I’ve heard folks rail about pennies for years but really didn’t pay much attention to them. It surprised me in reading the news of the last pennies being minted this week, that it actually costs 4 cents to make a penny. It’s shocking to me that we’ve been minting these coins for awhile at a 300% markup. Why didn’t we quit this silliness earlier?
When I was growing up, my dad kept a jar on the dresser and every night all the coins in his pocket went in. My mother used to fish out any quarters, dimes and nickels that she found but she left the pennies until the jar was full, then she took them to the bank. Occasionally a few pennies would be meted out to me and my sister, but not too often.
I discovered last January when I visited, that my mother is still putting coins into a jar in her chiffarobe. Apparently she doesn’t do this on a regular basis, just when she thinks her wallet is getting too heavy. Quarters go in a separate jar for the washer and dryer in her condo building. I also discovered that banks are no longer very interested in helping the public deal with their coins. And those coin machines you occasionally see at grocery stores? A pretty hefty fee and the grocery store near my mom’s would only give you store credit. A little calling around and I did find a bank about 15 minutes away that had a sorting machine, but you had to deal with it yourself. Not too awful but you could only put in one kind of coin at a time so it was laborious. Luckily it was a branch of my mom’s bank, so I could just deposit the money into her account.
No coin jars at my house and if there had been, that experience with my mom’s coins would have cured me. The news is that people are worried that every business will eventually start rounding up the price of your purchases. Personally I can see that happening with cash purchases, but with so many purchases being credit card/cyber transactions, I’m not too worried.
Was there a coin jar in your house growing up? What about now?
Trail Baboon 
I agree about the “silly penny” thing. I thought about it for years. Any penny I got in change I left in that little coin container on the counter for someone else.
However, I do have a jar full in my closet, plus a jar for nickels and quarters, plus we have a bank made by my uncle. It’s a small oak box with the old fashioned mailbox for the door. It has a combination to open the little door to get the mail ‘uptown’ in the day. This is full and I mean packed full of dimes. This little thing is so heavy. And we can hardly get another dime in it. I have to shake the dimes down a bit to get just one more in.
Stubbornly I’m trying to wait until 2026 or until we absolutely can’t get another jammed into it.
The plus side is our credit union does have a coin machine for members to use for free. It will take all kinds of coins at same time; just dump them in. It will also spit out any foreign coin or nafarious coin not redeemable. Once it totals up the coinage the machine prints out the final number which is put into our account.
I’ll try to remember to tell all of you the final tally when I do cash this mailbox in.
Then we will begin to fill it up again.
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Which Anonymous?
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The anonymous who wrote that poem, the name of which I have forgotten.
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And why waiting until 2026 to do something about the over stuffed coin box?
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My bank, credit union, has a machine in which you dump all your coins. The money does go in your account.
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My dad owned a car wash that was operated with quarters. We always had a dish full of quarters at home that I could use to buy candy and treats at a nearby shop. Hardly any coins in our house now.
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I keep quarters in the car… for Aldis and also for tipping at the Dunkin drive thru.
YA gives me all her coins… although that’s not many. Like many of her generation she avoids dealing with physical money if she can.
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Got ’em in a 3 gallon wine making crock pot.
OT
November 18, 1928
Mickey Mouse’s Birthday
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And my mom’s.
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Is this his birthday as Mickey or his original birth as Mortimer??
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It’s his birthday as Mickey. I get the writers almanac and Garrison wrote about this topic in 2008.
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Mortimer – REALLY?
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I use cash in the summer at the ball games but in the winter rarely. I have my Aldi quarters. I sometimes buy coffee at Scooters which I pay for in cash so I can tip. When my adult grandkids were here they were very happy that I still have a quarter jar from which they took money to go to the lobby to buy pop. That was a treat Sandy gave them, a big adventure to walk on their own to the lobby.
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I have a full jar of pennies on my dresser. I need to get them to a coin counter but doing so will likely be a dedicated trip to a verified location. I can’t see myself carrying it around hoping I’ll run into a counter.
I also have a jar full of wheat pennies from the ‘50s and earlier. Some of those, I understand, are worth as much as 1¢ to collectors.
I don’t recall any penny jars at home growing up. I did, briefly have a penny collection with those blue penny folders.
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When they started making the special quarters, one per state, I got a big folders for those for YA. It was the map of the US with holes in each state (or near each state) for the quarters to go in. We did dismantle it during Covid and spend the quarters. Mostly cause we were just cleaning up and it didn’t mean as much anymore once it was all full up. Another one of those things that was more fun as a project than the final product.
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What I found interesting was the disparity in the quality of the design from state to state. Some of the quarters were striking and some looked like they were designed by a committee. Minnesota’s was one that looked like the product of a committee.
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Hence the new state flag. Ahem.
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I don’t remember a penny jar when growing up, but Husband did keep one briefly, I think. And we do have a change bowl on the desk for… not sure what.
I still have some of those blue folders for coin collecting that my dad started back in the 60s. They had been coming along nicely when my dad realized Mom would sometimes use them to pay the paper boy when he came to the door collecting…
I think we tried giving them to a Coin Collectors club here, and they declined.
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No coin jar when I was a kid, but we had a “lunch money cup” that resided in a kitchen cupboard. I don’t remember how it worked other than it had a few bills and enough coins to buy hot lunch tickets for a week. I remember lunch being about 25 cents back in the early to mid-60s.
For the last many years I’ve been saving pre-1982 pennies for their 95% copper content. Certain 1982’s also have 95% copper but I’m never sure which ones, so I save those too. The current value of the copper in those old pennies is about $.03.
If copper prices ever go up exponentially like silver and gold have, those pennies will be worth much more and could be used as “money” during the Apocalypse (whatever that is, and if it ever happens), when US fiat currency (paper $$) becomes as valuable as German marks were in the 1920s.
I missed out on saving pre-1965 coins with silver in them (dimes, quarters, half-dollars, dollars). Had I been psychic, I would have known the melt value today would be astronomically greater than the face value and made a tidy sum on whatever old coins I’d accumulated.
Oh well. At least I’ve invested in precious metals with modest success in the stock market.
Chris in Owatonna
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I save quarters until I have $100, then I take them to my credit union where they have a sorting machine. It gives me a receipt which I take to the counter and ask to have the amount put into my savings account. I also have two quarters in my car for Aldi.
I put much of my change into the little cups on the counters of stores so that others can use it, or deposit it into the boxes left there for children with MD or MS or other diseases.
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Can we finally get rid of that 9/10ths of a cent on gasoline?
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I remember my dad selling gas at his station for 29.9.
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The coins go into the cup holder between the seats in the car. That way I always have a quarter when I go to ALDI, and place from which to fish out a handful of coins when I’m going to be on an urban street where there will be panhandlers or buskers.
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How will the little birds get fed? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XHrRxQVUFN4
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my dad kept a coffee can in his dresser drawer there were two or three of them. one time i wanted to go horseback riding and dug out 3 or 4 dollars worth of quarters dimes nickels and likely 50 cent pieces. i got caught eight away and was surprised that it was noticed.
i have s 5 gallon water cooler jug on the kitchen floor full currently about 6 inches up. if i remember correctly we got 800 dollars last time we cashed it in my oldest grandson is losing teeth at age 7. tooth fairy is cash experience. doesnt come up often these days
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I have a cousin who used to collect pennies in one of those water jugs. At some point he overloaded it and the glass broke. He got another bottle but switched to putting buttons in it, since they don’t weigh as much.
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Huh, forgot about songs…
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