Too expensive; kill it

Rico says he's long advocated killing off the stupid penny, but Alison Griswold has a Slate article about why it would pay us to do so:

The cost of producing a penny fell just over thirty percent in the 2014 fiscal year, but still exceeds a penny, according to a new report from the United States Mint. Whereas last year it cost $0.0241 to manufacture a penny, it now costs only $0.0166. The price of making a nickel, dime, and quarter also decreased in the latest year, though the nickel, like the penny, still has a production cost that exceeds its transaction value ($0.0809).
The penny is a topic of perennial debate in the US because, as The Wall Street Journal stated succinctly in September of 2014, it is "easy to lose and expensive to produce." Two years ago, Matt Yglesias made the case in Slate that the US should follow Canada's lead and ditch the penny entirely. He's not alone. Citizens to Retire the Penny, a group founded by an MIT physics professor, says the penny drains "almost a billion from the national economy every year."
But since we haven't ditched the penny, what are we still using it for? It's a little unclear. In May of 2014, NPR's Planet Money had a pair of reporters wander around Manhattan in search of anything they could buy for a single cent. Spoiler alert: they failed to find it. One woman said she might be able to sell a single sequin for a penny, but that the transaction wasn't "worth her time". The main arguments for keeping the penny these days seem to come from the zinc industry, and relate to vague fears that getting rid of the single-cent will cause merchants to round up all their prices.
Could better technology bring a solution to the penny problem? Unfortunately, getting the coin to cost a cent or less may be an unattainable goal. The Mint warns that "there are no alternative metal compositions that reduce the manufacturing unit cost of the penny below its face value".

Rico says if it'll stop all that stupid $x.99 pricing, he's all for it...