Sure, sometimes the rounding works in your favor. At McDonald's the other day, my change should have been 24 cents, but I was handed a quarter instead. In another transaction, though, I ended up paying an extra 3 cents. Maybe it eventually balances out on paper, but that's not the point.
The point is this: the U.S. Mint estimates that roughly 300 billion pennies are currently in circulation. For context, the Mint typically produces between 5 and 7 billion new pennies each year, and even in 2025—after production was halted—one billion pennies were still minted. We are not running out of pennies. Not even close.
Yes, about 8% of pennies "disappear" annually—into jars, drawers, couch cushions, parking lots and the void of everyday life. But even with that attrition, the idea that we've suddenly hit a nationwide shortage is absurd.
The hard truth is simple: there is no penny shortage. We're being misled.
Whether or not this qualifies as gouging, it's undeniably dishonest. Businesses don't want to deal with pennies, and they've spotted an opportunity to quietly pad their margins even if only roughly 20% of all transactions conducted are done with cash.
Maybe it's small beans, I'll admit. But what frustrates me here is the blatant falsehood of it all. No federal authority—the president, the U.S. Mint, the treasury—has told anyone to stop using pennies. In fact, they've emphasized the opposite.
There are plenty of pennies in circulation, they remain legal tender, and people should continue using them.
So, why the signs? Why the warnings? Why the fiction of a "shortage"? It's a completely manufactured narrative, and a dishonest one.
And there's another wrinkle here. If businesses keep pretending pennies are scarce, and the government doesn't put a stop to it, then the burden shifts to nickels. That's an even bigger problem. A penny costs about 4 cents to produce, but a nickel costs 13.8 cents. Eliminating pennies, then, doesn't save money—it substantially increases minting costs. If nickels have to fill the gap for every rounded transaction, we'll need far more of them, and the financial loss grows.
Essentially, eliminating the penny to reduce minting costs falls flat.
If we ever reach a genuine penny shortage, then fine—let's revisit the conversation. But right now, the penny is still plentiful, still valid, and still very much a part of our currency system. Did they mint one billion new pennies in 2025 just to have them be obsolete and wasted scraps of copper in 2026? Hardly.
Businesses should stop at once, perpetuating a false narrative and return to giving accurate change until the last penny ceases to exist. Which, by conservative estimates, won't be until 2085.
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© 2025 Jim Bauer
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