Because currently, there's almost a nickel's worth of metal in a nickel. They know what's coming.
“Because currently, there’s almost a nickel’s worth of metal in a nickel.”
It is worse than that; much of Europe in the 1950s (both Western & Warsaw Pact) started using cheap metals and/or paper. The fact is that soon everything you can buy in a store will cost more than $.09 (it won’t even be possible to make a piece of candy for less than $.10); that is why they aren’t even bothering to make them more cheaply.
Nope, we can't have our currency being worth
the value printed on it,
it's unAmerican. /sarc