WICHITA, Kan. (KSNW) – The U.S. Mint printed its last penny on Wednesday, but that doesn’t mean the coin will disappear anytime soon. Few local businesses seem to be mourning its end. While it’s a historic moment, most are largely unfazed.
While those local businesses say they don’t have a concrete plan for handling cash and change, most of their transactions are digital and typically don’t involve cash anyway. As for the hobby of coin collecting, a Wichita coin dealer doesn’t believe the penny will become a hot commodity.
“It’s a tangible piece of history. So you can kind of see, you know, when they change designs, they make minor tweaks,” Zane Killebrew, a coin collector and the head purchaser at Phil’s Coins, said. “An instance that comes to mind would be the steel cent from World War 2. The same design as the wheat cent, but because the copper was being used in the war effort, they started to produce them out of steel. Kind of stands out to a lot of people.”…