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Just for discussion--What would have happened if the Mint had just skipped cents in 1943?
CaptHenway
Posts: 34,312 ✭✭✭✭✭
Inspired by the delightful threads on the 1942 experimental cents:
What if the Mint had simply announced "Hey Americans...we need copper for the war effort and will not be making "pennies" in 1943. You can help Uncle Sam by cleaning out any old pennies in your sock drawer or whatever and spending them or taking them to your bank.
Professional Numismatist, Retired. 55 year member ANA. Former ANA Senior Authenticator. Winner of four ANA Heath Literary Awards; three Wayte and Olga Raymond Literary Awards; Numismatist of the Year Award 2009, and ANA Lifetime Achievement Award 2020. Winner of the PNG's 2026 Robert Friedberg Award for "The Enigmatic Lincoln Cents of 1922," Available now from Whitman or Amazon.
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Interesting. I still doubt that it would have removed any real collector coins from the market place though. There would be fewer piles of circulated examples I guess...fewer trash cans full of them. Lol
Not really looking for much these days but if I were, it might be a toner.
Cents circulated heavily back then. There would have been a cent shortage by the end of the year.
Don't really know as I was born the next year.
There would have been a lot of unfilled holes in the coin folders.
There might very well have a cent shortage at a time when a cent could actually buy something. The mintages had been low during the Great Depression because of a lack of demand for goods and services. The mintage of 1943 cents was 485 million in round numbers according to "The Red Book." That was not a small output for the U.S. Mint System.
The Mint and Treasury had multiple 'penny day' campaigns and school events beginning in 1940 in an attempt to get cents out of jars and cans. But demand, especially from low-value vending machines that dispensed penny candy, soft drinks for 6-cents, streetcar and bus fares of 7 or 8 cents, plus state sales taxes that became popular I the 1930s beginning with West Virginia, all required large quantities of one-cent coins. (This was also deep in the era of state sales tax tokens for 5 mil or 5 mils, etc.)
There were plenty of more important shortages in 1943 , food, bullets , merchant ships , coffins ............. 1943 was a rough year everywhere , it would have not even been a blip on the radar.
I dunno but I recall being dumbstruck the first time I saw a steel cent when I was about eight.
Maybe a skipping a Few years of production may serve as a compromise to save the cent and save money
Experience the World through Numismatics...it's more than you can imagine.
1974 and prior coins would have more wear.
Just about everything in the grocery stores was like
.27 per lb
.17 ea
even yards of cloth were never .25 per yd it always seemed to be one or two cents off a common coin denomination.
Getting pennied to death but merchants counted every penny.
Note: My mom told me about metal drives for the war effort and noted copper pots were prized and set aside.
"Keep your malarkey filter in good operating order" -Walter Breen
Interesting concept. I guess just skipping production never occurred to them, probably for the reasons stated above, But, private entities might have stepped in (as with CW and HT tokens.) It would have been interesting.... We might have had local paper cent chits, various metal cent tokens, fiber or composition token, maybe even ceramic or porcelain.
In the 1970s there was a cent shortage (I don't recall why) and if you turned in $25 worth of cents to the bank ($5 for minors) then the Treasury Department sent you a fancy certificate thanking you for doing your patriotic duty. I still have mine somewhere - I will take a photo of it the next time I come across it.
The country could have picked up the slack by just recirculating the existing cents more often. Might have been a problem if they went past one year.
This was also a time when casual card playing was very, very popular. Many homes kept a container of cents around to use as chips for their weekly games. My grandparents and at least one great aunt had such a container. In the case of my grandparents the container continued to be used for the card games into the 1960's.
I don't think people had jars of coins laying around in 1943. As was said previously, Cents were used regularly. Wartime created shortages of everything, and the thing to look at is the orders for new Cents from banks had to be filled. This most definitely put the Mint into a big quandary......how do we do it?
Things defense-wise were moving very fast. The Mint acquiesced by having to make a quick decision and came up with the "Steelies".......not well liked at all and often mistaken for dimes. But it had to do.
Just a blip in the timeline of American Coinage..............what's a person to do?
Pete
My birth year set would have had three fewer coins.
Now that I think about it, all of the coins in circulation today have different metallic compositions than those in my birth year set.
That is an interesting observation. Only those born in 1943 can make that statement. I would have to think about it for a while but the last time that was an accurate statement was well back into the 19th century, I think....
Another question to ponder.......... Back then, the Government/Treasury/Mint had to make a quick decision on producing cents & what composition they would be. Do you think, given the same urgent state of emergency, TODAY's versions of the same entities could pull together to accomplish the same?
...I think it would have hurt the moral of the World if we had to stop making pennies during WW2...I would certainly look it as a blow to my enemy if they had to stop producing monies mid-fight. Also, in 1942 we weren't necessarily winning to the eyes of the world yet...so there is that mindset also. I think it's cool they did what they did and now we get a steel cent in our type sets because of it
No, the cents and nickels of 1944 and 1945 are different now.
I did think about those but I figured they were close enough to not count, but the argument could be made.
I guess 1942 would also partially qualify, since they made nickels in two different compositions that year.
It would have been a bummer if the Lincoln cent had wound up having a "missing" year. This coin (the obverse, anyway) has to be the all-time champ for being continuously minted for circulation for 109 years (so far) without any years being skipped or a change in design. The closest it came to missing a year was in 1922.
I am glad they did not skip a year. That would irritate me... I stopped collecting ASE's when they skipped a year...I must have a touch of OCD....
Cheers, RickO
I don't think that the "volatility of money" or the number of times a dollar is spent in a year works that way or changes that easily. Yes, the Cents might have moved through the economy a little faster, but I don't think that is would have fixed the coin shorta.