Vanishingly rare in the wild?
Say what? Do you mean they aren’t taken in stores any more? If so, then yes. But there are literally still millions of pennies about. Every single person in this country probably has a couple of jars full somewhere in their house. And now no way to use them! They will be around for a long, long time, in my opinion.
No way to use them? Any store will accept them, as they’re still legal tender, and most of the self-serve checkout lanes accept them in their coin slot (one of the few ‘vending machine’ setups I’ve ever seen that will). Most people just don’t bother. And of course you can just dump them in a change machine or deposit them in a bank.
Except to take them to the bank, but that doesn’t seem to occur to anyone. Or, if you don’t mind using one or two at a time, you can play my rounding game.
I spent 2ȼ yesterday in the self-checkout at Safeway. My total was $9.49 and I paid $10.07 (cash, coins first), causing it to round up my change by 2ȼ. So my two pennies turned into four cents! I am a genius! Wealth and power will soon follow.
Except I don’t have any more pennies. Oh well.
The US Mint seems to prefer “Cent” as the official term but doesn’t have any hang-ups about “penny”. For instance:
By ‘rare in the wild’ I meant to imply that you don’t see them in everyday use very much, and that they’re almost entirely not circulating anymore. Of course there are a whole bunch of them in jars, and I even have some myself, but I haven’t found one on the ground in a while, or seen them used to buy something, or even observed them in a donation bin.
They’re still legal tender, and the guidance on cash purchases was that totals should be rounded ‘where pennies are not available’, so you might expect that pennies would linger in the system for a while, still being seen in daily life with decreasing frequency. What I was saying is that we seem to be well along that curve; aside from stashes where they loitering unused for long periods, I haven’t seen many pennies lately, and it’s pretty rare to see them in contexts which imply people are actively using them.
I’d actually be really interested in estimates of the rate of removal of pennies from circulation - what’s the time constant of that function? What fraction of the actively-circulating coins remain in service, and how does that compare to the number that were and are loitering in jars?
In any case, the last few times I actually tried to spend pennies to make exact change, the cashier just waved them away, as if they get so few of them they’re not even worth handling anymore.
Today, we could get them for 91 cents a hundred.
But the net effect would simply be to move millions of pennies in mayonnaise jars on Canadian dressers to mayonnaise jars on American dressers. The US mint could offer to buy American pennies back for 1.5 cents each in a short amnesty program, and then reissue those instead of m making new ones at 1.85 cents each. To be put back into mayonnaise jars.,
Does the US mint actually have to stamp out many pennies these days? We still use pennies in the UK (worth about 1.68 cents) but the only time they are ever needed is because of the stupid shops that insist on pricing things at £x.99. I too have a couple of jars full which I will get around to sorting out one day.
As a matter of interest - what do shops in Canada use these days? $x.98 Or $x.75?
Where have all the pennies gone? Gone to mayonnaise jars, every one.
$x.98.
Everyone’s getting used to rounding.
Buy $1000 in pennies, exchange for $1500. Use that to buy $1500 in pennies… No, the US Mint wouldn’t be that stupid,…except for that time they were.
To promote circulation of the $1 coin, the US Mint sold them at face value and covered shipping and handling. People started using the program to get free frequent flyer miles by buying the coins on their card and just depositing the coins back into their accounts to pay the credit card bill and earning the miles. That means that while these people were getting free airline miles, the government was using taxpayer money to ship these heavy ass coins around that usually never went into circulation. One of the clues to the abuse was the number of coins being deposited still in their US Mint packaging.
The wheatback pennies I inherited were in old glass peanut butter jars. Much sturdier than mayonnaise jars.
Since there’s only two jars, I’m holding on to them and waiting for demonitization. (Spot price: $3.05/lb - I’ll be rich!)
Yes. They made about 7 billion in 2013, out of about 12 billion coins total.
The wheatback pennies I inherited were in old glass peanut butter jars. Much sturdier than mayonnaise jars.
Since there’s only two jars, I’m holding on to them and waiting for demonitization. (Spot price: $3.05/lb - I’ll be rich!)
Some places use to take Canadian currency. I remember in the 80’s, and maybe even early 90’s signs in some businesses saying that they would no longer accept Canadian coins. So it’s not like we haven’t done it before.
I would recommend going through them looking for the valuable ones.
The 1909 VDB is worth $700-3k, 1922 Missing D is $600-30k, etc.
You would need to issue a new series of currency. And certainly it will happen, eventually. People are going to get the idea that they’re going down the wrong path when the smallest denomination becomes the $1000 bill.
Inflation doesn’t stop. It just keeps coming eternally, after all.
It didn’t seem to bother the Italians to have to pay a couple of thousand lira for a cup of coffee. 
Seriously? Wow.
Maybe I’m misremembering, but in the 80’s I think I remember hearing that bus fares in Mexico were like a couple hundred Pesos?
Mexico has since done what I suggested and shifted the decimal point to the left a few spaces.
The South Korean Won currently trades at about ₩1,000 to US$1. The smallest coin in circulation is ₩10. I think you’d fairly quickly get used to paying several thousand won for a cup of coffee or a bus fare.