The Persistence of the Penny

Soon, the days of making wishes in fountains, "take a penny, leave a penny" dishes, and the many idioms involving pennies will come to an end. This is all because as of November 12th of 2025, new pennies are no longer being minted. The stat that it costs over 3 cents to make each penny had been thrown around for nearly a decade before the penny began to meet its demise. This is because of one corporation's lobbying efforts: Artazn, a zinc company, was the supplier of the blank coins that would be minted into all of the pennies in circulation. This Tennessee based company maintained a chokehold on the penny, and on the legislators that allowed it to continue to be minted, by spending nearly $3 million since 2006 on the lobbying firm Americans for Common Cents. Since Artazn was a privileged group, it recognized the value of protecting its revenue stream and wasn't bogged down by the free rider problem or need selective incentives. Given how niche of an issue this was, it was enough to prolong the creation of pennies by nearly two decades.

It seems like Olson would not have been pro penny. The benefits were very concentrated for this pressure group: since 2008, the U.S. Treasury has paid the company more than $1.3 billion since 2008 to produce the blank coins. Meanwhile, in 2024 alone, the net loss for taxpayers was $85.3 million, which is a pretty penny! But since the costs were distributed across hundreds of millions of taxpayers, it only cost about each American one quarter annually. Taxpayers were the latent group in this case, since no one calls a congress member over 25 cents a year. Even the people most prone to penny pinching probably would not have thought twice about how printing pennies hurts their pocketbook.