LOCAL ANGLES: FIND A PENNY ... AND YOU HAVE A WORTHLESS COIN

How is it the old saying goes?

Find a penny, pick it up, and all the day you have ... well, a nearly worthless piece of ore in your pocket.

Or something like that.

It is also said that a dollar won't buy what it used to, and it takes 100 pennies to make a dollar. Depending on the spin applied to this, you might say that pennies are devalued at one one-hundredth the rate of dollars ... or that they are more inconsequential than ever.

Inflation intensifies the plight of the penny but isn't the only problem for this underachieving coin. People recoil from having a pocketful of pennies because they weigh you down and won't buy you much.

The best a penny can do in your possession is create "correct change" and keep you from getting more pennies in your pocket. In those rare transactions where you make the numbers work, matching coinage to the price showing on the cash register, you gain an unnatural feeling of accomplishment.

At many small businesses and restaurants, clerks will spot you a penny or two to keep from making change and filling your pockets with coins. Some establishments even provide at their cash registers receptacles containing pennies for the use of their customers.

You won't find these at the corporate fast-food outlets, however, since a penny saved is still viewed as a penny earned when thousands of franchises are involved.

These places will boast incessantly about cooking you the best sandwiches around, insisting you take fries with the order, yet their service to you vanishes when it comes to having you haul away 99 cents in coins after you can't come up with a stray penny at the drive-thru.

In getting that 99 cents, you take into your possession at least four pennies. The circulation of those pennies becomes muddled at that point, since they will likely be deposited on the dashboard of your vehicle where, in the summer, they will become too hot to hand any other fast-food attendant requiring small change.

Else, they will find their way into a pants pocket and subsequently onto a dresser, where the coins will remain until the initiative is taken to collect them in a bowl, where pennies will pile up until ambition is summoned to wrap them in bank-supplied rolls.

The rolls seldom get to a bank within three months of this tidy exercise.

The circulation of pennies is a grudging endeavor.

As Americans, we can still count ourselves lucky in this regard. There are no doubloons, shillings, shekels, drachms or farthings to deal with.

With this American enmity toward pennies, find no surprise in an idea that surfaces on occasion that would eliminate the production of these coins and phase them into oblivion.

Costs that are conveniently divided into 100 parts because of pennies could be divided instead into increments of 20, meaning the smallest coin necessary would be a nickel ... meaning, of course, we could get started on our grudge against 5-cent coins.

Or, since most pennies are needed now to account for the odd and varying amounts of sales taxes affixed to goods, we could eliminate some of the taxes, round costs to the nearest coin and make better use of the money spent to keep $20 billion in coins in circulation.

The Mad magazine take on finding pennies has a man debating whether to stoop to pick up an unclaimed coin on a sidewalk. Convincing himself of the merit of this, he badly wrenches his back in the effort and is seen next in traction, a huge hospital bill produced by the act of proving money's worth.

Despite this, I pick up pennies when I spot them. They seem to be on the ground with increasing frequency, possibly from growing individual indifference to the coins, though it may just be I walk with my head down more these days.

There are no superstitions attached to this, and I haven't noticed my luck (or bank account) improving as a result of these finds. It endows in me a feeble bit of discipline, a reminder that meager exertion is rewarded meagerly ... but rewarded all the same.

Who knows? Maybe my luck is accumulating.

Ken Newton is editor of the Southeast Missourian.