But if you do want to pick them up, you will be glad to know pennies don’t have an expiration date and are generally passed around between hands for around 40 years.

LOL.Īnd who knows how many pennies are lost each year? Just think about those poor lonesome pennies that fall on the ground and aren’t considered worth picking up. And I think I had to feed the machine quarters for the pleasure of ruining that penny. I gave a couple of pennies to my grandsons to do that a few years ago. Some people damage them on purpose in machines made for just that purpose. Sure, some coins are damaged and taken out of circulation. Those statistics make you wonder why the Mint continues to produce 5-16 billion pennies every year. If you’re like me, when you start talking millions and billions, those numbers are too big to properly imagine. That’s a lot of pennies and if you were to gather them all together they would weigh more than 716 million pounds.

Do you have a penny in your pocket? Odds are, you have a jar or dish full of pennies somewhere in your house that you don’t bother to count.Īccording to a news article I came across on the internet, there are approximately 130 billion pennies currently in circulation or hiding out in those piggy banks at your house.

Penny in my pocket