I normally enjoy The Atlantic but WTF is this?
Wow—you are talking like a baby angel raised by puppies in a beachfront palace with no right angles, who has never attempted to wrench useful information out of a government agency’s public-affairs officer. I would give anything to spend 30 narcotic minutes in your gumdrop world. Let me take your round little face between my hands and squeeze it tight as I scream this
I couldn’t get through the article with this writing style…
The author has 4 other pieces written, and before that she wrote for Gawker, New York Magazine (like not even the Times) and GQ. I’m going to venture that there’s some nepotism going on somewhere.
AI slop
Even if they’re generating articles, I’d have thought that they’d at least be reading them before publishing them.
It’s fine. They have AI reading them too.
checked out the author’s wiki and she originally came from gawker writing things like “My 14-Hour Search for the End of TGI Friday’s Endless Appetizers”. Not all slop is ai
News Is Trash Now | Journalists lose all integrity as they go all-in on generating click-bait nothing burgers to drive up ad revenue
Plus the articles are unreasonably long, repeats and finally gets to the point at the end, which I think is to fit more ads.
Huh? You just spend them, the government didn’t outlaw the penny lol they just stopped making it, they don’t need a “plan”
I will take all of your unwanted pennies. Preferrably pre 1983, but ill take them all
they are at the ripping copper out of the walls stage of “draining the swamp”.
As Josh Johnson says… This is crackhead behavior
Just wait till copper goes up in value a little bit. In the 00’s gangsters were melting pennies down by the ton for the small amount of copper in them. Wouldn’t call them “trash” exactly…
Since 1982 Pennys are zinc with a thin (2.5%) copper cladding.
They’re not copper anymore
You mean copper coated zinc. Which can’t be recycled, and already has about 5 cents of metal in them
Reminds me how I visited relatives in Russia and they were just throwing their change away. Literally in the garbage. There was barely a place that would take them anyway so why keep it. It still feels very weird to toss money like that, even if it is not even a cent.
Weird. Do they not have the equivalent of CoinStar there? It’s a nice occasional boost when the coin jar gets full.
We did ours recently, found 2 large containers of coins my wife and I had. Cashed in almost $100 in change we didn’t expect. Was nice.
It is weird, and I don’t know if they had something like that. My guess is that getting small change in the first place was rare and it was not worth bothering for most.
Just for context, I am talking about копейки (kopek). Around 2003, the ruble was actually rather strong, with up to 23₽ to 1$. So 23 kopek would be 1 cent.
The last time I was there was in 2019 (for two obvious reasons). Back then the exchange rate was shit, with about 60-80₽ to 1$. The thing was that few places even gave you change in coin form. I remember relatives telling me that pharmacies are basically the only place that had prices with kopeks. The way it would work when shopping - apart from the fact that 99% paid with their phones and not with cash, I was the exception since I didn’t have a Russian bank account and couldn’t get one with my Russian passport - was that they would round prices, usually in your favor. So if you owe 2763 rubles (or 2762.88), and you gave them 3000, they would return either 240 or even 250, depending on how much change they have. They would also get majorly annoyed if you didn’t have “760” on you since they usually didn’t have change. I rarely got change back to the ruble (in this example 237). I definitely never got kopeks in a supermarket and just couldn’t use them there.
So maybe accumulating change would take long time?
Please note that I am not a local, so my knowledge of Russian money culture and habits aren’t the best or most reliable source. It’s my experience but there are surely more qualified people around here to chime in.
Where I live, In Europe, these machines take a 10% commission.
When I have a sizeable amount of coins, I take bags to my local big box store, and use the self checkout. Some registers take cash. I just dump a handful, and top up with bills.
Ah, I really like that idea.
Use them as screw washers.
They are still legal tender, the Mint just isn’t producing them anymore. If things stay that way, eventually they will just become rarer and rarer until no one really sees them anymore (we stopped caring about them decades ago). Why bother with some convoluted, expensive plan to do anything about them? It’s really a problem that will solve itself for the cost of someone a bank occasionally delivering a bag of them to the Mint as they do with any currency which is old and should be taken out of circulation.
Right, big nothing burger if that’s the case. The headline made it sound like not only did they stop minting new ones but that existing ones were also suddenly worthless.
Depends on how much actual thought was put in. The poorest segment of the population uses a fuckton of cash. There could be a massive implicit transfer of wealth going on if the Dollar Generals of the world are allowed to construct prices around an implicit $0.04 gain from rounding up.
Not how it works…
Not how what works? If you don’t think stores are going to round up thier prices, i got a nice bridge for you.
The existing one’s are worthless and trash, you could get more money off them as scrap metal they just also are legally required to take them at stores.
$0.0085698 is the melt value for the 1982-2014 zinc cent on November 17, 2025.
But if you have 100 pre-1982 pennies they’re worth $3.188!
Time to get melting. I’m sure I have a few hundred older pennies from grandpas old basement. Just gotta weed out any special ones, or not.
You can gravity sort them fairly easily and quickly
The US made half sent coins for quite a while. Most people have no idea.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Half_cent_(United_States_coin)
If people still know about the British half penny (pronounced haypenny) it’s because it’s mentioned in that xmas carol. There’s a ton of old currency that no one cares about and no one will miss the penny. I thought it only survived as long as it did because it’s got Lincoln on it and IL (his birthplace) didn’t want the symbol to go away
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halfpenny_(British_pre-decimal_coin)
Fun fact! The hapenny had a decimal version as well. I have about 300 of the damn things.
Canada: “First time?”
Just deposit them in the bank. Simple
Paging Timothy Dexter
Collect them, make rolls, and then stuff them in your pants to impress
I’m trying to imagine how having what looks like a bunch of small dicks in my pants would impress. Or, more accurately, who.
Polyphallophiles, if that’s a word that exists
It does now.
I would be impressed
Someone who likes small dicks, obviously.
This article was super interesting to me. Especially the part about how the system wouldn’t be able to handle it if everyone tried to turn in their pennies all at once.
Aren’t 300B pennies like… 3B dollars?
