WASHINGTON, D.C. – Americans have a message for the penny: Good riddance.
Around the country, people of all ages are expressing giddiness, relief ‒ as well as a bit of wistfulness ‒ over President Donald Trump’s plan to direct the Treasury Department to stop minting 1-cent coins.
“It’s probably the only good idea I’ve heard in the last two weeks,” said Walt Rok, who was visiting the Smithsonian National Museum of American History with his wife, Pat, from their home in Rhode Island on Monday.
Despite childhood nostalgia associated with the coin, Rok, 70, said he agreed with Trump’s assessment that the penny simply costs too much. Many others agreed with him.
USA TODAY spoke with more than a dozen people on Monday, most of whom suggested the 233-year-old coin is a relic of the past better remembered in places like the Smithsonian, than at the bottom of their junk drawers and purses.
A penny-presser machine near the museum gift shop that spits out elongated copper-colored souvenirs no longer allows patrons to use their own pennies. Once requiring people to plop in four quarters and a penny, the machine now asks that they pay with dollar bills, a credit card, or their Apple digital wallet.
Chris Jacobsen, 59, who was visiting from Michigan, saw the change as a sign of the times.
“I think it should just be shelved, honored for what it was,” Jacobsen said of the penny. “Time to move on.”
A pretty penny’s nostalgia
For many, pennies stand as an enduring reminder of youth – a time when one cent was enough to buy a piece of candy, each new year marked a fresh chance to add a new Lincoln-faced coin to their collection book and finding a penny on the street meant a year of good luck.
When David Hartgrove was growing up in Miami in the 1950s, he would pile the coins atop the counter at his neighborhood sundries store to load up on penny candy.
Hartgrove said he had fond memories of walking to school back then, picking up bottles alongside the busy 4-lane highway. One glass bottle could be turned in for three pennies.
“When you’re 8-years-old, you don’t have a lot of money-making capabilities,” Hartgrove remembered. “Going out and finding Coke bottles, Nehi bottles and Pepsi bottles on the side of the road and taking them to the store allowed you to buy enough candy to live like a king for a half-hour.”
As a young boy in the logging town of Aberdeen, Washington, Caleb Backholm, now 50, never walked past a penny without picking it up. In grade-school, Backholm and a group of his friends would take any pennies they had found throughout the day and hastily slip them into a gumball machine near their bus stop.
More:How much do pennies cost to make? Here’s what to know as Trump calls for pause on production
“When you got a piece of gum that was a good day,” Backholm, 50, said.
But today, like many, he can’t remember the last time he used a penny to buy something. The father of three said his children – all between 18 and 23 years old – did not have the same relationship with the coin that he had as a child.
“When I was [growing up,] if you saw a penny on the ground, you stopped and you got it, and it meant something,” he said. “That era is gone. I wish it wasn’t the case but it is.”
Others, like Marilyn Mason, see the death of the penny as “history in the making” that could bode well for coin collectors, including her son.
The 88-year-old associates the copper coin with her childhood penny loafers and the summer afternoons when she and her friends would place them on a railroad track and wait for a train to smash them down.
To this day, Mason, a retired accountant, checks the date on most pennies she comes across, looking to see whether it corresponds with an important moment or occasion in her life, such as her mother’s birth year.
“There may be a time people will look back and say, ‘Remember when they had pennies?’”
A penny saved
Not everyone is excited about the history-making potential and decluttering that could arise from the loss of the penny.
Otha Anders, 82, has been collecting pennies for more than five decades. He vowed when he started to never spend one unless he absolutely had to and at one point amassed more than $5,130 worth of pennies, which he stored in 15 five-gallon plastic water jugs around his Ruston, Louisiana home. But he was forced to cash them in a decade ago to pay a large dental bill.
When asked if he’d be sad to see the Treasury Department stop minting the coins, Anders was emphatic: “Yes, I would. Yes, yes, yes, yes, because they mean just that much to me.”
Anders said he started saving pennies in 1970 because whenever he spotted one on the street or got one back as change, he saw it as a reminder to thank God.
“I’d give you a dollar before I would give you a penny,” Anders said.
