mark Weller, executive director of Americans for Common Cents. The pro-penny group is funded primarily by Artazn, the company that provides the blanks used to make pennies. \u201cBy the time we reach Christmas, the problems will be more pronounced with retailers not having pennies.\u201d\n <\/p>\n \n Weller said other countries that removed low denomination coins, like Canada, Australia and Switzerland, had guidance for afterwards. Not so in the United States.\n <\/p>\n \n \u201cWe had a social media post (by Trump) during Super Bowl Sunday, but no real plan for what retailers would have to do,\u201d he said, referring to the president\u2019s February announcement.\n <\/p>\n \n Kwik Trip, a family-owned convenience store chain that operates in the Midwest, decided to round down cash purchases in stores where it hasn\u2019t been able to find pennies.\n <\/p>\n \n \u201cThere\u2019s no way that we wanted to charge (customers) an extra 2 cents because we just didn\u2019t think that was fair,\u201d said John McHugh, spokesperson for the company. \u201cI mean, it\u2019s not their fault that there there\u2019s a penny shortage.\u201d\n <\/p>\n \n But with 20 million customers a year, and 17% of them paying with cash, the policy will eventually cost Kwik Trip a couple of million dollars a year, McHugh said.\n <\/p>\n \n It\u2019s not just businesses that face increased costs. Rounding to the closest nickel will cost consumers about $6 million a year, according to a July study by the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond. That is fairly modest, coming to about five cents each across 133 million American households.\n <\/p>\n \n And rounding is not a national solution.\n <\/p>\n \n Four states – Delaware, Connecticut, Michigan and Oregon – as well as numerous cities, including New York, Philadelphia, Miami and Washington, DC, require merchants to provide exact change, according to the National Association of Convenience Stores (NACS).\n <\/p>\n \n In addition, the law covering the federal food assistance program known as SNAP requires that recipients not be charged more than other customers. Since SNAP recipients use a debit card that\u2019s charged the precise amount, if merchants round down prices for cash purchases, they could be opening themselves to legal problems and fines, said Jeff Lenard, spokesperson for NACS.\n <\/p>\n \n \u201cRounding down on all transactions presents several challenges beyond the loss of an average of 2 cents per transaction,\u201d Lenard said. \u201cWe desperately need legislation that allows rounding so retailers can make change for these customers.\u201d\n <\/p>\n \n For that reason, NACS and other retail groups recently wrote to Congress asking for legislation to deal with the questions raised by the end of penny production.\n <\/p>\n \n The penny was one of the nation\u2019s first coins, first minted in 1787, six years before the Mint itself was established.\n <\/p>\n \n Benjamin Franklin is widely credited with designing the first penny known as the Fugio cent. Its current form arrived in 1909 on the centennial of Abraham Lincoln\u2019s birth, when it became the first American coin to feature a president.\n <\/p>\n \n But it has declined in both use and popularity ever since. The Treasury Department had said there was an estimated 114 billion pennies<\/a> in circulation, though they were \u201cseverely underutilized.\u201d So, outcry from the public over its demise has been muted.\n <\/p>\n \n Joe Ditler, a 74-year old writer and historian from Colorado, said he still has an old cigar box filled with mostly pennies given to him by his grandfather. He remembers flattening pennies on railroad tracks or souvenir machines in amusement parks.\n <\/p>\n \n However, he only occasionally uses pennies to make a cash purchase. And he often tosses the one-cent coin in the tip jar.\n <\/p>\n \n \u201cThey bring back memories that have stayed with me all my life,\u201d he said. \u201cThe penny has had a wonderful life. But it\u2019s probably time for it to go away.\u201d\n <\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n The American penny will pass away later today after a prolonged illness. It was 238 years old. The last penny will be minted Wednesday afternoon at the US Mint in Philadelphia, overseen by Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Treasurer Brandon Beach. President Donald Trump announced via social media in February that he instructed the Mint … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":9572,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"","fifu_image_alt":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9571","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/www.jubi24.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/11\/The-last-ever-penny-will-be-minted-today-in-Philadelphia.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jubi24.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9571","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jubi24.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jubi24.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jubi24.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jubi24.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=9571"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.jubi24.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9571\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9573,"href":"https:\/\/www.jubi24.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9571\/revisions\/9573"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jubi24.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/9572"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jubi24.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9571"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jubi24.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9571"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jubi24.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9571"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"Pennies](\"https:\/\/www.jubi24.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/11\/gettyimages-2244371456-20251111224944820.jpg\")
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