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Retire the penny

Baristas, bank tellers, accountants find plenty of reasons to eliminate them

Money is popular in Durango, but the penny is not.

Traipse any Durango street, and behold 1 cent coins tossed in gutters, lying despised and abandoned on sidewalks.

People stomp on them without noticing.

It’s illegal to destroy U.S. currency. Yet many locals wage open war on pennies, gleefully flinging them into the river in broad daylight.

“The other day, I threw a penny away in the garbage. I felt bad about it, but then I didn’t because they’re just so stupid,” said Erica Fendley, a barista at Steaming Bean.

In Durango, other acts of penny-related aggression are clearly premeditated, as when teenagers place pennies on the train tracks with the excited expectation that they’ll be run over.

Durango Police Department Lt. Ray Shupe acknowledged that many penny-related crimes occur in Durango but said it’s up to the Secret Service to investigate such cases, not police.

Residents report that they feel nickeled-and-dimed when merchants charge “$1.96” and “$3.71” – all but guaranteeing that cash transactions result in penny-intense change.

At Magpies Newsstand Café, Peter Barnett said there are few things he loathes more intensely than pennies, comparing them to “cat scratches that really cut into the skin and get infected. That’s similar to my hatred of pennies.” Barnett urged the elimination of the penny.

“Get rid of it,” he said.

Abolitionists versus Lincoln

Across the country, the call to abolish the penny has grown more full-throated in the past decade. Over the objections of America’s zinc lobby and Illinois’s Lincoln-loving politicians, anti-penny advocates argue Americans can no longer afford the penny: The U.S. Mint spends 1.8 cents making every penny it produces.

Last year, the federal government lost $105 million by producing pennies and nickels, spurring President Barack Obama to demand a comprehensive review of the currency and evaluate alternative options for both the penny and nickel.

Bobby Lieb, Republican candidate for La Plata County treasurer, said he hadn’t studied the “penny issue” in depth.

“I don’t think you can even buy a stick of gum with the penny. But if you did away with the penny, you’d have to count in increments of five,” he said.

Lieb’s Democrat opponent, Allison Morrissey, took a strong anti-penny stance in a passionate phone message.

“I have felt for many, many years that it should be done away with, and merchants should just charge a dollar or 95 cents rather than 99 or 98 cents,” she said.

“There are too many pennies in people’s drawers – mine included. And they’re heavy to carry on your person. I don’t like them,” she said.

In 1996, the Government Accounting Office determined that every year, most of the pennies that the U.S. Mint produces simply disappear.

The discontinuation of the penny is beyond the purview of La Plata County treasurer’s office, yet the issue is dear to the electorate, with coffee shops proving to be bastions of violent anti-penny sentiment.

Steaming Bean’s Fendley is tormented daily by hundreds of pennies.

“Pennies are just meaningless. I don’t want them. We have a penny jar, but it’s for customers,” she said.

For baristas, the dreaded coin is also a biological weapon, spreading pestilence from palm to palm.

“They’re dirty, filthy and sticky. I have to wash my hands every time I handle pennies before I can make coffee,” she said.

Fendley said she supports the penny’s immediate termination.

Liz Nelson, a barista at Durango Coffee Co., said at this point, the penny is a philosophical absurdity.

“Let’s not have the penny anymore! Please! It’s just so stupid. I count probably 400 pennies a day. It takes 30 minutes a week, and 90 minutes of my life a month. It’s so dumb,” she said.

Nelson said even if the penny were abolished, Lincoln could still content himself with top billing on the $5 bill.

“That’s more than enough,” she said.

While they’re at it, Nelson said, they should do away with the nickel.

She extracted a nickel from a jar, looked at its head’s side, and said, “I don’t know who that guy is or what he did for us. Oh, Thomas Jefferson. Well, that’s not a great picture. I wouldn’t miss that, either.”

Penny dreadful

Tim Wheeler, owner of Durango Coffee Co., likewise said the penny makes no sense.

He said the economic rationale for abolishing the coin is overwhelming.

“Time is money. Pennies are more expensive to produce than they’re worth. It’s just gotten crazy,” he said.

Meanwhile, thanks to inflation, the penny purchases almost nothing.

Soda machines and parking meters spurn the penny, because the time it takes to count pennies – to say nothing of the upper-body strength and gas money required to haul them – renders pennies a money-losing denomination in almost any volume.

At Durango City Hall, Kristen Jenson said, “the only time people pay with pennies is parking tickets, when they’re extremely upset with the city. Essentially, it’s a revenge payment.”

One $12 parking ticket means 1,200 pennies, weighing 6.6 pounds.

The Internet is rife with rumors of wives and Fortune 500 companies settling divorces and lawsuits with payments made in pennies.

In Durango, a teller at one downtown bank, who was not authorized to comment, recalled an embittered customer withdrawing tens of thousands of pennies to make a rent payment because he was “mad at his landlord.”

Thoughts for the penny

Laurie Cooper, who has been a teller at First National Bank for more than 20 years, has seen millions of pennies deposited. Mercifully, she said, First National Bank uses a machine to count change, sparing tellers the hideous task.

Cooper stuck up for the penny.

“I still pick up pennies when they’re on the street. They’re good luck,” she said.

Though retrieving stray pennies may bring good cosmic fortune, experts say the practice is actually impoverishing.

“Picking up a penny from the sidewalk and putting in your pocket pays less than the Federal minimum wage if you take longer than 4.9 seconds to do it,” according to the New Yorker’s David Owen.

Cooper said the penny, through cumbersome and largely useless, remains vital to plugging children’s piggybanks.

At Durango Coffee Co., Nelson strongly disputed this.

“They don’t need pennies. Kids today have $20 bills,” she said.

cmcallister@durangoherald.com



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