Jeff Duntemann's Contrapositive Diary Rotating Header Image

Daily Penny Report

  • 1 penny at McDonald’s: 1978, very fine, 5% mint luster.
  • 1 penny at McDonald’s: 2000, near-uncirculated, 60% mint luster.
  • 1 penny at McDonald’s: 2002-D, extremely fine, 20% mint luster

Let me clarify how these reports work: I am posting a line item for every penny I receive in change on any given day, not a line item for each transaction. (Actually, if I get two pennies with the same date, I’ll report them in a single line item, as I did yesterday.) Today’s pennies came to me in one purchase at MickeyD’s. If you don’t see a Daily Penny Report, it means I didn’t buy anything that day that gave me pennies in change. Big stuff I typically charge, but I pay cash for little stuff so as not to clutter my charge statements.

3 Comments

  1. Roy Harvey says:

    Sounds like someone came across a bunch of old pennies and spent them at McDonalds. Go get some rolls of regular pennies and go offer to trade them for whatever they have in their drawer.

    1. I dunno. Spending pennies in sufficient quantities to fill cash drawers full of them is unlikely. Is somebody going to buy a McMuffin with eight rolls of them? I’ve never done anything like that, and I don’t think anybody else would do it, except perhaps as a prank.
      Our Fry’s supermarket has a coin exchange machine. You dump in a jar full of coins and it prints you a ticket for what they were worth. You can spend this at the checkout or get paper bills at the customer service counter. If such machines are widespread (and I think they are) they make it very easy to monetize grandpa’s penny jar. The coins are then banked and returned to circulation. I still think this is what we’re seeing, and getting some real stats on the prevalence of 20+ year old pennies is going to be interesting indeed.

  2. Don Doerres says:

    OneAZ Credit Union and every Chase Bank branch that I know of has the coin counter machines.

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