Stores brace for price rounding and cash register chaos as the U.S. Mint shuts down penny production

U.S. Mint made its final pennies on Wednesday

The decision to stop minting pennies was made because it costs 3.6 cents to mint a single penny. FOX 13's Evan Axelbank reports.

TAMPA - Whether they are being pinched, paying for your thoughts, going towards two cents, time may be running out for pennies.

What they're saying:

 "Some people do pay with pennies, especially the older customers," Autumn King, the manager of The Floridian sandwich shop on Kennedy Boulevard said. "They like to have their exact change."

 People hunting for exact change leaves storeowners with the prospect of rounding up or down to hit the nickel on the head.

 "We'll probably take the loss," King said. "But you have to think, a year of doing that, you know, it accumulates, so it will be a lot of money."

Dig deeper:

The National Association of Convenience Stores is worried because half of their transactions are in cash.

Despite there being an estimated 250 billion pennies out there — somewhere — there is a shortage of them in circulation.

Half of pennies are under couches or in jars, so storeowners either seldom have enough to give change, or must follow rules over how prices are set.

"We're not asking for the penny to come back," Jeff Lenard of the NACS said. "What we're asking for is federal clarity so that retailers can round up and round down."

For their part, coin collectors are not about to find their pot of gold.

"We all have to be willing to embrace change," Steve Howard of Coinacopia Coin Shop said. "No pun intended, but that worked pretty well, didn't it?"

While the makeup of the penny has changed over the years, anything minted after 1982 will be worth the price printed on the back.

"It's just going to be a trash coin," Howard said.

The other side:

So what do we all lose?

Historians say coins are the most reliable way to preserve a society's history.

Who was important? What ideals are passed down?

"When Mount Rushmore is ground to dust," Professor Emeritus Frank Holt of the University of Houston said, "when the Lincoln Memorial has completely fallen away, coins will survive, pennies will survive in large numbers and be the only means we might have to preserve images of, of that extraordinary president."