U.S. Mint Stops Making Cents

The U.S. Treasury, at the behest of President Donald Trump, has officially stopped making cents.
After 232 years, the last U.S. penny was minted on Wednesday in Philadelphia.
Although change has come, that doesn’t mean that every last red cent will suddenly disappear, though:

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They’ve been around since 1793. Why stop now? One main reason is that they’re simply not worth the cost, as Trump pointed out in February:

Some stores are already rounding up transactions to the nearest nickel in anticipation of penny shortages. The copper coins (actually, mostly zinc these days) are almost as old as the republic itself:
Pennies were among the first coins introduced by the U.S. Mint, a bureau of the Treasury Department, more than 230 years ago.
The cost of making both coins has increased over the past two decades. Some of that is attributed to the rise in raw material prices of copper, nickel and zinc.
Higher metal prices result in higher production costs. If production costs get too high, the seigniorage – the difference between a coin’s face value and the cost of putting it into circulation – make the coin worth less than what it costs to make it.
Pennies cost about $56 million per year to make, according to the Treasury Department.
But the penny isn’t even the least cost-effective currency out there – nickels cost around a whopping 14 cents to produce.
Dimes, meanwhile, are a steal at 6 cents, and quarters around 15 cents.
The U.S. Treasurer says there are more than 300 billion pennies in circulation.