Covid puts U.S. penny back on death row

While poking through my own penny accumulator recently (looking for wheat-backs) I found a weird one from 2009. Turns out there were four designs for the penny’s reverse that year (Abe’s 200th birthday), depicting scenes from Lincoln’s life and career.

I’d really like to find the one where young Lincoln is sitting on a log reading a book, but most of my pocket change collection is at my currently inaccessible office.

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'58. First Lincoln cents in 1909 for the 100th anniversary of his birth. First time a president appeared on a coin, imagine that!
Lincoln Memorial replaced the wheat ears on the reverse for 150th and…

which are likely to become quite collectible so hang onto them!

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I still find one on occasion, nonetheless.

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I got a wheat-back penny in change a few months back and got mildly excited. The checkout clerk looked at me like I was nuts.

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At a convention a couple of years ago, the guy at one booth in the dealers room gave us a $2 bill and some dollar coins in change, I think, which was neat.

Wheat pennies are getting rarer, though.

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I bought (and wear) one of these.

When inflation is taken into account, the monetary value that a penny represents is minuscule. By extension, the transactional/functional value that it brings, equally so.
I’d actually like to go farther than the shirt and see us decimalize money.
Dimes, $1 coins (no more $1 bills) $10 bills and $100 bills.
Contrary to the knee-jerk objection, I don’t think people would be burdened with pounds of coins, because people would do what they used to do with change/small bills when I was growing up - they’d make an effort to use them throughout the day.
This is all predicated on the assumption that we’re going to keep using physical cash at all, of course. :slight_smile:

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I’ve gone to the bank to get $2 bills and 50 cent pieces just for the reactions I get.
I’ve never worked a convention booth, so I guess there are at least two of us doing that!

It should be like the way we currently handle fractions of a cent. When you pay 7.25% sales tax on a $1.00 purchase, that doesn’t mean that the vendor really expects you to pay $1.07-and-a-quarter-of-a-cent. It means the purchase gets rounded up or down to the nearest available denomination.

However, if you’re calculating interest on a loan then the bank can track the value of that interest to as many decimal points as they care to. It’s only when you cash in or out that we need to round it off to the nearest penny.

If we got rid of the penny the only difference would be that we’d start rounding prices to the nearest 1/20th of a dollar instead of the nearest 1/100th of a dollar.

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Not first world by any means, but Zimbabwe went the other way.

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So, lobbyists are responsible for the government dithering on the fate of the penny? Does congress maybe need to be “dis-in-cent advised” … ?

Thank you, I’ll be here all night or at least until the vegetables really start flying. :smiley:

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I’m not going to be the one to make the pun about coinslots.

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Actually, far from getting rid of the penny, you guys need to introduce the tenth of a penny coin.

As was posted here recently in another thread

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You’ll have to do some searching to find the ones made of copper.

Turkey was in a bad situation 20-30 years ago

The Turkish lira had slid in value so far that one original gold lira coin could be sold for 154,400,000 Turkish lira before the 2005 revaluation.

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We know why inflation happens. Sustained inflation began in the modern era as a monetary policy choice, because periodic/cyclic deflation results in way too much misery with no good way to alleviate it, and 0% price change is not a stable state/target. Also, as long as the rate of inflation is relatively predictable, it doesn’t really matter how high it is. If anything, the Great Recession taught economists that our current 2% inflation target in the US is too low and/or that trying to target specific inflation rates is just the wrong model to be using.

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The Sacagawea dollar is about the same size as all the other dollars, which is about the same size as a quarter.

Making it heavier, yellow, and giving it a smooth edge is insufficient. A dollar coin needs to be more different from a quarter than that.

Now that vending machine slots aren’t going to drive the design, they could go a different direction. The British pound coin is a good example.

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Ah, I have a stack of 100s I got off Wish.com that look like this. Interesting to know what the intended use is!

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The vending machine slots were driven by the size of the Carter QuarterSusan B. Anthony dollar; the Sacagawea, Native American, Presidential and American Innovation dollars all had to be the same size, weight, and magnetic properties. (The last is what led to the gilding that turns muddy brown seemingly overnight - these are ugly coins when patinated.) There is actually a tremendous number of vending machines in service tooled to accept these coins, despite the fact that they seldom circulate. Is compatibility with them no longer a constraint to the design?

You’re turning into the funnel people:

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