There was an owner of a convenience store/gas station back in the late 1990s who openly bragged about “earning” an average of $30 a month from the “take a penny/leave a penny tray” next to his cash register.

The owner — who will remain nameless for obvious reasons — and I got into a debate one day whether the practice was ethical.

We only did so after he mentioned he “cleaned” the tray out a dozen or so times an hour.

I argued people were placing pennies in the trays on the assumption someone else would be able to use them to complete a purchase. As such, I felt his practice was questionable at best and stealing from an implied social compact at worst. The fact he regularly harvested the pennies throughout the day and not just at closing made me feel he was taking advantage of people’s generosity.

His argument was simple. People didn’t want to be bothered with the pennies.

Plus, before he started his frequent emptying of the tray, there were some customers who’d retrieve as much as 12 cents at times to avoid breaking a dollar to cover the odd change on their final tab.

I might add this was about the time the one piece of Bazooka bubble gum that I could buy in 1968 for a penny was selling for a nickel each.

Clearly, one to four pennies by themselves couldn’t buy you anything even back in 1998.

If we were to revisit the debate today, I’d agree 100 percent with the owner who has since sold and moved out of town.

My attitude started changing when more and more convenience store clerks — I assume at concerns that were independently owned and not part of a large company — started automatically not giving you back two or three pennies you had coming in change.

I’d ask for the pennies and they’d oblige. They never argued.

I made the request based on the fact it was “my money” and that I could use it later to buy an item so I didn’t have to break a larger coin, if you will.

What really ended up happening, I’d empty my pockets at the end of the day and weed out the pennies. I had several jars filled with pennies plus probably a couple dollars’ worth in various drawers and in nooks and crannies in the car.

I stopped rolling pennies years ago when I made the transition to doing 99.99 percent of my “in person” banking at the drive up ATM.

Bank of Stockton, it is worthy of noting, was one of the last holdouts to have ATMs that dispensed $10 bills.

It is clear the vast majority of people don’t carry around a lot of cash.

And by 2018, a fairly large number of people oblivious to merchant transaction charges when using debit cards to even buy a soda or candy bar that once upon a time you could do so for less than $1.

The U.S. government, back in 1857, was smart enough to drop the half-cent that had become relatively useless in its buying power.

All of this, of course, brings us to President Trump’s executive order to stop minting pennies.

It cost 3.7 cents to produce a penny in 2024, up from 3.1 cents the previous year.

Some 3.2 billion pennies are minted each year at a face value loss of $83 million.

And if anyone is keeping track — which apparently they’re not — roughly 250 billion pennies have been minted during the past there decades.

The odds are most of those stopped circulating a long time ago.

They were either lost in drawers and jars or sucked up unceremoniously by a vacuum cleaner in a car or in couch and chair crevices.

Trump’s order doesn’t go far enough.

Canada, in 2012, not only stopped minting pennies but they took them out of circulation.

Do not misunderstand. You can use pennies that are still out there to buy stuff in Canada.  But you cannot get any from a bank. 

At the end of 2012, banks were required to send what pennies they had to the Canadian mint. They got the value back in other coins or currency while the returned pennies were recycled.

If you use cash in Canada and the transaction after sales tax has been added on has a total ending in 1, 2, 6 or 7, the amount is rounded down to 0 or 5. If it ends in 3, 4, 8, or 9, it is rounded up to 5 or 0.

They actually conducted studies that determined at the end of a year’s time it would be pretty much a wash for both the merchant and the customer.

Electronic transactions aren’t rounded as the customer is charged the actual total.

If you don’t believe the statistical odds don’t favor either the entity that rounds up or down a charge to the nearest five-cent increment or the person that pays it, as a Californian you’ve been subject to such a rounding process for years.

Your annual state income tax return, or what you are due from overpaid taxes, is rounded even more aggressively to the nearest dollar. That change went into effect in a bid to reduce entry errors on tax forms.

Again, studies showed the decision to round to the nearest dollar was basically revenue neutral for the State of California.

That said, small addition errors that cost time and money to correct were virtually eliminated.

If anyone out there is channeling Benjamin Franklin’s mantra “a penny saved is a penny earned” consider an inflation tidbit from the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics. Back in Franklin’s day of 1780, a laborer made 15 cents an hour. The penny had a lot of purchasing power. Since then, the annual inflation rate average has been 1.29 percent for an accumulative inflation of 2,203.69 percent. That means the face value of a penny issued in 1780 would only have the purchasing power today of 0.04341 cents in constant monetary power.

If Franklin were around today, he’d have to revise his witty insights in Poor Richard’s Almanac to a penny not minted is 3.7 pennies saved.

—  This column is the opinion of Dennis Wyatt, and does not necessarily represent the opinions of The Courier or 209 Multimedia. He may be reached at dwyatt@mantecabulletin.com