Posted on 04/06/2025 2:54:29 PM PDT by CFW
It can arbitrate disputes with a flip, add shine to DIY art projects and keep fingernails clean when scratching a lotto ticket. But when it comes to commerce, it’s become so useless that even life-long cent collectors have begun cutting losses.
“I've thrown pennies in the trash. Sometimes they’re in horrible condition. They’ve been out in the rain or buried in the dirt or corroded, or they're just damn ugly,” Dan Norris, owner of D&J Coins in Sheridan, told Cowboy State Daily. “I could take it to the bank and redeem it – but they’re pennies.”
Norris was expressing one side of the divided response to the president's February executive order to stop minting new pennies. The logic behind that move is simple: with a minting expense over three-and-half-times its face value, the cent is in the red.
Ironically, the order catalyzed a craze for the latest batch of cents. The penny, it appears, is like a dead-beat ex-boyfriend. You can’t wait to get rid of him, until it sets in that he’s actually gone.
“The resale price of a 2025 Lincoln cent has been averaging about 25 to 50 times its face value,” Takumi Veley, coin and currency expert for the popular online platform Resell Calendar, told Cowboy State Daily.
[snip]
Only time will tell if 2025 becomes a key date coin. But as speculators look to the future, Wyoming coin collectors say the moment has compelled them to look toward the past.
[snip].
“Most people don't look at the profit motive. They've got a desire to have ownership of something historical,” he said. “The fun part of it is just doing the research about where this came from and why it came into existence in the first place. Understanding why it's rare now and what replaced it.
(Excerpt) Read more at cowboystatedaily.com ...
Meh. Depends on how many they produce. 2009 nickels and dimes (quarters, to a lesser extent) are relatively scarce, due to Great Recession halts in production.
I found an 1888 penny in our town in front of an old house. I do not know the original purpose of the house. Maybe it was a doctor’s office.
“The resale price of a 2025 Lincoln cent has been averaging about 25 to 50 times its face value,”
I think it’s all kind of silly.
How many people actually want one? For that matter, how many people want a roll of them for, $12.50 to $25?
Buy one for 25 cents as a keepsake - “the last penny”? Okay.
But buying rolls of them to “hold onto them”? A fool and his money are soon parted.
Irrelevant, since a penny is not used only once. The average coin stays in circulation for decades. Each time it's exchanged, it's worth its face value all over again.
Thanks, but we have TONS of them and many UNCIRCULATED ones, in sets. And these sets are old.
Great question!
Perhaps for good luck?
As they learned when Canada did it, it is a net 1% cost increase on things you buy.
Use your credit card for anything, even for a few bucks, then you won’t lose that 1%
No, sticking put from under the grass. Like from “Somewhere in Time.” 😉
Oh my goodness!
Pre-’64 dimes and quarters are worth more than face value.
About 50 years ago, over a dull winter weekend in Chicagoland, I took the collection of change and rolled it all. For the pennies, I sorted them by year before rolling 'em up. So I have this pile of rolled pennies, sorted by year. (I was REALLY bored that day.) We'll see if that proves to be an unintended benefit.
Didn't sort the other coins by date, didn't have enough of them to make it worthwhile.
My brother did the same thing.
“Irrelevant”
Yes.
DOGE exuberance seeing low-hanging fruit and claiming a rare innocent purely traditional American victim.
When well-meaning but naturalized Elon slips back into the private economy we irrational Natural Born Citizen Americans will start minting them again. To our heart’s content.
Cool.
Back in the mid 70’s the US military commissaries and exchanges in Europe did away with the penny. It was just too expensive to fly the coins to Europe. Costs that ended in a 1 or 2 were rounded down, those that ended in 3 or 4 were rounded up. Didn’t seem to cause any problems.
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