Easy Sunday: Pennies

I don't bother picking up a penny when I see one on a sidewalk. 

I wouldn't bother picking them up even if I saw a lot of them.

I've done the math.

If I spent five seconds picking up a penny, I could do 12 in a minute. Theoretically I could pick up 120 pennies in 10 minutes of relentless bending-over exercise. That's a good workout. If I could keep that up for a full hour -- down, up, down, up -- and I most certainly could not -- I would have $7.20.

It isn't worth it. 

Worse, I would have 7,200 pennies taken off the ground -- surely a mass of germs -- so I would want to wash them and my hands thoroughly.  And personal history shows that I would not make an errand out of taking them to a bank to deposit. Instead, I would put them in the large jar in my closet where I put small change when I empty my pockets. And they would collect there, taking up space.

Ben Beach writes today about the penny problem. He is a college classmate. He is a mostly-retired writer and editor, now living in Alexandria, Virginia. He set a record for the most consecutive finishes in the Boston Marathon: 54. 

Guest Post by Ben Beach

Have you counted your pennies lately? Apparently there are quite a few in circulation: 728 for every American. And that number’s growing. I found only 115, most in an old beer stein where I put loose change.

The nation’s first one-cent piece was born in 1793. In 1909, President Lincoln appeared on a one-cent coin and became the first real person—as well as the first president—to have his face appear on a regular-issue American coin. It was President Theodore Roosevelt’s idea, as part of a campaign to celebrate the centennial of Honest Abe’s birth.

With all due respect to our 16th president, some people think that we should stop making pennies. That was the recommendation in a recent New York Times Magazine article (“America Must Free Itself from the Tyranny of the Penny”) by Caity Weaver.

Would you support that? There are some good reasons to retire them. It costs almost three cents to make each one and, because so many pennies drop out of sight, the U.S. Mint churns out more than six billion a year. That’s twice as many as the runner-up (the dime). And based on the median American wage of $20.17 (2020 figure), it takes less than two seconds to earn a penny. Yet another reason: We are paying with cash less and less often. Canada, New Zealand, and Australia have stopped making one-cent pieces.

And yet,,,

For Baby Boomers like me, the little coin has nostalgic value. Remember those Bass Weejuns penny loafers? When I was in elementary school, Santa came down the chimney with cardboard penny folders for my brother Randy and me so that we could build a penny collection in an orderly fashion. Our parents taught us that “a penny saved in a penny earned.” Still true.

They add up. When my friend Jean’s father died last year (at age 100), his kids found 3,400 pennies in various places. Think what you could buy with that $34!

You never know where they might turn up. Lee, a retired Connecticut judge, told me he and his wife recently cleared out the filter of their clothes washer and discovered 35 pennies, along with about $4 worth of other coins.

My coffee partner Dave reported, “I encounter them in various locations in our house. For instance, a few years ago I noticed a lacquered box sitting on a seldom-visited shelf in my desk. I opened the top, and the box was full of pennies. I don’t recall how they got there. Another time I was rifling through a cabinet of fishing gear and found an old plastic bag full of pennies. Again, who put them there, and why? Then there’s the drawer in Cary’s desk that has a box full of pennies shoved to the rear, ignored, neglected. I guess in our household orphaned pennies are simply an issue we do not wish to face.”

My college friend Len reported, “I am sometimes tempted to throw away one that I find in my fanny pack or in a desk drawer, but I can't. I put it somewhere out of sight until the next time I decide not to throw it away.”

In 1989 a Stanford University student named Jens Molbak was sitting in his dorm room staring at a jar of coins on his desk, trying to think of the easiest way he could turn all that loose change into some much-needed cash. Two years later, he founded Coinstar, and today there are 18,000 machines where Americans can deposit their coins, about half of which are pennies. You have to pay 12.5 percent of your deposit for this service.

I imagine we’re not far away from the day when one of my grandchildren—all quite young now—will see a penny and ask, “Baba, what’s that little brown coin?” Or perhaps: “Baba, how do you think that dime got so dirty?”

Would you bend down to pick a penny off the sidewalk? For those of us whose knees have done seven decades of duty, that’s not always easy. But my college roommate Dan reminded me of this old saying:

“Find a penny,

Pick it up.

For all day,

You’ll have good luck.”

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