Congress finally noticed the penny costs more to make than it’s worth. In 2024, the US Mint spent about 3.7 cents to produce a single one-cent coin. Multiply that across billions of pennies and you get a coin that loses money every time it exists. So the House moved to eliminate it. Reasonable. Overdue. Canada did it in 2012 and the sky did not fall.

Here’s the part nobody in Washington explains: the rounding does not happen to the government. It happens at the register. And the person holding that register is not a bank. It’s the woman who runs the bodega on your corner.

When you scrap the penny, cash transactions round to the nearest nickel. Canada’s rule rounds both ways: a total ending in 1 or 2 cents rounds down, 3 or 4 rounds up. Fair on paper. But now every small shop owner has to retrain staff, reprogram or reconfigure point-of-sale systems, and explain to grumpy customers why their $4.98 became $5.00 in cash but stayed $4.98 on a card. Card payments don’t round. Cash does. So the exact same basket costs two different amounts depending on how you pay.

Who pays cash most? Lower-income people, older people, the unbanked. The Federal Reserve found households earning under $25,000 use cash for roughly 36% of their payments, far more than richer households. So the group most likely to eat the rounding is the group least able to shrug it off.

The counterargument is real: the rounding effect is tiny, a fraction of a cent averaged out, and Canada saw no measurable inflation from it. True. Over a year the math nearly cancels. But “nearly” is doing work, and studies of rounding suggest stores round up slightly more often than down, because prices ending in 9 are everywhere.

Kill the penny. It’s a wasteful coin. Just don’t pretend the cost vanishes. It moves. It lands on the smallest shops and the people who still pay in coins. That’s the story, not the mint.