I’m still waiting for news of a 2017 “plain” cent to be discovered, made by processes identical to or similar to what gave us 1922 “plain” cents.

I live in the Northeast and only saw maybe a dozen or so of them. They got snapped up here too, I guess.

I’ve read that so few people now carry cash when traveling that the rate of “mixing” from different mints has tanked. I now rarely find Denver coins around home, and see almost none from Philly when I go the Midwest or farther. Back in the, uh, good old days as a young collector I was able to put together almost complete P-D-S sets of recent-date coins from my parents’ change boxes… no more, sadly.

Not only are zinc cents poisonous to dogs, they can sicken little kids who also just love to eat “interesting” objects.

And the “keeping people employed” argument has been used for ages to defend propping up obsolescent products and industries. It’s the main theme used by Crane Paper and its successors when lobbying (so far very successfully) for continued production of that other wasteful piece of US currency, the paper dollar.

Yes, nickels are out-of-the-money also (6.2 cents per nickel to produce), but only slightly so compared to the cent. At least people still use nickels.

The only winners in cent coin production are the zinc mines and a couple dozen mint employees. Everyone else loses: it actually costs more in employee time to count out cent coins than they are worth, it costs a lot in fuel to transport them around the country, they are very poisonous to dogs, they pollute the water if they wind up in drains (which they do because nobody picks them up off the street).

Someone cornered the market it seems. Here on the West Coast I have yet to see ONE of he billions made with the “P” MM. Really, what they that someone will pay a buck for them, not likely. I collected Lincolns but stopped in 2009. 100 years is enuf. Still need the 22 ‘plain’ o’wise I’m fini……..

There are more than enough cent coins to go around – about 350 billion made since just 1982 when they went to all zinc, which is about 1000 for every single person in the US. Heck instead of paying the mint 2 cents for each cent, why not ask people to turn them in for a limited time at that same rate? I bet enough people would be motivated to bring them in that they could easily get several decades worth of production back into the vaults.

What happened to all the 2017p pennies????