Keough’s Corner #1: A Penny for Your Thoughts

Hello friends, and welcome to Keough’s Corner, my alliterative little lilypad in The Swamp. Think of this as my chemistry and forensics free space to vent about what’s on my mind. There are so many big issues in the world today—climate change, a global pandemic, the slow and steady march of facism—that I’m worried we’ve lost sight of the negligible issues: subway delays, mosquitos, and those SHOWTIME guys kicking people in the face on the train. I’m going to use this space to shed light on the insignificant and trivial inconveniences of life in a “get off my lawn” style of curmudgeon well beyond my years. Get ready youths, I’m about to ask life’s minor annoyances to speak to their managers.

Imagine you and your friends are out on a shopping trip looking to purchase some things that young people like. You walk into the store, go up to the counter, and say, “I’ll have one Tik Tok please.” The shop owner reaches under the counter, pulls out whatever a Tik Tok is (I want to say it's some kind of watch?) and says, “That will be $12.97.” You hand them three single dollar bills and a ten, and they give you three pennies in return. What do you honestly think of those pennies? Are you overjoyed to now have three shiny Abe Lincolns staring up at you? Of course not. If you’re anything like me, you’re now thinking, “Great, more garbage.” Because pennies are worthless.

The humble penny, maybe the only currency more useless than crypto.

Think about it, when was the last time you spent a penny? I’m not talking about happening upon a spare in your pocket to make exact change; I mean went out to buy something and grabbed a bunch of pennies to make your purchase. Never. Heck, if the item you’re buying costs more than 50 cents, I doubt anybody would even take your pennies. Also, spoiler alert, thanks to inflation, everything costs more than 50 cents! So what do you do with all of your pennies? Well you have a few options:

• Put them in a jar you swear you are going to do something with someday but we all know you won't.

• Throw them into wishing wells so fish can choke on your pollutant hopes and dreams.

• Bring them to a Coinstar machine so you can pay a robot to give you money you can actually use.

There are only two types of people in this world who like pennies: coin collectors and children. Coin collectors love them in the same way antique collectors love old shoe horns: extinct relics of a bygone age with no modern use. Children love them because they love all shiny things and you can convince those gullible marks that if they find one on the ground it’s their lucky day. Side note: whoever came up with that idiom is my hero. Why can’t we do this for all garbage? “Hey kid, if you find a Twix wrapper on the ground you should pick it up, it will make you smarter.” It’s basically child labor but they feel lucky to do it, and that sense of good fortune they feel is way more valuable than if we paid them in pennies.

The penny situation is even more dire than just being worthless. It’s not that pennies don’t have any real value, they actually have negative value. Did you know that in this country it costs 2.1 cents to produce one penny based on the price of the zinc and copper starting materials? That’s true, look it up. The USA produces about 130 million dollars worth of pennies every year which costs us about 273 million dollars to make. That’s Elon Musk levels of throwing away money. The nickel is almost as bad, coming in at about 7.5 cents to make, but that's a rant for another column.

So what can we do? Would it be best for the country to get rid of the penny and nickel and just round every price to the nearest dime? Obviously, but will we? Doubtful. It doesn’t seem like any of our politicians care. No one ran during the midterms on the platform of reducing government spending on useless trinkets whose best purpose is a chemistry lab which may or may not turn them gold. It looks like all hope may be lost on this one so the last resort is screaming into the void—the void called: Keough’s Corner.