"Pretty Penny was her name, she was loved and we all will miss her".

End of an era

Death of the penny - US Mint set to make final coin after Trump decree

The penny is about to drop in America - for the final time.

President Donald Trump says the small coin is "so wasteful" and should be abolished.

The US Mint has made its final order of penny blanks (flat metal discs that are made into coins) and expects to stop making new pennies once those are cashed out.

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"For far too long the United States has minted pennies which literally cost us more than 2 cents," Mr Trump wrote on Truth Social in February. "This is so wasteful!"

"I have instructed my Secretary of the US Treasury to stop producing new pennies."

Made from zinc with a copper coating, the penny was one of the first coins made by the US Mint after its establishment in 1792 and there are now around 114 billion currently in circulation

Do you care? Does this affect your life in any meaningful way? Probably not. As society moves rapidly into cashless environments, many people don't even carry paper money, much less coins. With so many pennies still in circulation, it will take a long time before they disappear forever. Will that even happen? Eventually.

But what about prices?

The Penny Is On the Way Out. Can You Still Buy Something With It?

With the Treasury's announcement, which came at the behest of President Donald Trump, the anti-penny side decisively won the battle over pocket change. And bipartisan legislation has been introduced in Congress to remove any doubt about the legality of the Treasury's move. In April, a group of Democratic and Republican senators proposed a bill that would officially end penny production, and require retailers to round up or down to the nearest five cents for cash transactions.

In a post-penny world, it's unlikely that price tags will change to reflect the new five-cent minimum denomination, if the experience of our neighbor to the north is any guide. Price tags ending in .99 are still common in Canada, which eliminated the penny in 2013.

Now, anything costing 99 cents will be rounded up to $1 at the cash register. Believe it or not, researchers have studied the potential impact of this. A 2001 study found that merchants would pocket all those extra pennies, equating to a "rounding tax" of $600 million a year on customers. But those findings were challenged by a 2007 article that found the "rounding tax" virtually disappeared when you took sales tax into account, since it pushed up prices on individual items enough to make them round down sometimes.

And if you are the type of person who sees the opportunity to get free stuff by making one- or two-cent purchases and having them rounded down to a cool $0, the lawmakers are ahead of you: The law specifies that those amounts will round up to five cents.

Interesting Reddit thread about the discontinuation of the penny. Reddit is a rabbit hole at best and more often than not it's a cesspool. Enter at your own risk.

What will actually happen when the US no longer has the Penny?

Pressing matters

How many of you collect pressed pennies? Maybe your kids or grandkids do/did.

It will probably take some time, but these will become a thing of the past, too.

Where was the first engraved penny pressed?

In 1893 at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, Illinois the first pennies were rolled through hand cranked mill type machines with reverse engraved dies. The pressed pennies were immediately popular through 1916. Starting in 1917 pressed pennies decreased in popularity until after 1932 when the pressed pennies regained popularity. The popularity of pressed pennies has only increased through the decades. Historically elongated coins (pressed pennies) are placed into three categories: Colloquially from 1893 to 1965, Modern Elongateds from 1966 to 1985, and Contemporary Elongateds from 1986 to present day.

Before the penny enters the dustbin of history, let's learn a little more about it.

The History of The Penny

The history of the Penny goes back over 1,200 years ago, as the first pennies were made all the way back in 790 A.D. The word “penny” and its variations across Europe, including the German “pfennig” and the Swedish “penning,” originally denoted any sort of coin or money, not just a small denomination. In fact, Great Britain is actually the only country to have a denomination that is officially called the penny. In the United States we have been calling our one-cent coins “pennies” for centuries, largely because our one-cent coin was inspired by the British penny. However, the one-cent coin or “cent” is the official name of the coins we endearingly call pennies today. Over 300 billion one-cent coins, with 11 different designs have been minted since 1787.

The penny was the first currency authorized by the United States from the Mint Act of 1792 signed by George Washington. The design for this first one-cent coin was suggested by Benjamin Franklin, and for over two centuries, the penny’s design has symbolized the spirit of the nation, from Liberty to Lincoln.

Read the whole thing. Details of every version of a one cent coin going back to the late 1700s. Photos of each version there as well.

DJ Doof - Penny Jukebox Version

What say you, Hordelings? Throw your 2 cents in on this topic.

Prayers up for KT as she recovers from surgery