I hate change. Not the variety beget by motion: that stuff’s okay, at least until the Big Crunch. No, I loathe pockets full of rattling coin. I hated it when small, snot-nosed children would walk into the comic book store where I worked as a teenager and empty several moist, fungous socks full of pennies on the counter to pay for a funny book. I hate it now that I live in the EU and change comes in denominations up to 2 euro.

The penny is the most hated of all coins: when it’s wet, it smells like semen. It’s small. It’s worthless. It had a tendency to go mossy. So good news! Now that it costs more to mint a penny than the loathed thing is actually worth, the penny is singing it’s swan song.

Since you can’t buy anything for a penny anyway, the only impact this would have is by rounding prices to the nearest nickel. Some critics claim this would screw poor people who can ill afford to pay an extra penny when their Hostess Crumb Cake is rounded up from 99 cents to 1 dollar. I don’t know any poor people who don’t look at a penny as imminently disposable, but if such people exist, the US Government can systematically execute them all if it will just get pennies out of my fucking life forever.

The Penny’s End Is Near

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