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Well, friends, the time has finally come: No longer will pennies roll out of the US Mint in giddy profusion.
Last week, mourners marked (mocked?) the occasion at a funeral held, appropriately, outside the Lincoln Memorial.
Our change is a-changin’ as we dispense with the pence.
I vividly remember walking as a child on Kingsbridge Avenue in The Bronx one wintry day when my mother spotted a penny on the ground.
“Freddie, pick it up,” she said.
When I didn’t stoop to get it, she grew stern: “Pick it up now!” I did.
That’s when I learned that growing up during the Great Depression had deeply shaped my mother with a fear of economic hardship.
She became a well-trained bookkeeper, greatly valued by her exhaling bosses when their records unerringly passed auditors’ examinations.
In school, we were told how a young store clerk walked miles to return a few pennies to a customer whom he had accidentally overcharged.
For that he became known as Honest Abe — and in 1909, 100 years after his birth, the penny became the first US coin to bear a president’s image.
Now, the lowly penny departs after decades of disrespect.
How many thousands of them have I seen discarded, lying on the sidewalk or dying in the gutter.
Mom would have contempt for anyone who couldn’t sully their pockets with such a humble coin.
Alas, pennies lost their glow long ago, when they stopped raining down from heaven to bring us fortune, sunshine and flowers.
Where are the subway vending machines that dispensed a Chiclet or a piece of Juicy Fruit for one cent?
Will penny loafers go into hiding, or go as extinct as penny candies or a piece of Dubble Bubble gum?
Dodos like me are left to wonder.
We have officially become One Nation Divisible by Five.
No more will math-impaired cashiers have to worry about subtracting odd amounts of change for penny-pinching customers.
We are living in a time of inexactitude, when “close enough” has become the norm.
Let me get past my nostalgia.
There are sound economic reasons for taking pennies out of circulation.
According to the Federal Reserve, it costs 3.7 cents to mint and distribute a penny — nearly quadruple its face value.
Last year, the US Treasury lost over $85 million to put out 3.2 billion Lincoln medals, made of 97.5% zinc and 2.5% copper plating.
All told, there are about 300 billion pennies — $3 billion in legal tender — running loose in the world.
That’s not chump change
Copper is costly nowadays — but prior to 1982, US pennies were 95% copper.
Wouldn’t it make sense (no pun intended) for the government to get penny hoarders to empty their jars of their vintage ones?
Why not offer a penny-wise buy-back program: For every old penny returned, get two cents in exchange.
Melt them down and put the metal to better use, while removing the glut.
Just as the government was stamping out the penny, it introduced an ironic twist to the tale.
The Mint announced it would produce a scarce few cuprous collectibles that would become instantly valuable when they went out to bid.
Sure enough, 232 three-coin sets (matching the number of years since the penny’s birth in 1793), each marked with the Greek letter omega, fetched $16.7 million at auction this month.
I’m not sure how my mother would feel about the way our government has scorned our most unappreciated bit of currency, while seeking to profit from its memory.
But one thing is certain: Somewhere out there, Mom is still balancing her checkbook — down to the penny.
Fred Smith is retired from the NYC public-school system, where he worked as an administrative analyst.