Some people hate pennies. One of the chief complaints is, "It costs more than a penny to make a penny." That's a stupid argument, though. All our money could cost more to make than it's denomination and it wouldn't matter because it's not the physical value of the actual object we're trading when we give someone money in exchange for goods and services. The monetary object is just a tool, a symbolic way to keep track of the amount of value we're trading for something. A single penny may be exchanged tens of thousands of times during its lifetime. If something that useful only cost pennies to produce then it was a bargain.
Pennies are nice, though, in that they are almost worthless, but not quite. When I have the opportunity to leave pennies in the, "Leave a penny, take a penny" bowls by cash registers, I do, and I feel good about it because I've made someone's life a little less annoying by doing so because now they'll be able to make exact change. The times when I've had to use that bowl, I've been very grateful to the person who left their pennies there. It's a win/win!
I also don't carry pennies with me. If there are any in my pocket at the end of the day, they go into the penny jar. And they keep going into the penny jar for months, even years, until we're short on funds. Then we roll them up and there's always a surprising amount of money we didn't realize we had. So, yay pennies!
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