At an Albuquerque coin expo, the penny’s retirement stirs more talk than sentiment

The 1-cent coin has gone the way of the VHS player. The United States produced its last penny on Nov. 12 after nearly 240 years in circulation as the cost to produce the coin outpaced its value.

At the Albuquerque Coin Club’s semi-annual Great Southwest Coin Expo earlier this month, coin collectors — known as numismatists — were largely indifferent.

“I could (not) care less either way,” said Bob Uzelac, a coin collector from American Fork, Utah. “It doesn’t buy anything anyway.”

The penny has long been relatively useless as actual currency. Cash is falling out of fashion — paper money accounted for only 14% of all payments last year as digital wallets surged in popularity, according to a survey by the Federal Reserve.

A 2019 article from Yahoo Finance titled “30 Surprising Uses for Your Unwanted Pennies” suggested that the coins can be useful for checking tire treads and fixing a wobbly kitchen table. If you have a lot of pennies, the story proposed filling a sock with them to use as a weapon.

The actual cost to the U.S. government to manufacture one penny is 3.7 cents, a cost that has exceeded the value of the coin for 19 years. Perhaps, then, the penny has served its purpose.

“I think when it costs more to make (than it’s worth), you’re really throwing money away,” said Rick Russell, who owns Cheyenne Coins out of Cheyenne, Wyoming.

The United States joins Canada, New Zealand, Australia and the Bahamas, which have all eliminated their penny equivalents in the last four decades.

“I think it’s fine,” said Mark Machosky, a coin dealer from Englewood, Colorado, when asked his thoughts on the downfall of the penny. Machosky told the Journal he hoped it would draw more people to coin collecting, just as the state quarter program had done years before.

Pennies made up some of the coins on display at the expo, though most attendees in the ballroom of the Crowne Plaza Hotel gravitated toward rarer and more expensive offerings like the silver dollar.

Certain rare and old iterations of the penny can be worth something, said Matthew Peacock, coin show organizer and Albuquerque coin and antiquities dealer, like one in his showcase worth about $5,500.

“But as a general rule, yeah, they’re going to be worth a lot less than something like an old silver dollar from the same year, or an old half-dollar, even from the same year,” Peacock said.

The U.S. won’t run out of pennies anytime soon, he said. The Mint produced between 25 and 50 million pennies yearly, sometimes multiple prints of different types.

“If you do the math on that, that’s 2.5 billion pennies or something like that,” Peacock said. “Us running out of pennies or them getting rare is really not a possibility.”

Since the late 1980s, Congress has been considering legislation to eliminate the penny due to cost concerns, though an interest group called Americans for Common Cents — funded by the company that sells zinc to the U.S. Mint — fought hard to keep the one-cent coin, arguing that its demise would hurt charities that rely on change and force retailers to raise prices to the nearest nickel, which might very well happen.

Peacock said he doesn’t feel sentimental about the penny’s retirement. He thinks it’ll probably become a novelty, much like the $2 bill, which was retired in 2013, or the Twinkie, which temporarily disappeared from shelves for several months after its manufacturer, Hostess, filed for bankruptcy in 2012.

“People didn’t care about Twinkies until they thought they were going away,” Peacock said. “I feel like it’s kind of a similar deal where there will be some hype and maybe a new interest, but as far as value or extreme collectibility, that’s — I mean, I don’t have a crystal ball, but I would say that’s not going to happen.”

Ultimately, the end of the penny is a positive, Peacock said, if it piques the public’s interest in coins.

“If it makes old pennies more appreciated, I would say that’s a good thing,” he said. “I’m not saddened by it.”