U.S. Mints Final Penny, Retailers Begin Rounding Amid Coin Phase-Out

America has culled coins before: the half-cent vanished in 1857 amid post-Civil-War inflation, and Britain lopped off its half-penny in 1984 for similar cost-benefit reasons. Today’s penny obituary sits at the intersection of centuries-old seigniorage math and a 21st-century shift away from physical cash (the Fed says <20 % of payments are now in paper or coin). If history rhymes, small change dies quietly while commerce adapts—Canada’s 2012 withdrawal and Australia’s 1992 one-cent scrap barely register now. Yet the symbolism matters: ending the coin named for Lincoln signals that even cherished iconography yields to efficiency, and it exposes bigger structural questions—why the nickel, still losing 9¢ apiece, survives; or how unequal rounding might subtly tax the poor who rely on cash. On a 100-year arc, the last penny may read as phase one of America’s slow pivot to a mostly digital, possibly central-bank-digital-currency economy, where physical coinage is a nostalgic novelty rather than a monetary necessity.