The end of an era —or not

The penny, long derided as a nuisance and praised mostly for sentiment, will soon disappear from U.S. production lines. The U.S. Mint has announced it will cease minting the coin in early 2026, citing its ballooning production cost—now nearly three cents per penny—and the dwindling relevance of cash in a tap-and-swipe economy. It marks a turning point in American currency, and for better or worse, the end of a minor but enduring chapter in everyday transactions.

Still, this is not quite the funeral some may expect. Pennies will remain legal tender, and there are more than enough in circulation to keep rattling in dresser drawers and coffee cans for years to come.

The United States has done this before: in 1857, the half cent—once the smallest denomination—was discontinued as inflation and copper costs made it impractical. If the nation could let go of the half cent in the age of the telegraph and horse-drawn streetcars, letting go of the penny in the era of smartphones and contactless payment shouldn’t be unthinkable.

The truth is, the penny’s disappearance will likely bring little more than a shrug from the average consumer. Economists expect minimal inflationary impact. A handful of scholarly articles and vague official guidance suggest that retailers “may resort to rounding,” a rather open-ended phrase that does little to clarify how commerce will adapt. In reality, some already do round—or skip cash entirely. Canada dropped its penny in 2013 and hasn’t looked back. Even if rounding becomes the new normal, the process tends to even out over time—sometimes up, sometimes down.

Tax law and pricing conventions still lean heavily on cents, so while new pennies will no longer roll off the presses, there remains some friction in fully phasing them out. As long as transactions can result in totals ending in .01 or .99, some form of adjustment—or perhaps nostalgia—will keep the one-cent piece limping along.

Of course, the penny joins a long line of now-defunct denominations. The three-cent piece, minted in both silver and nickel, was ultimately done in by redundancy and confusion with the dime. The short-lived 20-cent coin was so similar to the quarter that it was rejected almost immediately, a failure melted down and relegated to numismatic trivia.

The $1,000 bill (along with its even larger cousins) was quietly discontinued in 1969, though officially it remains legal tender—just don’t expect to get one in change at the gas station.

Then there’s the “half dime,” a coin that proves semantics matter. It did the same job the nickel does now, but in a smaller, shinier, silver form. It was finally retired in 1873 in favor of the more durable—and easier-to-handle—nickel. That name, at least, stuck.

In the years ahead, the penny may take its place alongside other once-everyday items that have slipped quietly into history. Grandparents will someday regale their grandkids with tales of cassette-tape answering machines, clunky carbon paper, and the purple haze of freshly cranked mimeographs. They’ll marvel at slide rules, ashtrays built into car dashboards, the ingenious mechanics of metal ice cube trays with levers and yes, even the fluorescent light fixtures that, oddly, looked like those same ice cube trays.

The penny’s time has passed, but its place in our cultural drawer of odd, obsolete things is assured.