With the US mint soon to stop minting pennies, do you think semi key and key date wheat cents will go up in value or stay the same? Do you think that there will be a greater, lesser, or same focus on collecting pennies (collecting, not hoarding)? Do you think common wheat pennies will stay the same at around 3-5 cents apiece?
I think so. When we changed from the memorial reverse to the shield reverse I expected that memorial cents would be gobbled up like my generation gobbled up wheat cents when I was young, but it never happened. I suspect the Lincoln cent market will remain about the same in the foreseeable future.
I've heard that the mint has a big stockpile of cent planchets. The coin will no longer be made for circulation, but it will be included in Mint and Proof sets. If the stockpile is big enough, it could last for a long time. Frankly if this is true, I'm all for it. The cent is the only collector coin with a virtually complete date run from 1793 to present. Only the 1815 is missing.
He’s already done it. Back in the mid 1800s, some observers thought that the 1813 large cent would become scarce because so many of them that he had seen had been altered to “1815.”
There is too much love for the penny for it to disappear or become non-collectable. Even our new generation of numismatist generally start with the cent. The cent is part of American history!
I'm curious about the legal/legislative side of this. My impression is that the mint can decide how many to produce of a given denomination based on demand, but can they really decide on their own to just stop production altogether? They coined over 3 billion cents last year, so clearly there is still demand. Seems like Congress would need to authorize total cessation?
Everything is relative. Key and semi key (and some variety/error) Lincoln Cents were STILL produced in comparably large numbers (to the millions and billions of common dates) and available readily in the trade. I don't think there will be much change in cent adherents and values much outside the historic value increase trend. I DO think there MAY be speculation on some US Mint minuscule mintages (intentional and relative) releases of a certain category of the series.
