Should We Get Rid of the Penny

Should we get rid of the penny essay will take an attempt to answer this questions giving an argumentative answer. So you are at the cashier and you are paying for the delicious bacon strips that you bought, but you only brought pennies to play with. The cost is $10 and you have count all one-thousand pennies. As you count out your pennies the line to the cashier gets longer and longer. People start getting angry and frustrated. They shout at you for taking so long. What are you going to do, stop paying and promise to pay it back? No, you keep on counting, and after 7 excruciating minutes you are done counting and you pay for your bacon. Was it worth going through all that trouble, when you could have paid the whole amount with a $10 dollar bill? 

Pennies have very low value in currency and are worthless to carry them around. With a penny, a consumer cannot buy anything. The penny should be taken out of circulation because is negatively impacting finances and the environment and also takes up too much time. Constructing pennies are costly both financially and environmentally. Even though pennies have very low value in currency, it has a big negative effect financially. 

According to, 'Should We Get Rid of the Penny?' by Justin O'Neill, says that the U.S. government loses half a cent for each of the billions of pennies it produces each year. The government is spending more on one penny than its actual value. To be exact, the 'Retire the Penny' Organization states that the U.S. Mint annual report show that the cost of a penny is 1.7 cents. Nearly 8 billion pennies have been minted by 2014, the U.S. spent about $132 million to produce less than $50 million of circulating currency. Not only does the penny have a negative impact on finance it is also very costly environmentally. According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, zinc ores contain only 3% to 11% metallic zinc. Along with the zinc, the ores usually contain other metals, including toxic metals like cadmium and lead. In addition, zinc itself, though necessary in small amounts, is harmful in high doses to both humans and animals. All these toxic metals can contaminate water, soil, and plants in the area surrounding the mine. In addition, pennies are worth so little, they’re much heavier than any other coin in proportion to their value. Design-life-Cycle.org, a site created by students at the University of California, calculates that just transporting pennies to banks – not even counting any of the other stages of their production – puts about 1.5 million metric tons of carbon dioxide (CO2) into the atmosphere each year. 

Overall, even though pennies are both costly financially and environmentally, they also take away too much time.