Making Sense Of Pennies

If cents were no longer issued for circulation,
you never know:
1.) Zincolns may actually become to be appreciated by collectors.

2.) I think there will always be collectors of cents, just as there is with all other no longer issued denominations.

3.) The U.S. Mint may start producing off metal proof silver and gold cents for collectors.
All gold and all silver proof sets of currently issued coins have been made for Australian collectors. Only 300 all gold sets for 2006 that include our no longer issued cent, were produced.

Not sure why some ..will group everyone into their line of thinking.

To say that no one likes the cent ... Is a over statement.

If everyone did not like the cent, then the government would
get rid of it.

I like the cent. I like collecting them, and I have no problem
using them in purchases. I feel there are just as many people
that like them as those that don't like them.

In my experience, people that don't like something, will voice their
opinion more often.

Also I wonder why there are so many negative post about getting rid
Of cents .. Nickels ... Dollar bills and modern quarters. In a forum about collecting the same.

In a forum like this I would hope to see mostly post about what you
like. There is a good chance our younger collectors collect,
Lincoln cents, modern quarters .. Well all modern coins.
What do the young collectors think when there are so many
negative post ...about the very coins they are collecting?

If this is the case then I think they will have to up their game a bit if the rumors are true about the shortages of zinc predicted.

I think I read something about it on Kitco or somewhere similar. Can't remember for sure though.

The money that our government wastes is nothing to what they loose on making the cent. So all that BS about waste means nothing unless they (gov't.) cleans up their act. Then I can see them addressing the cost of making the cent.

In the late 1960s the French 1-centime piece had approximately the same purchasing power that one US cent has today - I remember a postage stamp costing 45 centimes. When the coin started costing more than its face value to produce, the mint simply stopped making them, except for collectors' uncirculated sets. The coin was never demonetised (until France joined the Euro) but it gradually disappeared: retailers started pricing most of their goods in multiples of 5 centimes, and even where items were priced to the nearest centime, shops seldom gave them in change after the mid-1970s. In 1976, when I was studying in France, I often bought candy bars from a particular shop where they were sold for 1.08F. About half the times I went there I was given centime coins in change (often one of the old aluminium 2F coins issued from 1941-59), but otherwise I was just given change to the nearest 10c. Why not just let the penny die gradually like the French did with the centime?

Just because the government wastes a billion dollars on something else does not justify them wasting 100 million dollars on cents.

Waste is waste. Trust me, in other forums I rail on them for the waste relevant to that venue. However, this is a numismatic forum. So my job here is to point where the government wastes money on the worthless one cent coin and equally worthless one dollar notes.

Zinc is the fourth-most used metal on Earth, and the US accounts for 6% of world production. 720,000 tonnes (note the unit) per year. One year's worth of Lincolns (I used 5 billion as a round number) consumes less than 2% of US output alone, unless my math is wrong.

I don't think the world can produce zinc fast enough for the demand, as it is.

Ahhhh I see ... that makes sense.