Turning a funny color in the cup holder

By Marc Robertson - Editor | November 12, 2025

A VIEW FROM THE BRIDGE

“Find a penny, pick it up, and all day long you’ll have…
….a penny.”
Yes, folks, the penny, that absolute base element of the American currency, is fast going the way of the dodo, the coffee percolator and the Rolodex.
It’s become worthless, you see. It means nothing to anyone. It’s a nuisance, jingling around with the keys in your pocket, stuck by a dribble of Dr. Pepper to its unwanted siblings and turning a funny color in the cup holder of your car, barely even used anymore for an ante in a friendly poker game.
More importantly, it’s become more expensive to make than its own face value. The US government has been admitting for years that the penny is too costly to keep minting, and this year announced that its newest shiny batches would be the last.
We are left to wonder what happens now to those cut-off styrofoam beakers beside cash registers at every tired and gritty convenience store across America, covered twice for good measure in gouging ballpoint scribble: “Got a penny? Leave a penny. Need a penny? Take a penny.”
We shan’t be needing those anymore.
For the time being – and I’d say a year or two – we will be rounding up and rounding down all prices to the nearest nickel.
Silvery and somewhat thicker than his more famous but lesser valued and far later successor, Thomas Jefferson has been waiting in the wings to become the favored coin of the republic. Hopefully by design in feigned anticipation he has recently been turned to face us, thereby shielding his peculiarly messy ponytail from view but also glinting, nearly Eastwood-like, cold eyes and clenched teeth, gaunt and resolute, at the millions who may henceforth toss him nonchalantly into assorted cups and sticky-bottomed vessels.
While I agree completely that abolishing something almost prohibitively costly and yet of so little value makes all the sense in the world, I have to say that the very cornerstone of decimalization should, in almost every respect, be upheld as the unit upon which we build all of our transactions. A dollar, after all, is merely a hundred of these little things, and its clothy paper (or papery cloth) is likewise ridiculously expensive to make and lasts only a fraction of time by comparison. In between, the remaining cousins in the range are merely units of convenience, making it easier for us to transport multiples of the base unit without needing extra bags.
All jokes aside about men waiting in the wings to remove the 16th president, we should be aware that the penny must continue existing for some time, rather Elvis-never-left-the-building, as the many ways in which fees, taxes, tariffs, levies, royalties, interest rates and even some salaries are measured in percentages that oft rely on decimals far smaller than can be accommodated by Mr. Jefferson. Just the other day, shoving an energy company’s check into my bank account, I wondered how many drops of oil were represented by the final few pennies in the total that my meager piece of Texas had produced, those stragglers after the obsequious black dot.
All those things must surely change, if we are to relegate coppery Mr. Lincoln to the buff-colored cardboard panels behind glass at museums no one visits, even to faded cigar boxes in some uncle’s attic, revealed decades later as disappointing treasure, green, brown, flecked with stains of sweat and grease, the occasional cat hair, cup holder lint and three salt packets from a drive-through burger shack.
All those micro-percentages will need to be adjusted, because the smaller they become, the less significant and useful, for they can no longer be realized in actual hard coinage.
We witness strange little changes in our world and gradually become accustomed to new ways, eventually forgetting how important something once seemed. This may soon go for the penny but, with apologies to Abe, we may point out that there was a time when the VCR replaced actually going to the theater in person and yet it, too, has been pushed to the curb.
It may be many years before Mr. Roosevelt’s tiny disc becomes the new base unit of our transactions, as for the moment it seems one sneering Jefferson is just too hard to discard.