While visiting the Benjamin Franklin monument in Philadelphia, I experienced an epiphany about pennies, of all things. Although Franklin invented the first American penny and spawned the phrase “A penny saved is a penny earned,” tourists ironically toss these lowly coins onto his monument’s grounds. These relics littering this sacred area epitomize the one-cent piece’s evolution from a worthy component of American life to a readily dispensable nuisance. Seeing them so casually discarded prompted me to ponder the unthinkable: maybe it’s time to abolish the American penny.
Granted, economics aside, it could be argued pennies represent an integral part of American culture—penny candy, penny loafers, lucky pennies, etc. The penny’s sanctity is also bolstered by the image of Abraham Lincoln gracing its surface. With Honest Abe instead of, say, Pee Wee Herman, adorning the penny, thoughts of retiring the one-cent piece become downright un-American.
But lest we become too sentimental, let’s look beyond the cultural quirks and weigh the penny’s practical value. How does it feel when they rattle around in your vacuum nozzle for five seconds before falling back to the floor? Or when you reach into your pocket for a quarter and pull out only pennies? How much time do these pests add to your wait in a checkout line when the cashier fumbles to make exact change for the customer in front of you? Only if you’re in the process of buying something that costs, say, $2.51, is a penny worth anything. You give the cashier a penny so you won’t get back any pennies. There’s your irony: the only way to avoid carrying pennies is to carry pennies. Not a good argument for keeping these ugly little brown things in our lives.
It wasn’t always like this. Before inflation whittled these once-valued coins into irrelevance, pennies bought something. They could buy a stick of gum, ten baseball cards, or a giant jawbreaker. You could even drop them into parking meters or newspaper machines. But what can you buy for a penny now? Anything? There’s got to be something, but what?
To ascertain this, I conducted an experiment. I visited a convenience store and asked the clerk if he carried anything that cost one cent. He grunted, shook his head, and examined me with an expression somewhere between suspicion and sympathy. With his unnerving gaze compelling me to buy something—anything—I purchased a key chain I didn’t need and slinked out of his store, once again cursing the penny’s existence.
In a more conventional experiment to gauge the penny’s value, I approached my seven-year-old daughter Clara while she was doing her homework. I held up a shiny new penny and said, “Here’s a penny, Clara! Just for you!” Years ago, if you offered a seven-year-old girl a penny she would smile, snatch it from your hand, and hop around with glee. Did Clara hop around with glee? Hardly. She glared at me and said, “Are you drunk?”
To further measure the worth of this lowly coin, I conducted a third experiment. In a city square during my lunch hour, I placed ten pennies on the sidewalk, sat on a bench twenty feet away, and observed the unfolding drama. Passersby occasionally glanced down, but no one bothered to grab any pennies. After twenty minutes, I tried to fuel more interest by positioning a quarter among the pennies. Notably, for the next half hour, nobody even picked up the quarter. This begs the question: what’s a penny worth if no one bothers to pick up something twenty-five times more valuable?
With these experiments bolstering my hypothesis, I went on to consider unconventional uses for pennies. For example, thanks to copper’s electrical conduction properties, pennies once served as temporary connections for screw-in house fuses. We no longer have those screw-in fuses, however, so I pondered other practical roles. Try as I may, I could think of only two: flipping for heads or tails and tossing into wishing wells. But even in these endeavors, any coin could perform the same function.
Growing increasingly immersed, I delved further into my appraisal of the penny’s worth—or lack thereof. I Googled the subject to determine how much it costs the U.S. Mint to manufacture pennies. The conclusion? According to the U.S. Mint’s own website, a penny costs about 1.7 cents to create. In other words, by manufacturing something nobody wants, we’re contributing to our national debt. A dubious fiscal policy at best.
Reading further, I discovered the U.S. government mints forty-one pennies each year for every man, woman, and child in America. Because the average lifespan of a penny is twenty-five years, we are each allotted 1,025 pennies at any given time. After exploring my surroundings, however, I unearthed only nine—most of them embedded in my sofa. Hence, if over a thousand pennies supposedly occupy my general vicinity, it’s hard to validate such a lofty allocation when I have at my immediate disposal less than one percent of them.
Sliding further down the Google search results, I encountered opposition to my crusade in the form of an organization called Americans for Common Cents. Oddly enough, this curious alliance’s sole objective is to argue against the discontinuation of pennies. They claim the upper ground for the penny’s preservation, insisting 70% of Americans oppose abandoning the coin. Given the American propensity for convenience, however, I suspect few of this 70% would shed genuine tears should their lives become penny-free.
Let’s review our findings: you can’t buy anything for a penny, they rattle around in your vacuum, children don’t even want them, nobody bothers to pick them up, and it costs more to make them than they’re worth.
As I surveyed the pennies littering the monument’s grounds, an eerie feeling engulfed me— as if Ben Franklin’s spirit had emerged to challenge my reasoning. His ghostly entreaties sparked memories of bringing five pennies to the candy store for gum, collecting enough of them to make a roll, and emptying my piggy bank to search for pre-war coins.
Nevertheless, I whispered back: “Let it slide, Ben.” Far be it for me to question this genius, but abandoning our pennies would, paradoxically, resurrect his invention’s dwindling worth. As the years pass and we encounter fewer of them, we would increasingly treasure these relics—and what could be more patriotic?
The day may indeed come when the only pennies encountered will be the ones unearthed by future archaeologists, but when that day arrives, this beloved slice of copper-plated zinc will be the least of mankind’s worries. Until then, an enshrined penny would no longer be in the game, but like retiring an iconic athlete’s number, we could propel its legacy to its worthy distinction.
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