When will pennies no longer be used as coin of the realm? I have heard that stores will soon be rounding off the prices of their goods so that pennies will no longer be needed.
the rounding off is a good idea. round either up or down to the nearest nickel and after enough times everything evens itself out anyway. however keeping pennies hanging around isn’t really a major cost since the life span a a penny is relatively long. relative to a paper dollar anyway. hence you are more likely to see dollar coins and maybe even 2 dollar coins( see Canada for an example) before pennies are taken out of circulation.
Cecil has touched on this question: