Common 'cents': Long Island businesses like Trump's plan to end penny production

To them, it just makes cents.

Some members of Long Island's business community expressed support Monday for a directive from President Donald Trump telling the U.S. Treasury Department to stop minting the one-cent coin.

"For far too long the United States has minted pennies which literally cost us more than 2 cents. This is so wasteful!" Trump said in a post Sunday night on his Truth Social site. "I have instructed my Secretary of the US Treasury to stop producing new pennies."

Michael Clara, co-owner of Ciro's Pizza of East Meadow, said dealing with pennies can be "annoying," especially as most of his business involves credit card transactions.

"We always round down," Clara said before the start of Monday's lunch rush. "We never even take the penny. So we would be OK with this idea."

Tim Kalogeratos,  manager of the Apollo Diner, also in East Meadow, agreed and said he'd prefer to come up with a system where customer bills can be rounded out.

"It becomes a deal because there's not enough out there," he said of pennies and the problem of giving customers exact change. "We don't find any. It can be a nuisance."

Trump's idea — part of a wave of cost-cutting initiatives proposed in recent weeks by Elon Musk's so-called Department of Government Efficiency — is not new.

Former U.S. Mint Director Edmund Moy urged lawmakers during his tenure from 2006 through 2011 to pass legislation ordering the end of the penny. Members of Congress have repeatedly proposed legislation to suspend or eliminate the one-cent coin from circulation but those bills failed to gain traction, records show.

 The half-cent coin, meanwhile, was discontinued by Congress in 1857.  

The U.S. Mint said in its 2024 annual report that taxpayers lost $85.3 million on the nearly 3.2 billion pennies it produced last year. Every one-cent coin, the report states, costs nearly $0.037 to produce — up from $0.031 the year before. 

While proponents of discontinuing the coin said it will save money and create quicker checkout lines, critics said the plan is penny-wise and pound-foolish.

"Many Mint overhead costs would remain and have to be absorbed by other coins without the penny. Also, there would be greater demand for expensive nickels, which means even more costs," Mark Weller, executive director of Washington D.C.-based organization Americans for Common Cents, which in part represents companies involved in penny manufacturing, said in a statement.

The nickel is no bargain, with each 5-cent coin costing almost 14 cents to make, according to the U.S. Mint. 

Herman Berliner, a professor of economics at Hofstra University, said Monday the overall role of the penny in the U.S. economy is so small the coin would hardly be missed.

"If you look at consumer spending, 86% does not involve cash," Berliner said. "So you're talking about 14% of consumer spending. And that gives you a sense of how minuscule the impact of the penny is."

Matt Cohen, president and chief executive of Melville-based Long Island Association, the region's largest business group, said the penny's time has come and gone.

"It is a common sense win-win to streamline business transactions," Cohen said Monday of a penny production stop. "Pennies will become a collector's item and President Lincoln, whose birthday is this week, will still be honored on the 5-dollar bill."

Ending production of a 1-cent coin wouldn't be unique to the United States.

Canada stopped minting its penny in 2012, a move that Canadian government officials said in budget documents that year would save about $11 million annually. 

But a 2017 paper by economist Christina Cheung found Canadian grocery store consumers paid a "tax" of about $3.27 million due to prices being rounded up on everything from bacon to eggs. 

Alison Ritchie, president of the Albany-based New York Association of Convenience Stores, said Monday that elimination of the penny could streamline cash transactions, reducing the time spent counting and handling small change.

"However, this change raises questions about pricing and rounding policies, as well as how it might affect customers who primarily use cash," Ritchie said. "Officials will need to provide clear guidelines to ensure that rounding practices are fair and do not disadvantage consumers or retailers."

With AP

By Robert Brodsky

robert.brodsky@newsday.com@BrodskyRobert

Robert Brodsky is a breaking news reporter who has worked at Newsday since 2011. He is a Queens College and American University alum.