A Nickel for Your Thoughts

By Gordon Hopkins “Be careful who you call your friends. I’d rather have four quarters than one hundred pennies.” - Al Capone “Pennies do not come from heaven. They have to be earned here on earth.” - Margaret Thatcher “When someone asks you, A penny for your thoughts, and you put your two cents in, what happens to the other penny?” - George Carlin I like to sometimes begin my column with a quote that is somehow relevant to the topic at hand. There are a lot of quotes about pennies. I mean a lot. Ben Franklin's famous quip, “A penny saved is a penny earned,” is just the beginning. I am now wondering what is to become of all those quotes, now that the penny is doomed.I am reliably informed that the U.S. Mint has made its final order of penny blanks. A Treasury Department official confirmed this just yesterday. That means, when the last of those blanks run out, no more pennies.It was a long time coming, so I'm, not exactly in shock. I've been hearing rumors of the death of the penny for decades. It costs more to produce a penny that a penny is worth, and has for a long time. I couldn't tell you when the last time I had a penny in my pocket.* As the world moves inexorably to a cashless economic system, we see fewer and fewer coins and fewer and fewer paper dollars. However, until the day every last human being buys a hamburger and fries with a plastic card or an app on a phone or a biometric scanner, I'm not sure how commerce will handle the death of one cent pieces. After all, everything still costs $1.99 or $29.99 or $199.99 or $4,211,415.99. Making change will become increasingly problematic. Still, it won't happen right away. After all, pennies are made of metal. They should hang around for quite a while yet, getting more bent and corroded but still spendable. You might want to hang on to any pennies you find under the fridge or between the couch cushions. The law of supply and demands suggest pennies may actually become more valuable the scarcer they are. Perhaps you should hold off taking that big bottle of pennies to the bank until they become harder to find. Or not. Who can say? Speculation is always an uncertainty, as the name suggests. Still, remember what they say, “Find a penny, pick it up, all day long you'll have good luck.”And that brings me back to the quotes. As pennies vanish from public consciousness, will the song, “Pennies from Heaven,” no longer make sense? Will we have to update all those penny quotes?“Dime-wise and pound foolish” doesn't have quite the same ring, does it?At least we won't have to change the best and wisest currency-based quote ever uttered, “A nickel ain't worth a dime anymore.”That one came from Yogi Berra, of course. For accuracy's sake, I just checked my pockets. It turns out, I have three pennies in my pocket, plus and old cough drop.

Debra Kay Brejcha

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