Unpopular Opinion: Killing the Penny Was the Right Call

The penny just lost its last fight in Washington. Congress gave final approval to the Common Cents Act in the final week of September, a measure that formally ends production of the one-cent coin and lets retailers round cash purchases to the nearest nickel, according to ConsumerAffairs. The reaction has been loud: nostalgia for the Lincoln cent, accusations of a stealth tax on shoppers, and warnings that the poorest cash users will pay the price. Here is the unpopular opinion: killing the penny was the right call, and the panic about rounding misses the point.

The Math Behind Killing the Penny

Start with the production cost, because it ends the argument on its own. Each penny costs nearly four cents to manufacture, meaning the government loses money on every single one it strikes, as reported by USA Today, citing the Mint's annual report. Killing the penny is expected to save about fifty-six million dollars a year in material costs alone, according to the Associated Press. More than three billion pennies were still minted for circulation in the year before production stopped, each one a tiny loss the moment it left the presses. A coin that costs multiples of its face value and piles up in jars by the billion is not a cherished tradition. It is a manufacturing habit nobody bothered to question.

The timeline shows how quietly this was settled. The president ordered the phaseout in February 2025, the Mint stopped striking new pennies for circulation that same year, and Congress finished the job in September, with both chambers passing the bill by unanimous consent and sending it to the White House, as reported by the ABA Banking Journal. Bankers like the clean rules: the measure will "modernize the nation's coinage system," according to American Bankers Association president Rob Nichols, and it requires the Treasury to give Congress sixty days' notice before discontinuing any other circulating coin. The bill that made killing the penny official passed both chambers without a single recorded objection.

Rounding Will Not Wreck Your Wallet

The part that worries people is the rounding. Under the new rules, cash totals ending in one or two cents round down and those ending in three or four round up to the nearest nickel, with rounding applied once to the total after taxes, not to each item. Purchases paid by card, check, or phone stay exact to the cent, and every penny already in circulation remains legal tender indefinitely. That last detail matters: nothing in a change jar becomes worthless, and anyone who prefers exact change can simply keep spending the coins they already have.

The counterpoint to killing the penny runs on fairness, not math. Researchers at the regional Federal Reserve bank in Richmond estimated that rounding could cost American shoppers about six million dollars a year, since totals land on round-up values slightly more often than round-down ones, as reported by iHeart. That is a real number, and it deserves an honest answer: six million dollars spread across the entire cash economy is a rounding error on a national scale, and the law even tilts toward workers by requiring cash wages to be rounded up, not down, when exact change is impossible. There is one genuine wrinkle: the nickel, which inherits the penny's job as the smallest coin, costs nearly fourteen cents to produce, according to USA Today's coverage of the Mint's figures — which is why the bill also directs the Treasury to study cheaper metals for the five-cent coin.

The World Already Ran This Experiment

Canada already proved this works. Ottawa stopped distributing its penny in early 2013, told retailers to round cash totals to the nearest five cents, and kept every card payment exact to the cent, according to the Government of Canada's official backgrounder. A Bank of Canada study found the inflationary effect of eliminating the penny would be small or non-existent, because rounding applies once to the final total rather than to each price tag. If killing the penny caused prices to spiral, the data would show it. It does not.

Australia and New Zealand went further, dropping their smallest coins years ago, and a Canadian Senate committee report found no noticeable effect on inflation in either country. One consumer survey even recorded prices falling slightly after the change, crediting competition between retailers, according to the report. The deeper reason killing the penny is defensible is that the coin had already stopped functioning as money. Pennies do not buy anything; they exist to make change, and most of them never make it back into circulation, which is why billions had to be minted every year just to replace the ones swallowed by jars and car seats.

Nobody is required to love this. The penny dates to 1793, the Lincoln cent has run for more than a century, and the coins in a dresser drawer will still spend exactly as before. People who save their coppers can spend them, roll them, or donate them, the same options Canada's backgrounder suggested to its own savers. The unpopular part of this opinion is not about sentiment. It is about refusing to confuse sentiment with policy. Keeping a coin that loses money on every strike, to guard against a rounding effect that three countries could not find, is nostalgia with a federal budget line. The honest case for killing the penny does not require anyone to stop loving the coin, only to stop subsidizing it.

So spend the jar, keep the wheat pennies, and let the nickel become the smallest coin in the register. Killing the penny is not an attack on cash or on the people who use it. It is arithmetic catching up with nostalgia, and it was overdue. For more well-reasoned heresy, see more stories in this lane, including the recent argument that the four-day week is overrated.