What Are We Going to Do With 300 Billion Pennies? Highlight

Incredibly, the penny’s end seems poised to be more ignominious than even the phrase worst-case scenario might suggest. A scenario is a sketch of a possible future event; worst-case implies some sense of order and codification—that multiple scenarios have been considered, and ranked by degrees of badness. Worst-case scenario implies that someone is thinking, beyond the present moment, about what can and should be done; it implies an intention, or at least a wish, to avoid the worst-case scenario.

That option, like all others, appears to have been removed from the table. The tabletop, in fact, is entirely bare. The government has issued no guidance about how cash transactions calculated to the cent should work in what will soon be a cent-coin-less country (as soon as the final batch of pennies plunges out of circulation—which will happen with shocking speed). “We are not aware of any plans to issue rounding guidance,” Andrew Von Ah, the director of physical infrastructure for the Government Accountability Office, told me on Friday