So 114 billion pennies is basically $1.14 billion. That’s a ton of money if you look at it as dollars, but in pennies, it’s just a massive pile of coins nobody wants to deal with. I mean, can you imagine trying to pay for something big with just pennies? It’d be insane!

In my experience, nobody really uses pennies for anything other than tossing them into a Coinstar machine if they really need cash. Businesses hate counting and rolling them up. Even charities used to collect a lot of pennies, but now they’d rather get bills or even digital donations. It’s just not practical to have all that money tied up in the smallest coin.

Honestly, if all those pennies were melted down or just taken out of circulation and people got dollar bills instead, it’d be way more useful. $1.14 billion could help out tons of businesses, pay workers, or be invested somewhere useful. As pennies, though, it’s almost a joke how little good they do for anyone. It’s wild to think how useless all that money is when it’s locked away in coins nobody spends.