You mean the one that ripped off a less popular socialist board game?
9 Likes
It costs the U.S. government about 2 cents to produce every penny.
IDGAF about the fate of the penny, but this little factoid always seems to get thrown into the mix, and it’s totally irrelevant. The government doesn’t lose money on a penny, any more than they make money on higher-denomination coins, but damn if your brain doesn’t want to jump to that conclusion every time someone says that.
But that’s… just my two cents.
4 Likes
Well it’s been a while since I had the confidence to visit the land of the fingerprint-taking-on-entry free, so I guess I’m behind the times. 
Did you mean to write round down? I don’t follow the logic if that’s the case.
I noticed that too. In fact the BoingBoing post image also shows a wheat-back, which they stopped making in what, 1964?
2 Likes
Total 10.04. Store donates 4 cents to food bank and I hand them a $10 bill. All is right with the world.
Edit: They could just charge me $10 without the donation so you are right that there is no connected reason for the store to donate in this case. My mistake.
Yeah, these days we’ve got the ones where the US Mint made the deal with Disney to promote the Marvel movies.
5 Likes
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.
1 Like
'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!
2 Likes
I still find one on occasion, nonetheless.
3 Likes
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.
3 Likes
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.
4 Likes
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. 
1 Like
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.
3 Likes
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. 
2 Likes
I’m not going to be the one to make the pun about coinslots.
3 Likes
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
2 Likes
You’ll have to do some searching to find the ones made of copper.
