What you’re saying is they’re ‘weighing down your pocket’ but you’d rather take them home and throw them in the garbage then say ‘keep the pennies’ while you’re still at the store?
Or if you can’t do that just toss all your change in something and once a year bring it to the bank/cointstar. That’s what I do, it works out to about $100 a year.
And if you really have to throw them out, at least toss them in the recycling bin.
$100 a year amounts to about 27 pennies a day. I seriously doubt you accumulate 27 pennies a day. I think the average would be about 5 pennies a day, or about 18 bucks a year.
I said “toss all your change”. Since he already made it clear upthread he had no interest in saving up pennies, I was trying to make it worth his while by saving all his change (including the pennies). Let’s say he averages 2 pennies a day and I know I average $100 a year in loose change*, that works out to 7% of your loose change, that’s nothing to sneeze at.
*Here’s my proof. I started this bag on 12/9/2005, the day my daughter was born and cash it in every few years, it’s part of the money I put into her college savings account. It’s odd how close it works out, but every time I cash it in, it’s always just about $100/year.
Ah. Thanks.
Or better yet, if you’re using cash just spend them as you go. You’ll never have to worry about coinstar fees, or weighing down your pocket, or sorting them when you clean out your car. Get in the habit of having your coins in hand before you get to the register and it takes less time than throwing them away, and saves you money as well.
they make great screw drivers, tire thread gauges, gambling tokens for poker games, slingshot ammo, spacers, washers, emergency fuse for nuclear power plant backup generators…
That’s right: so next time the barrista says, “That’s $9.99 for your coffee and donut,” say, “So, here are 4 pennies, and 2 dimes, and 3 quarters, and 4 engravings of General Washington, and 1 of Secretary Hamilton. Just give me a picture of honest Abe as my change.”
I’ve been hording pennies for a few decades. It’s over $250 now, all sorted by year and mint mark.
We could probably ship the pennies on a regular truck at this point.
Agreed. Get rid of the penny, that frees up a slot in the cash drawer for the dollar coins (which I think everyone hates but me), so then we can ditch the $1 bill next.
I think keeping pennies in a jar is a tremendous waste of effort. It takes four and a half pounds of pennies to buy a six-pack of decent beer, which will probably take seven months to accumulate. It’s a total waste of time and effort to lug a flour bag’s worth of weight to a supermarket to get screwed by the high fees of Coinstar just to get a damn buzz on.
Pennies: a huge waste of taxpayer money (since it takes two to two-and-a-half cents to mint each one), a waste of weight in your pocket or in a jar, with absolutely no useful relevance to modern life.
I’m envisioning these scenes from Breaking Bad where there is a huge pile of cash, only that you have a similarly huge pile of pennies… adding up to $250.
I’m with the tossers. Hell, I toss nickels and dimes too. I estimate that I make a cash transaction about 3 or 4 times a year at this point, so the loss is beyond trivial.
I started a thread about this a while back to see if anyone else saw it my way. [I have never told anyone else, unless they see me do it and ask]. Truly staggering how judgmental people were about it. Have some perspective people!! I bet most of you waste a ton of money each day that could be better spent helping others. Don’t be so quick to judge.
Also pretty decent guitar picks. And you can’t beat the price! [This is my only reason for ever not throwing them away]
I’ll be riding my bicycle down the road at 15 mph and if I see a penny, I’ll stop and pick it up. I was born pretty poor and old habits are hard to break.
However it’s time for the cent to go the way of the dodo bird. It costs more than a cent to make one and they aren’t even all copper anymore. Just stop making them and round everything to the nearest nickel.
It’s hardly a new idea: Australia did it in 1991. New Zealand in 1990.
I like this idea very much! 
I saw flooring done using copper pennies and some type of adhesive grout; it looked great. Mr. Beata calculated the cost per square foot and said it would still be fairly expensive.
When gas prices were at their peak in 2008, I worked with a woman who also worked at a convenience store, and she could never get over the people who would yell at her for the price of gas (as if she had anything to do with it) and then said they didn’t want their pennies.
:smack:
While in recent decades houses come with circuit breakers, older houses were built with fuse boxes–and people would occasionally use a penny as an emergency fuse–and sometimes this penny didn’t get replaced with another fuse.
I find it surprising people have large accumulations of pennies since there has been a huge transition to plastic (credit or debit cards).
I’m a tosser as well, been throwing them out for years now. I barely use cash anymore because I hate coins so much, but when I do get them, it’s silver money into whatever change receptacle I have handy, brown money in the trash. The only thing I use coins for is parking and the occasional soda, and copper is no good for those anyway.
It’s not worth the headache for even $20 a year at the coinstar, and there’s no way I see even $20 in pennies a year. At this point, I probably touch less than a dollar’s worth.
I think the US needs to get ahead of the curve and stop producing anything smaller than the quarter.
Throwing metal away is criminally wasteful and selfish. If you can’t or won’t use, then, as others suggested, don’t take it, or donate it to someone who wants and needs the coins.
Yeah, I agree, we should abolish the penny, but as long as we still have it, don’t throw it in the trash.