This is a Long, but what I thought was an interesting read...So, I thought I would share, Sorry about the copy and paste....

What the end of the penny means for the economy, your piggy bank, and the way America prices items.

President Donald Trump ordered the U.S. Treasury to stop minting pennies.... .
That came after Elon Musk and DOGE made the coin a focus of negative attention for wasteful spending.
There are currently 114 billion pennies in circulation, or $1.14 billion, or 0.006% of U.S. money, and economists say the impact should be minimal, and it could take decades for the currency to truly disappear, but it’s not wholly without potential inflationary and pricing changes.

Talk to end the penny’s production has been bandied about for decades among government officials and economists. However, the talk became policy when, over the weekend, President Donald Trump ordered the Treasury to stop minting new pennies.

“For far too long the United States has minted pennies which literally cost us more than 2 cents. This is so wasteful!” Trump wrote in a post Sunday night on his Truth Social site. “I have instructed my Secretary of the US Treasury to stop producing new pennies.”

Trump’s attack on the penny came after Elon Musk’s DOGE already had targeted the coin for elimination. Among all the contentious battles that the Trump administration and Musk find themselves in over government spending, this is one that most economists and others in the monetary ecosystem seem nonplussed about.

According to the Federal Reserve, there are 114 billion pennies in circulation, or $1.14 billion, or 0.006% of the money in circulation. It costs $192 million a year to produce pennies, about 4% of the Mint’s operating budget but only 0.00003% of the U.S. federal budget. This expense makes the penny expendable, according to economists.

David Gulley, an economics professor at Bentley University, said the estimated cost of making a penny, at around three cents, is an economic burden, “because millions vanish under couch cushions each year, the U.S. Mint must produce a steady stream of replacements.”

Rounding up prices
But banishing the penny could alter the prices of many small-ticket goods.

“Prices would have to be rounded to the nearest five cents to allow for cash payments and correct change received back — that will be the end of $6.99 fast food combo meals,” Gulley said, adding that it’s not clear if businesses would tend to round up or down.

That pricing decision does matter, with some citing the penny’s impact on inflation, but even that appears minimal.

“Businesses might round up more often than down, leading to a slight inflationary effect,” said David Smith, an economics professor at Pepperdine University’s Graziadio Business School. But he added that studies have shown that rounding prices to the nearest nickel does not lead to significant inflation.

In Canada, which eliminated the penny in 2013, cash transactions were rounded to the nearest five cents, based on the total amount of the transaction, not on each individual item.

To the extent rounding up occurs more frequently than rounding down, cash consumers would be paying the price for the cost efficiency Trump and Musk are seeking, said Ajay Patel, a professor of finance at Wake Forest University School of Business.

Canada’s experience in eliminating the penny shows there are some additional costs for consumers to bear. A 2017 paper by Canadian economist Christina Cheung found that penny-rounding in grocery transactions imposed a “rounding tax” of approximately $3.27 million, from Canadian consumers to grocery vendors. For a typical grocery store, though, this amounted to an estimated additional revenue of $157, indicating a minimal impact on individual consumers.

America’s remaining cash consumers get hit
Patel points out that eliminating the penny would only eliminate the penny itself, not necessarily something that costs $5.16. “Anyone writing a check or using a debit card or credit card could have the correct amount paid since no actual cash changes hands, and pennies would not have to be paid by the buyer or returned by the seller,” he said.

There are still people who use cash for many payments, and these consumers would be the most impacted, but the effect would be modest, according to Gulley, as more payments move away from physical currency. As recently as 2015, one-third of transactions in the U.S. were by cash, but that has now fallen to under 20%, and it is expected to continue on the decline.

But that means people at the bottom of the economic ladder will probably feel any penny pinch the most.

“The individuals paying for this benefit will be those who purchase products and services using cash and will continue to do so going forward because they are either unbanked or unable to access debit or credit cards or a digital wallet,” Patel said.

Gates Little, the CEO of Alabama-based Southern Bank, said the financial services sector won’t miss the pennies.

“Eliminating the U.S. penny wouldn’t make any difference in the economy,” Little said. “I can’t think of how it could hurt.”

Patel noted that President Trump only ordered the cessation of minting new pennies, not their purge from use in the currency system. So people can continue using pennies until they are slowly reabsorbed into the banking system and are eventually melted down to recycle their zinc and copper. Patel says the actual elimination of the penny is decades into the future.

Your saved penny may increase in value
Still, Little said, the gazillion pennies hoarded in piggy banks, sock drawers, and hiding under your car seats would gradually increase in value.

“Pennies would become more scarce over time and eventually increase in value. In the near term, they might become useless, depending on how the Treasury treats them. I would think that would have to be in phases so people could convert them to other denominations, thus removing them from the system,” Little said.

There are pockets of population around the country where both of these outcomes matter. Laura Maike, of Burton, Ohio, notes that the Amish will feel the pinch right now.

“Here in Northeast Ohio’s Amish country, we still use pennies regularly,” Maike said of her area, which includes thousands of generally cash-using Amish. “How would this work for cash-only transactions? It would be impossible to give exact change as the purchaser or seller.”

Maike is more bullish, though, on a world in which the end of the penny means existing pennies increase in value.

“I have a wheat penny sitting in my jewelry box because I knew when I found it nearly 20 years ago that they were becoming increasingly harder to find,” Maike said.

Pennies depicting two sheaves of wheat were discontinued in favor of today’s Lincoln versions in 1958.

Smith said there are other benefits to getting rid of the heavy-to-transport pennies.

“Eliminating the penny would save taxpayers millions of dollars each year. In addition, the production of pennies has environmental costs, including the mining of zinc and copper, eliminating the penny could have a positive environmental impact,” he said.

Some Americans are reacting to the end of the penny with a sense of humor. “How will people give their two cents?” said Eileen Kailholz, a retiree in Bright, Indiana.

But it’s not entirely a joking matter. Nate Throckmorton, an associate professor of economics at William & Mary, says it may be time to start keeping an eye on another coin in your piggy bank: the nickel.

“It’s the nickel we should worry about,” Throckmorton said.

It takes three cents to make a penny, but 11 cents to make a nickel....

I'm afraid digital currency is already here. I pay for 99% of everything i buy with a credit card and just pay that off at the end of every month and in return for the convenience, I get points and air miles to spend on travel so I can use my care even more...

Whether we like it or not hard currency is on the way out. We may not see it in our lifetimes, but it's a dead man walking. It's just the nature of the beast. (No pun intended...)

Our primary care Dr.'s office will not accept cash payments. They only accept credit and debit cards.

I started my research by finding and figuring out what scrap copper is worth per pound....Best I can tell with the info I found, is that scrap copper runs around 3 to 4 dollars a pound if its clean. That's stripped wire with no insulation...Copper pipe...etc, etc...
Then I took some pennies and weighed them, did ya'll know that 154 pennies weighs a pound... So, If my math is somewhat correct, that means 154 pennies melted down would get you close to a pound worth of scrap copper which should be worth around 3 to 4 dollars a pound... Thats close to doubling your money and possibly more depending on the scrapyard prices, just by melting your pennies and scrapping them out... Pretty good return on investment if you ask me... So upon doing more research, I found that the dates of the pennies that are 95 % copper are 1982 and back, So, I stopped by my local gas station and asked if I could buy a couple rolls of pennies to see how many 1982 and earlier pennies I would find, and then I could possibly come up with a mean or avg. percentage of copper pennies you could expect to find in a random roll....I think someone has beat us to the punch because I aint found a single one yet dated 1982 or earlier... Anyway, I'm now on a quest to go thru all my spare change and find some of these rare bird pre 1982 pennies.....They'll most likely become collector items one day... I'll let ya'll know and post my findings as I go..... I'm on the Hunt now...so to speak.... P.S. I know its not legal to melt currency and would never attempt it....

Meh

Coins will go first. Just make everything a dollar amount including tax and move on.

My thoughts about that are that there is concern for in office theft if cash is involved and/or so many younger folks have to rely on a cash register to give the correct change back to a customer. On top of that, when a company only takes credit and debit cards, there is no physical bank deposit to make daily, which has always had at least a small risk of theft by a third party involved.

However, I think all folks should know how to give change back from an old cigar box and count it back to the customer from the amount charged, It is the way I learned and when you do that, it always shows any mistake being made, both to the cashier and the customer, so it can be corrected right then.

Oh, and I also was taught how to read a tax table and hand write invoices. This started when I was in 8th grade and my parents bought a feed and seed store in east Texas.

This is also a testament to how dependent society has gotten on electronics to think for them.

It’ll cut down on theft too.

A penny for your thoughts...

They took his very last penny.

Another thing to ponder...Why do they say giving my two cents when it's only a penny for your thoughts...

LOL!

I thought it was illegal not to accept currency. And since they require cards and don’t except a check are they adding in the 3.5 to 5 % some places do now to their total price?

It is illegal. Good luck getting it prosecuted.

The Varsity restaurant in Atlanta stopped taking cash years ago. Cards only.

Negative GhostRider, I’ve always paid cash there.

Well then, their service is free.

A penny is 2.5% copper. You're gonna need to re-figure .......

Some days I feel like I work for pennys on the dollar.