On February 9th, 2025, the United States lost one of its most important features. It wasn’t the unicorn hunting license in Michigan. It wasn’t Topeka’s law banning singing the alphabet out loud at night, or the 100 acres of pizza that people in the US consume daily. It was something far more valuable—the penny. Though it costs 3.7 cents to produce a single penny, the benefits of the penny outweigh its costs.

The cookies at the student store cost 50 cents. How would someone pay for the cookies with fifty pennies if pennies aren’t in circulation anymore? The vending machines accept cash and produce change in coins. How would people be able to receive their 25 cents of change without 25 pennies? Furthermore, other coins wouldn’t be able to replace the penny—paying for a bag of chips that costs 2 dollars and 67 cents won’t work without the penny. 

Everyone knows retailers and businesses are motivated by profit. As a result, without the penny, their capitalistic greed will motivate them to round the prices of their goods up to the nearest nickel. Over time, customers will lose money.

For instance, a bag of chips that costs 2.35 dollars, with a sales tax, could amount to 2.35 + 0.235 = 2.585, which is rounded up to 2.59. There isn’t a way to pay this exactly without 1 cent coins! You’ll end up paying 2.60 dollars! The cost of rounding up to the nearest nickel grows quickly.

Let me give you another scenario: Let’s say someone buys a bag of chips every day for lunch from the vending machine for 160 days a year (they forget for a few days). Every week, they buy their three friends a bag each as well. Within one school year, they will buy 256 bags of chips. And without the penny, they will need to pay an extra cent for each of the 256 bags of chips that are bought. That’s already 2.56 dollars lost! With that money, they could buy themselves another bag of chips or five bowls of Top Ramen instead.

Common arguments in favor of no longer minting pennies include its high production cost. One student says, “I have never used a penny in my life!” Fortunately, penny collectors would offset this cost. The most expensive penny has sold for 2.3 million dollars. Keeping pennies in circulation would increase the chance that a student at Interlake comes across one of these rare pennies. If just 60 students were to find a rare 1943-D Lincoln Bronze Wheat Penny, they would offset the cost of minting pennies every year by over 40 million dollars. Thus the solution to our penny problem lies not in removing the coin, but moving all the expensive pennies to Interlake’s campus.

Removal of the penny may also present important implications for Interlake students. After this devastating coinage loss, more students may resort to walking to 7-11 for lunch, where most prices round up to the nearest ten cents—making their coins more user-friendly for buying food. However, this may lead to more tardy students after lunch, because as the number of people at 7-Eleven increases, the lines will grow longer. As one student put it, “Don’t get rid of the penny! It’s so pretty.”

Credit cards don’t solve these problems either! Sometimes, students are not given credit cards or debit cards to order food, meaning they have to resort to cash. Other times, they may lose their credit cards. When the only way to pay an exact cent is through paying with a card, people who are not able to do so end up losing money.

God save the penny.