Can you remember the last time you received a penny? If you’re like most Americans, you tossed it into a “penny jar” or piggy bank, or it fell unnoticed beneath the cushions of your sofa. In other words, you barely gave it a thought.
That may be because pennies aren’t worth the copper-coated zinc they’re made of. Each 1-cent coin costs the United States Mint more than 3 cents to produce, and the result is a coin that most people don’t spend. In fact, Americans have stashed away an estimated 250 billion pennies—about 700 per person—taking them out of circulation, according to the U.S. Mint.
Ironically, this hoarding of nearly worthless pennies creates a demand for even more of them. Last year, the Mint’s facilities in Denver and Philadelphia produced more than 3 billion replacement pennies so there’d be enough for every cash transaction in the U.S. that required them.
“At the policy level,” says Philip Diehl, director of the Mint from 1994 to 2000, “I think everybody agrees this is ridiculous.”