Are Pennies Legal Tender? (2024)

As a kid, I could reliably find three discarded soda bottles in the roadside brush while on foot to the nearest quick shop. The two-cent deposit on each bottle was enough for a pack of baseball cards with a penny left for the gumball machine.

As an idiot 23-year-old testing limits, I had a friend post bail for me with pennies from my loose-change jar. No joke. If you’re curious, I have written a short passage about it in an unpublished memoir.

This is mainly to say that, once upon a time, the penny had a purpose. You could do something with it other than level a chair or add weight to a curtain that won’t hang straight. We all know the days of paying for things in pennies are long gone. Heck, today you need a quarter to crank the gumball machine.

One complainant argued that being paid in pennies was “a symbolic middle finger,’” and the judge agreed

Even your bank can’t be bothered. To deposit coins you must dump them in a counting machine whose owner levies a 12.5% fee — constituting a risk-free rate of return that would make a hedge fund manager blush. What good is a lousy penny? It’s a question we’ve struggled to answer for years.

Let’s start here: Surveys show people are more inclined to bend down to pick up a penny (46%) than a nickel (7%), dime (4%), or quarter (13%). This makes one thing abundantly clear: Americans suck at math, a conclusion reinforced by just about every international student assessment.

This data also betrays an alarming level of superstition. As grandmother liked to say: See a penny, pick it up, and the rest of the day you’ll have good luck. This tired axiom, er, coined generations ago is the only reason I can surmise why people see pennies as being worth more effort than shinier coins with greater purchasing power.

The penny’s relative popularity certainly does not reflect the coin’s value as money, which is manifestly lacking in any quantity short of a truckload. Two real-life judges ruled as much in separate cases, going so far as to say that a payment made in truckloads of pennies is an…