NEW YORK — President Donald Trump talks of big change in his second term of office. But he’s not forgetting small change, either.
Trump ordered the Treasury Department to stop making pennies with a Feb. 10 sentence on his social media account that followed years of conservatives pointing out that putting a copper-coated zinc disc in your pocket costs the government more than a cent — almost 4 cents today.
Will Trump’s order make the penny disappear? There is no sign that the U.S. Mint will stop pressing pennies in Denver and Philadelphia, and Mint officials did not respond to requests for clarification this week.
But the presidential penny pledge is already being felt in one niche world. It’s a little-known world that depends on buying pennies wholesale, loading them into machines and persuading parents to feed a few dollars into machines that stamp designs on the pennies — Paw Patrol, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles — as they are stretched between metal rollers at funfairs.
Small orbits of collectors and craftsmen have developed around them. And without the penny, the whole thing faces an uncertain future.
New copper pennies vanished from circulation in 1982 — 73 years after the first Lincoln penny was minted — and were replaced by zinc-coated ones. The old ones are more pliable and easier to stamp, making them hot items for kids at funfairs.
“They’ll clean ’em so when they elongate the dino or shark of the printed coin it maintains a ghost image of the printed head of Lincoln,” said Brian Peters, general manager of Minnesota-based Penny Press Machine Co. “Pre-1982 copper pennies, they bring those.”
Jeweler Angelo Rosato worked for decades in the 1960s and ’70s hand-printing pennies with scenes of their New Milford, Connecticut, hometown and historical and sentimental scenes. Everything was obsessively cataloged, including more than 4,000 penny photographs.
“We’re big fans of the penny. Keep the penny,” said Aaron Zablow of Roseland, New Jersey, who was with two of his sons at the American Dream Mall.
“I like the pennies,” his 9-year-old son Mason said.
Critics say the rise of electronic commerce and the billions of pennies in circulation mean the U.S. could stop printing the copper coins tomorrow and see little widespread effect for decades. But some people are watching fearfully to see if Trump’s public critique of the penny will affect their business.
Alan Fleming, of Scotland, is the owner of Penny Press Factory, one of a number around the world that manufacture machines that flatten and stamp coins.
“A lovely retired gentleman in Boston sold me over 100,000 uncirculated cents a couple of years ago but he doesn’t have any more,” Fleming wrote. “I will need to purchase new uncirculated cents within the next 12 months to keep my machines supplied and working!”
Regardless of what happens to niche businesses like Fleming’s, penny defenders say they’re an important tool for lubricating the economy even if they’re a money-losing proposition.
Since the invention of money, humankind has wrangled with the question of small change, how to denominate amounts so small that the metal coin itself is actually worth more.
In 2003, Thomas J. Sargent and another economist wrote “The Big Problem of Small Change,” billed as “the first credible and analytically sound explanation” of why governments had a hard time maintaining a steady supply of small change because of the high costs of production.
In a digital world with the line blurring between the real and the virtual, tactile coins have been reassuring.
“What this all tells you about the United States as a country is that it’s an incredibly conservative country when it comes to money,” said Ute Wartenberg, executive director of the American Numismatic Society.
Pennies, nickels, dimes and quarters are sometimes designed by artists laser-sculpting tiny portraits of leaders and landmarks using special software.
“It’s pretty cool because when I tell people what I do I just say my initials are on the penny,” Joseph Menna, the 14th Chief Engraver of the United States Mint, said in the 2019 film “Heads-Up: Will We Stop Making Cents?”
Fleming is hoping some lobbying may help: “Maybe we should take a trip to Washington and ask to speak to President Trump and Elon Musk and see if we can cut a deal on buying millions of pennies from them.”
