PHILADELPHIA (AP) — The U.S. Mint in Philadelphia is set to strike its last circulating penny on Wednesday, Nov. 12.
President Donald Trump ordered the demise of the 1-cent coin as production costs climbed to 3.69 cents per penny.
The U.S. Mint has been making pennies in Philadelphia since 1793, a year after Congress passed the Coinage Act. Today, there are billions of them in circulation.
In a cost-cutting move instituted in 1982, pennies are made of zinc, with a thin coating of copper. Nevertheless, Trump found them too expensive.
“For far too long the United States has minted pennies which literally cost us more than 2 cents,” he wrote in an online post in February, as costs continued to climb. “This is so wasteful!”
Still, many people have a nostalgia for them, some seeing them as lucky. And retailers have voiced concerns in recent weeks as supplies ran low. They said the phase-out was abrupt and came with no guidance from the federal government on how to handle customer transactions.
Some rounded prices down to avoid shortchanging people, others pleaded with customers to bring exact change and the more creative among them gave out prizes, such as a free drink, in exchange for a pile of pennies.
“We have been advocating abolition of the penny for 30 years. But this is not the way we wanted it to go,” Jeff Lenard of the National Association of Convenience Stores said last month.
Some banks, meanwhile, began rationing supplies, a somewhat paradoxical result of the effort to address what many see as a glut of the coins. Over the last century, about half of the coins made at U.S. Mints in Philadelphia and Denver have been pennies.
U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Treasurer Brandon Beach were expected to be in Philadelphia on Wednesday afternoon for the final production run. The Treasury Department expects to save $56 million per year on materials by ceasing to make them.
But they still have a better production-cost-to-value ratio than the nickel, which costs nearly 14 cents to make. The diminutive dime, by comparison, costs less than 6 cents to produce; the quarter’s cost is about 15 cents.