It costs 2.4 cents to make a penny?

but what will happen to all the "have a penny, leave a penny. need a penny, take a penny." jars?

pennies are a pain in the ass. that whole whatever dollar and ninety nine cents thing doesn't fool anyone.

the biggest question is taxes. the 3.5 cents on the dollar and that sort of thing. all will round up to five cents, i guess. and if someone has a six cents, you know they arent gonna lower it to five cents. you would think local and state govts would be pushing for the elimination of the penny for that reason alone.

 

About 30 thousand.

 

collecting thousands and thousands of pennies seems like a tremendous hassle.

 

I have a machine that does the sorting. Zinc pennies weigh 2 grams and copper pennies weigh 3.1 grams. My machine sorts the zincs into a penny roll. The copper pennies, I usually just let them fall into a container I place under the machine, though now that I am selling them I have been dropping them directly into rolls as well.

I used to go to the bank each Tuesday and buy a box of fifty rolls, and deposit all the zinc pennies. I would run the rolls through the sorter. It can handle about 4 rolls a minute. Now I am just using the machine to roll my hoarded coins. It is a bit time consuming, but it is a risk free investment, that has paid off very well. As long as copper stays above 3.25 a pound I will probably keep doing it.

 

So why are people buying them from you? Illegally melting them?

 

I don't really assume much. I think some people are speculating that the Fed will lift the melt restriction on currency, and are taking the opportunity to buy physical copper slightly below spot. Some are probably illegally melting them and selling the copper. Others are collectors who want to buy unsearched lots. Because I don't hand sort, all the wheat pennies, indian heads, and errors, which have numismatic, value go unnoticed by me.

When I first started doing this I was hand sorting, and I would find a 1983 copper penny every know and again. This was an error because in 83 all pennies should have been made of zinc, but a few million where actually made in copper and put into circulation. Coin collectors will pay 15 to twenty dollars for these. When I was handsorting 2 or three rolls a night, I would put all the 83's aside and weigh them. Now that I'm machine sorting 50 r0lls at a time, I don't worry about it.

 

So if you sell 30,000 pennies, you'll make about $400? Is my math right? There's got to be an easier way to make some cash.

 

It has been brought up several times over the past 50 years. It seems that Abraham Lincoln is still very popular, especially in Kentucky where he was born and Illinois where he was a member of the United States House of Representatives.

 

That's an idiotic reason not to abandon it, but it wouldn't surprise me.