Thats right! After 150 years of exsistance, the penny will be a thing of the past for our future generations. The Royal Canadian Mint has decided to stop wasting money on the production of pennies in order to save the tax payers $11 million a year.

The reasoning behind this solution is very simple, the cost to make a penny actually costs us 1.6 cents to manufacture with material cost and labour cost. But the value remains just a cent.

With that in mind, how will things work when we have to pay that cent is rounding off the numbers to the nearest 5 cents. Therefore an item that would normally cost $1.01 or 1.02 would be rounded down to $1 and items that are $1.03 would be rounded to $1.05 but credit card and debit card purchases will not be affected by that rule.

The mint has produced 35 billion pennies since it began production in 1908. Distribution of the coin will end later this year. Pennies have been made of copper-plated zinc and copper- plated steel since 1997. The last penny will go to the country’s currency museum in Ottawa.

“The real issue was that people weren’t using them, they were putting them in jars at home, and we were doing the same thing at my house,” Flaherty said.