From the editor: The penny’s last lesson

The United States one-cent coin embodies the democratic ideal that every citizen participates in the economy, no matter how modest their means.

For generations, the penny served as an entry point into commerce for children receiving their first allowance, immigrants building new lives cent by cent and working families stretching tight budgets – a reminder that small contributions accumulate into something meaningful.

Finding a penny became a token of luck, spawning the enduring rhyme about "heads up" good fortune.

The concept of the "penny saved" elevated thrift to a national virtue, while "not worth a penny" became shorthand for worthlessness itself.

A sudden windfall — “pennies from heaven.”

During economic hardships — from the Great Depression through modern recessions — the penny took on outsized symbolic importance, representing resilience and the refusal to waste even the smallest resource.

Charitable coin drives have collected millions in pennies, transforming pocket change into meaningful community support and teaching that no contribution is too small to matter.

Yet the penny's current predicament—costing more to produce than its face value, accumulating in jars rather than circulating freely—raises questions about when symbols outlive their utility.

The penny forces us to confront uncomfortable truths about inflation.

In the mid-90s, I took a trip to New York City with a friend of mine.

At that time, most of the businesses we visited had already phased out the use of pennies, opting for the “cash rounding” system.

I remember one of the shop owners saying, “You’ll see it happen in the Midwest in the next few years.”

Well, it took more than a few years, but it looks like that might be “on the horizon.”

This summer, the U.S. Treasury Department placed its last order for the metal discs used to make the penny.

The U.S. Mint has estimated that it will save $56 million in material costs by not producing pennies.

According to its annual report, it produced about 3.2 billion pennies in 2024.

It will stop minting them in early 2026 after over 230 years of production.

And, as the U.S. Mint prepares to stop making them, businesses, such as Kwik Trip, are preparing to phase them out.

The company recently announced that they will adopt the rounding policy at all of their stores — rounding down to the nearest five-cent mark.

The penny's impending retirement  will not remove the lessons it taught — that every contribution matters, that small acts of saving compound into security and sometimes, that resilience means adapting rather than clinging to what was.

The penny taught us not to waste resources, and following that lesson means letting it go.