The Coin We Could Afford to Give Away

Cedar Valley News
July 21, 2026
The Coin We Could Afford to Give Away
By George Khan

There is a little dish by my register. Plastic, cracked on one side, no bigger than my palm. For as long as I have owned the deli, it has held pennies, and above it, in my mother’s handwriting because she is the one who put it there, a strip of tape reads, need one take one, have one leave one.

I have watched the dish do a quiet kind of work for thirty years, and I think it is about to disappear, and I want to say a word for it before it goes.

You know the arithmetic already. The country has stopped making the penny. The last one was struck in November, and there will be no more. The ones we have are still good, a hundred billion of them, but no new ones are coming, and as they wander off into couch cushions and coat pockets and never come back, the dish by my register will run dry. When it does, we will round to the nearest nickel, the way sensible countries already do, and the arithmetic will be fine. I am not here to argue the arithmetic. The penny cost more to make than it was worth, and I sell sandwiches, so I understand a thing costing more than it earns.

But the dish was never really about the penny.

Here is what the dish does. A man’s total is a dollar and one cent, and he has a dollar even in his pocket, and before he can go digging or apologizing, I tip a penny out of the dish, and we are square, and he goes on with his morning. Or the reverse. A woman gets a penny in her change, does not want to carry it, and drops it in the dish on her way out, for the next man who comes up short. Nobody keeps track. Nobody says much. The dish is a small standing agreement among strangers: one cent is not worth anyone’s trouble, and we will quietly cover one another for it.

This is the thing I do not want to lose. Not the coin. The agreement.

The penny, the actual metal, is the most useless money we have. Everyone knows it. You cannot buy anything with one. You stoop to pick one off the sidewalk out of some reflex your grandmother installed, and then do not know what to do with it. It is worth less than the second it takes to bend down.

And yet look what we built on top of the most worthless coin in the drawer. A small daily kindness. We took the one piece of money too trivial to matter and made it the exact denomination of neighborliness, the currency you give away without thinking, the one you would never insult a man by counting. The penny became the coin of covering each other. Precisely because it was worth nothing, it was the perfect thing to be generous with.

I think about my mother taping the note to the wall. She came to this country with very little, and she understood something about a counter I only learned by standing at one. She understood a deli is not only a place to buy lunch. It is one of the last rooms where strangers still brush against each other and have to decide, in small ways, all day, how to treat a person they do not know. The dish was her way of deciding it. Need one, take one. Have one, leave one. No forms. No thanks required.

When the last penny rolls out of my dish, and I do not refill it, we lose a coin nobody misses. Fine. But I hope we notice what leaves with it. The nickel is worth five times as much, which is exactly why nobody will ever fill a dish with them. You cannot be casually generous with something of value. The whole gift of the penny was there. It let us practice, a cent at a time, being people who cover the stranger behind them.

Keep a few. Not for the metal. To remember we once had a coin so worthless we could afford to give it away.

Cedar Valley News is free, and it comes to your inbox every morning, six days a week. If this morning’s editorial was worth your time, please forward it to someone who would value it. And if someone forwarded it to you and you’d like your own each morning, just reply with the word “subscribe.”

Cedar Valley News has a Facebook group. If you have comments and want to join the conversation, you are welcome. Is there still a take-a-penny dish where you shop, and what small kindness have you seen pass across a counter? Come and tell us. And if we get something wrong, tell us, and we will run the correction. https://bit.ly/40p8jKy

This editorial is part of the fictional Cedar Valley News series, written by Evan Swensen, Publisher, and Claude Marshall, AI Developmental Editor. While the people and town of Cedar Valley are fictional, the facts are real: the United States struck its last circulating penny on November 12, 2025, ending production after more than two centuries; roughly a hundred billion pennies remain in circulation and stay legal tender; and as the supply thins, cash transactions are expected to round to the nearest five cents, per the U.S. Department of the Treasury and the U.S. Mint. Lincoln has appeared on the penny since 1909, the first real person on a circulating U.S. coin.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Recent Posts

Subscribe to Our Newsletter

Start Your Publishing Journey with Expert Guidance.
Unlock Exclusive Tips, Trends, and Opportunities to Bringing Your Book to Market.

About Us

Kindly contact us if you've written a book, if you're writing a book, if you're thinking about writing a book, we can help!

Departments

My Account

Social Media

Payment

Publication Consultants Publication Consultants

Copyright 2023 powered by Publication Consultants All Rights Reserved.