DENNIS MYERS Against the Grain Advertisement

A couple of days ago I made a $1.74 purchase at a 7-Eleven, for which I tendered seven quarters. The clerk didn't give me my penny in change. Instead, he tossed it into the "penny cup" on the counter. The automatic way he did it suggested he does it routinely. I walked away slowly, then turned back and took my penny. I didn't really care about the penny, but there was something about someone else deciding whether I could have my change that rubbed me the wrong way.

The Gallup survey, which apparently will question people about anything, once asked people if they would stoop to pick up a penny. About three fourths said they would. Chicago columnist Cecil Adams, who answers reader questions, once received a question from a reader asking if it was worth the trouble to pick up a penny. Adams figured that "a proficient penny-picker upper can probably pick up a particular penny in five seconds. On an hourly basis this works out to $7.20 per hour. As of 9/1/97, minimum wage will be a mere $5.15 an hour." I think he underestimated the rate at which people could pick up pennies.

Another Gallup survey indicated that 58 percent of people put their pennies in jars or on dresser tops instead of spending them. A Harvard economist says the penny no longer functions as an unit of exchange.

I remember when penny cups first appeared. They were little paper cups or the bottoms sliced off large Dixie cups. "Need a penny? Take one," they read. "Have a penny? Leave one." It seemed like a nice convenience. Few of us realized that merchants were shifting the responsibility for making exact change from themselves to us. I've frequently looked over the counter into cash drawers to see if they had unused compartments, and they almost always did, which means we never needed the penny cups in the first place.

Over the years penny cups became omnipresent, to the point that tobacco and other companies started manufacturing them for free advertising to give to store owners.

Jason Kottke, one of the very first bloggers, once wrote, "Let's stop to think about this for a minute. This means that somewhere there's a machine (or possibly a whole factory of machines) punching out these custom penny cups. There are engineers designing bigger and better share-a-penny cups. Teams of marketing people are trying to build share-a-penny mindshare in the heads of gas station owners. Share-a-penny cup salespeople are out there going gas station door to gas station door selling their product. An army of delivery trucks [is] delivering these cups around the globe."

As penny cups became a fixture, the convenience and friendliness they represented started to dwindle out. I found a web posting at Flickr.com that carried a photo of one at a rural Nevada store that, after the sentences quoted above, added, "If you need more than one get a job."

The word "penny" used to be preceded by the word "copper" as often as not, but the coin now is made almost entirely of zinc. The Mint has also recently made it illegal to melt down older pennies to get the copper out of them (pre-1982 pennies are worth about 2.34 cents), which means that 7-Eleven isn't the only outfit that gets to decide what we do with our own property.

In 2003 the U.S. Mint spent about $44 million to make pennies at a cost of 1.3 cents each. You read correctly. To put that another way, it cost about $44 million to make about $34 million. Nevertheless, Congress has defeated a measure sponsored by an Arizona congressmember to do away with the penny. No one seems to want to talk about it much, so we really don't know why members voted that way, though it's quite possible that if the bill passed, a bill to discontinue nickels would be next. (Nickels cost 5.5 cents to produce.) The zinc lobby was busy making the case for the penny. The anti-penny legislation was a plot point on an episode of "The West Wing" in which it was speculated that the bill didn't pass because the House speaker came from Lincoln's home state. But Dennis Hastert is no longer speaker and we still have the penny.

In the 1970s the Mint struck more than a million aluminum pennies and never released them. I sometimes hear people talking about the "need" to restore more copper to pennies in order to reopen mines in Lyon and White Pine counties, but that probably wouldn't happen. Those mines shut down in the first place because copper is mined more cheaply overseas.