The argument is arithmetic, and it has been the same arithmetic for years. In 2024 the United States Mint spent 3.69 cents to make each one-cent coin and struck 3.2 billion of them (57.5% of all the coins it produced that year) for a loss of about $85.3 million. Those 3.2 billion coins weighed 8,000 tons and had to be moved under secure transport. On the other side, a 2012 Navigant Consulting report commissioned by Jarden Zinc, which supplied the blanks, argued that scrapping the penny would push fixed manufacturing costs onto other denominations and cost $10.9 million more. The common public objection is that shops would round up; Robert Whaples' 2007 study of rounding cash totals to the nearest nickel found the effect roughly neutral, worth about 0.025 cents per transaction to the consumer. Several countries have already done it: Canada withdrew the penny in 2013, Australia dropped its one- and two-cent coins in 1992, New Zealand in 1990. The US itself abolished the half cent in 1857, when it was worth around 17 cents in today's money. What actually predicts which side someone takes is how much cash they still handle: 31% of Americans say they never use pennies.