The pennies are gone!
I won!
To explain... just about 30 years ago (1995-ish), I started a quest to eliminate pennies. They seemed pointless; too little value to be worth carrying around to spend.
How did I plan to accomplish this? By collecting all the pennies in circulation, of course! That way, once I had them all, nobody else could use them, and we'd have to give up on them!
Yeah, really - that's really why I did it 😜
And a long time ago, I weighed them to see how many I had, which gave me a very rough count of about 18,000. ($180)
And for all practical purposes I "won" this battle years ago, when most people stopped using cash for most things. I don't think I've actually used a penny myself in a decade or more. I only rarely even end up having a new one to put in the jar, as change for spending cash. So the penny collecting stagnated a long time ago, and the jar has just been sitting in a corner.
And then earlier this year the US Mint stopped making pennies - so I really won! 😜 But of course, this government did it in the dumbest way possible; pennies are still legal currency, and stores are still supposed to accept them. It's just now the supply is cut off, so they have to deal with shortages. So I haven't really won.
But just this past weekend, one of the local grocery chains decided that they needed to stockpile pennies, and offered 2-for-1 gift cards for turning in pennies!
Prior to this, my options for turning the pennies into "useful" money were:
- Wrap them all by hand and turn them in to a bank. 😰
- Dump them into one of those commercial coin sorting machines, and only keep like $0.70 of each 100 pennies. (So that $180 in pennies would only be worth about $125 😠)
So a 2-for-1 deal, where I didn't have to sort them, was way better!
So I took them to the grocery, in two 5-gallon buckets (50 pounds each!):
And the grocery said I had about 21,500 pennies, worth about $430 in gift cards!
I won!