The story of the penny starts in the first US mint, founded in 1792, which produced these

one cent pieces along with other coins, including the quarter, dime, half dime, and a mystery

coin that we'll get back to later. These pennies of the New Republic were born of 100% pure copper.

But two forces conspired to ensure this wouldn't remain the case for long. The value of copper

went up, and because of inflation, the buying power of the penny went down. This caused the mint to reduce the amount of copper in pennies, first from 100% to 95% and then to only 5% copper and 95% zinc. Despite this debasement, in 2006, the value of the metal and older pennies rose above one cent, and suddenly they were worth more dead than alive, melted them to sell the raw copper for profit. In a rational, efficient world, the story of the penny would have ended here, with the government realizing that they weren't worth minting and happy that its citizens were removing them from circulation. But instead, the government made melting U.S. coins illegal and continues to manufacture 4 million pennies each year, which is idiotic as it costs the US mint about 1.8 cents to make each one cent penny. But even if pennies were minted from something more representative of their true value, like plastic or lint, it wouldn't fix the fundamental problem that pennies are bad for people and the economy. Here's why. The purpose of physical cash money is to make it easy to transact the everyday business of buying stuff. A shopkeeper has stuff and you want that stuff. Rather than bartering like savages for it, you use cash as a medium of exchange. To get the price just right, the cash must be divisible into pieces so that you don't overpay. But it isn't divided forever because at some point the value it represents is too small to buy anything worth or bother with, which brings us back to the penny. In the olden days, pennies could actually buy stuff, but no more. Now, if you want to spend pennies, you're going to have to put in some effort. For example, try to pay for 20 bucks worth of groceries with 2,000 pennies weighing 11 pounds and see how that works out. So you have to get rid of them using exact change. But because the United States doesn't include sales tax and prices, unlike more civilized countries, and you can't multiply by 8.875% in your head, you can't get your change ready before you reach the register like a good Samaritan would. The pennies you inevitably fiddle with after discovering the true cost of your goods adds two seconds to each cash transaction on average, which is less than the value of your time and the time of everyone behind you, which is why most normal people don't bother messing with change and the usual penny-pinching culprits are those with nothing better to occupy their day. If you want to spend pennies without being an inconsiderate jerk who waste other people's time, perhaps you can find a machine that will accept them. Good luck with

that. Vending machines won't take pennies, neither laundry machines nor toll booths or parking meters

or anything else because pennies aren't worth the time and effort to count, store and transport them.

In fact, there is only one machine that takes pennies. CoinStar, a leech on the economy that eats

10% of your money while providing nothing in return except the ability to spend cash that was already yours.

The difficulty of spending pennies is why they end up in jars, dead to the economy after a short, useless life, where they failed at their only job,

to facilitate exchange and instead did the exact opposite by being a literal dead weight on every cash transaction.

They must be eliminated.

But you might think won't prices rise and charities lose money without the penny?

No.

New Zealand got rid of their one cent coin, as did Oz.

Finland and the Netherlands ditch the one euro cent as well, though that might have been

because of how absurdly small and frustrating the one euro cent is.

These countries round to the nearest five cents for cash transactions,

and none of them saw prices rise or charitable donations drop. And anyway, the United States

has already gone through this process before without trouble. Remember the mystery

coin from the beginning? That was the half cent. Seen one lately? Of course you haven't. It was

discontinued in 1857 for being worth too little. But when the half cent coin met its fate, it had more buying power than today's dime.

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