Will Prices Go Up On All Lincoln Cents If It Is Eliminated?

And once the Lincoln Cent is eliminated, will new collectors even collect them as much? Right now many people collect them, because you can find almost all cents for circulation from roll searching for years 1959 to present.

I think they will go up in price, if demand goes up for them. There are millions of each year and mintmark saved in BU rolls, so it will take a lot of demand. The copper rolls have gone up quite a bit in the past 5-7 years already. Most about double or more, than their value in that time. Most BU rolls I could get for about $2, back then, and now they are around $4 or more.

Wheat pennies were made in lesser numbers, and the design was eliminated 54 years ago, and how much are they are worth if you take a handful of them to your local coin shop? 3-5 cents each, more for earlier dates or rarer ones. So if the Lincoln Cent was eliminated entirely, then there would be tens of billions of them that are sitting around not being used for commerce. Perhaps by 2075 they would be worth 5 or 10 cents, rounded off to the nearest nickel of course.

Even if all but a few thousand circulating ones get destroyed, theyres still hundreds of thousands if not millions of them depending on the year out there in proof sets. Thats not even counting the slabbed circulated ones that surely wouldnt be turned in for melting

carl: those coins would be ridiculous and how many people can even do their times tables that aren't factors of 1, 2, 5, or 10?

There's no such thing as rounding up or rounding down. Only "rounding" exists and this requires that the total goes to the nearest unit of change; the nickel. There is no net effect on costs except the decreased handling of the less than worthless cent. If a store were to only round up this would be called "overcharging" and is illegal (though this law probably is no longer enforced either). I would simply take items off until the total worked out even and then do my shopping elsewhere.

Nobody can gain or lose by proper rounding.

The short term effect on the cent market would be highly positive. All cents back to the first ones would enjoy more interest and demand. Nowhere would this be more keenly felt than in the zincolns since they've never really been widely collected. Many collectors would scramble to complete their sets. But the long term effect on the cent market will be highly negative. Fewer people will get into the hobby by collecting cents and fewer people will want to upgrade their cent sets in the future.

The short term effect of nickels will be nominal but the longer term will be positive since more people will start collecting nickels from change. The nickel too will need to be revamped to reflect inflation. The best bet is to demonetize it and make it out of aluminum. Since the old nickels aren't highly toxic like the pennies there is no need to remove them from circulation if their metallic value doesn't warrant a recall. The new nickel can simply be accepted by convention and rejected by machines. With the penny gone there will be a dollar coin that will make machines viable again.

Of course government doesn't always do things sensibly so don't expect any change anytime soon.

Eliminating the Lincoln Cent probably won't have any effect at all for at least several years. The reason being the key and semi key dates' values are already well established, the common dates will always be common for the pre 1959 issues but as time goes on and as new collectors begin to collect the Lincoln cents the common issues will show some small increase in value as the demand for them increases. The 1959 and newer cents will hardly ever have much value, there are just too many of them both uncirculated and circulated and with the exception of the errors, there aren't any dates that are low enough mintage to be worth saving.

Ed
ANA LM-3175

A lot of people like to say that the merchant will always round up in their favor. I wonder just how is he going do do that with today's modern electronic registers? He could just ring up their items, hit total, the register applies the tax, and then they can tell the customer a price higher than what they can see on the display. And then have to keep telling the customer why he is charging more than it says. (Great for business) Or he can total it all up on a calculator, apply the sales tax, determine how many cents he is going to have to add to one item so that the register after applying the tax will show the rounded up amount. (This means adding up every order twice, and having to have price tags on every thing instead of using the barcode scanners. Hard to add X number of cents to an item when it looks up the price from a barcode.)

I think the vast majority of businesses will simply set their registers to automatically adjust the total to the nearest $0.05 since this setting is already in the machines software. Trying to do anything else to always go in your favor will be more trouble and costly than you will get in the extra rounding up.

Frankly even though credit card and checks can still in theory be charged to the exact cent, in practice they will be rounded to the nearest five cent as well because the register will automatically round to the nearest five cent when you hit total to tell the customer how much it will be.