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When I came up two cents short on a $50 gift card at Chili’s last week, the server, my friend, and I all laughed. Somewhere, my father would’ve reached into his pocket and fished out the missing change.
He could have.
He’s been saving pennies for more than sixty years. Bags and coffee cans full of them. Some wheat, some copper, some plain old zinc. They sat in his basement like ballast, heavy and inert, the weight of a lifetime of thrift. Now they sit in his room in Harrisburg.
This week, that faith officially went out of circulation. Radio Iowa reports that the U.S. Treasury struck its final penny in Philadelphia after more than 230 years of minting. The Trump administration ended production because it cost nearly four cents to make each one-cent coin. Collectors estimate 250 to 300 billion pennies are still rattling around in jars and drawers, but they’re on their way to extinction.
It’s easy to shrug. Who misses a coin that clutters countertops and falls between couch cushions? Yet there’s something quietly sad about losing the smallest unit of value in a country that once prided itself on thrift and fairness.
The penny wasn’t just a coin. It was a tangible measure of care. Kids pressed them into their palms for bubble gum and baseball cards. Clerks handed them back to make a total exact. Churches passed them in plates. A penny meant someone had counted closely enough to make things even.
Now we round up or down to the nearest nickel or let an algorithm settle it. At a Panda Express in Fargo, my wife noticed a sign discouraging cash altogether. “Please use card,” it said, as if coins were a nuisance.
Of course, the numbers make sense. The Mint lost $85 million last year producing pennies no one wants. Cash is messy, slow, untraceable. Still, the loss feels symbolic – another small, rough-edged thing worn smooth by convenience.
My father’s pennies are more than currency; they’re a kind of moral ledger. Proof that small things matter, that patience accumulates, that worth isn’t always obvious at first glance. Each one bears Lincoln’s tired face, pressed into metal that now costs too much to make.
When those bags finally go to the recycler, he’ll get paid by the pound. The value won’t come from what’s stamped on the front but from the base metal inside. That, too, feels like a parable of our time.
In my Ode to the Penny, I wrote:
Down in his basement,
the bags sat like ballast –
worth more as metal
than as faith.
That’s where we are now – living in the rounded-up century, laughing at the missing cents, forgetting the weight of what they once stood for.
The penny’s death won’t change the economy. But maybe it should make us pause before we discard the next small thing – time, attention, honesty, grace because it no longer seems worth much.
A penny saved may no longer be a penny earned. But it was once a promise that even the smallest things counted.
Todd Epp is a journalist and writer based in South Dakota. He edits Northern Plains News and writes the ‘Voices from the Plains’ column.
