Production at a loss — As of February 2011, it costs about 2.4 cents to mint a penny. In 2007, even the price of the raw materials it is made of exceeded the face value, so there was a risk that coins were illegally melted down for raw materials.
Prices would not be higher — Research by Robert Whaples, an economics professor at Wake Forest University, using data on nearly 200,000 transactions from a multi-state convenience store chain shows that rounding would have virtually no effect. Consumers would gain a tiny amount – about 38⁄1520 (1⁄40) of a cent per transaction.
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