A penny for your thoughts

We recently popped into Kwik Trip for a couple of cold drinks on a rare day I carried cash.

The fact that I could pay with exact change tickled us both. (As an indication of how rarely I pay in cash, and how easily amused we are, the “exact change” to which I refer was $.01).

I handed over the bills and dug a lone penny out of my purse.

“Here you go,” I said proudly, “I have exact change.”

“Oh, we don’t take pennies anymore,” the Kwik Trip employee.

“What do you mean you don’t take them?” I asked, honestly baffled. I’d seen articles about how the U.S. intended to stop minting pennies. I had no idea businesses had stopped accepting them.

“We’ll just round down,” the employee cheerfully explained.

So, I saved myself a penny and, as Ben Franklin told us all those years ago, that means I earned a penny, too. But, aren’t all those ignored pennies going to add up for Kwik Trip?

The whole transaction left me a little deflated.

Just a few days earlier I had seen a penny escape my purse as I sat at Gate A8 in the Sarasota-Bradenton Airport. I watched it roll away and silently cheered when it landed face up. Naturally, I left the penny there for some poor phobic flyer to find. Airline travelers need all the luck they can muster.

Where will we penny patrons source our luck now? What will we toss over our shoulders into the Trevi Fountain?

I mentioned my concerns to my young companion, who had other questions on his mind.

“Can we melt down the pennies we have?” he asked. “Would that be illegal?

Weirdly, the answer to that is yes. It is illegal to melt down pennies and nickels, though I imagine that might change as businesses continue to refuse them. Why wouldn’t we be able to turn those pre-1982 pennies into some sort of copper masterpiece?

Listen, I’ll give you a penny for your thoughts on this situation, and you can put in your two-cents worth, and I guess we’ll both break even. But, that doesn’t seem right.

Meanwhile, if you need me, I’ll be frantically tracking down horseshoes and four-leaf clovers before my luck runs out.