Technologies

Small Change, Big Questions: Here Are Five Things to Do With Your Pennies Now

New pennies might not be entering circulation, but the ones you have are still usable.

For more than two centuries, the penny has quietly anchored American cash transactions as the nation’s smallest unit of currency. First minted in 1793, the copper-colored coin is now reaching the end of its run, with the U.S. Treasury producing its final pennies earlier this year. Although the decision was announced in May, the effects are already being felt: penny shortages are cropping up nationwide, driving up costs for businesses and prompting some retailers to offer cash incentives to customers willing to part with their spare change.

What’s that old saying? You don’t miss something until it’s gone? Maybe the penny was more important than we thought. But the old one-cent coin had been fighting a losing battle for respect for years. You can’t buy anything with them anymore, not even a gumball. Most of us just toss them into a junk drawer or a glass jar. A sad penny can even lie on a sidewalk all day and not get scooped up.

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The US Mint struck the last pennies marking the end of an era. According to the Mint, it was costing 3.69 cents to make every penny. That is hardly a smart return on investment for taxpayers. However, with the discontinuation of penny production, some brick-and-mortar businesses across the country have been unable to give exact change because they lack sufficient pennies, if any.

A Retail Industry Leaders Association survey revealed that thousands of stores have no pennies, and they are calling on the federal government to take action.

Grocery chain Price Chopper and Market 32 recently held a Double Exchange Day, when people brought in their pennies and received double the value back in the form of a shopping voucher. Similarly, grocery chain Giant Eagle offered gift cards worth twice the amount of pennies customers brought in during a one-day event on Nov. 1.

Millions at stake

CBS News asked several large companies how they would handle cash transactions if there were shortages of pennies at the counter. McDonald’s said its restaurants would round up or down to the nearest nickel, meaning an order costing $12.43 would round up to $12.45, but an order costing $12.42 would round down to $12.40.

Wendy’s, Kwik Trip, and GoTo Foods — parent company of Auntie Anne’s, Cinnabon, Jamba and Carvel — all said they would round down to the nearest nickel in favor of the customer. Kroger will encourage customers to use exact change, but still accepts pennies.

Rounding down is beneficial for consumers, but the National Association of Convenience Stores estimates that thousands of stores across the US could collectively lose more than $1 million a day by rounding down. The NACS wants US lawmakers to create a law that would allow businesses to round transactions up to the nearest nickel. Until the federal government establishes guidelines or regulations on how to address the disappearing penny, things will remain chaotic for a while.

Others have ditched the penny

Mark Stiving, the CEO of pricing strategy company Impact Pricing, said the discontinuation of the penny will have «almost zero impact» on consumers and businesses in the long run. And he’s got the receipts from New Zealand to prove it.

«What I think is about to happen is that companies will still put prices out in ‘9’s (like $49.99),» Stiving told CNET. According to him, New Zealand used the rounding method after demonetizing and phasing out its penny. «You’d still price something at $9.99, but you just rounded it to the nearest nickel. So whenever a transaction happened, it was always the nearest nickel.»

Canada and Australia also dropped their penny equivalents years ago.

Be penny-wise and take action

You’re not going to find a fortune by foraging all the pennies in your home, unless you have an exceptionally rare one lying around. Still, if you dig around your bedroom, garage, kitchen and even your car, you might collect a few bucks worth. That’s not nothing. Would you let a $5 bill collect dust in a drawer? Of course not.

Find a Coinstar kiosk: You’ve likely walked by one of the 17,000 Coinstar machines without even noticing it. This is a pretty handy way to convert those pennies and other coins into cash. The process is simple: locate a kiosk (typically found inside a grocery store) and deposit your coins to receive a cash voucher, which you can then redeem at checkout or at the customer service desk. There is a service fee of nearly 13%, so if you redeem $100 worth of coins, you get $87.

Wrap the pennies and find a bank: Many banks and credit unions will accept your coins. They mat have a coin-counting machine, or they may ask you to organize the coins into wrappers, which is time-consuming, but it also will give you an idea of just how many coins you have been stashing. There may or may not be a fee, depending on whether you’re an account holder. (Note: Some banks will not accept prewrapped coins. They must be counted out or machine-checked to ensure they are legitimate.) Yes, people do hide same-weight slugs inside coin rolls.)

Just spend the coins: Gone are the days when you could ride your horse down to the general store and buy something with a penny, but there are still a few holdouts. Dollar General offers a weekly Penny List featuring out-of-season or discontinued items that have been marked down to one cent. Websites such as The Krazy Koupon Lady and The Freebie Guy provide weekly updates on what you can get for a penny at Dollar General, if those items haven’t already been removed from the shelves. The Krazy Koupon Lady even has a Home Depot hack where you can get items for a penny.

Find a collector’s item: It’s doubtful, but you never know. The most valuable penny is a 1943 Lincoln Wheat Cent Penny in bronze and copper, which could fetch nearly $2.5 million. Or perhaps you have an 1880 Indian Head Cent, which could net you around $150. The USA Coin Book list of valuable pennies is available here.

Fun and skills for kids: Those pennies could help you level up your arts and crafts toolbox. Help kids learn about budgeting, create some art, or do a science experiment. You’ve got options! Check out even more ideas at Greenlight.

Is the nickel next to go?

The penny is the latest US coin to be discontinued. The half-cent, the half-dime, the large cent, the double eagle and several others have all come and gone. The nickel could be next. It costs nearly 14 cents to make, almost three times the face value of the five-cent coin. The problem is nickels are comprised of 75% copper and 25% nickel, metals which have doubled in price over the last decade.

It will be tougher, however, to eliminate the nickel than the penny. Rounding up or down to the nearest dime could cost US taxpayers $56 million per year, according to a study by the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond. That is significantly more than the estimated $6 million rounding hit per year caused by the penny’s retirement.

A penny for your trivia

The penny may be vanishing, but its history is full of fun facts.

President Lincoln was not always on the penny: Honest Abe only became the star attraction in 1909, in honor of the 100th anniversary of his birth. Lady Liberty was the first to appear on the penny, back in 1793.

Newer pennies have little copper: Pennies minted after 1982 are made of copper-plated zinc, which consists of 97.5% zinc and 2.5% copper.

You can easily clean pennies: Vinegar, vegetable oil and water can help wash away decades of soot and grime off those pennies. But «don’t, don’t, don’t, don’t» even think about it if you want to hunt for any collectables in your penny stash. It could significantly damage their worth, says one coin shop owner.

50/50 coin toss? Try 80/20: Stanford math professor and former magician Persi Diaconis says that a penny will land tails up 80% of the time because the side with Lincoln’s head weighs significantly more than the tails side.

What D, S and P mean: Lettering on the front of the penny indicates where it was minted: D for Denver, S for San Francisco and P for Philadelphia. But you will only see P on pennies minted in 2017, which was done to celebrate the Mint’s 225th anniversary. In all other years, pennies minted in Philly did not have the P engraved on them.

Five special pennies: The final five pennies ever minted feature a special omega symbol, chosen because omega is the final letter in the Greek alphabet. You are unlikely to ever see one in real life. Those five pennies will not enter circulation, according to the Treasury Department. Instead, the government plans to auction them. Details about the auction are not yet available.

Technologies

The Motorola Signature Is the Moto Phone I’ve Wanted for Years

Motorola’s new phone is its best flagship yet and could be the Galaxy S26 Plus rival that Samsung didn’t see coming.

At CES 2026, among the AI humanoids, flashy concepts and next-gen foldables, was a Motorola phone that I didn’t expect to be a CES highlight. And no, I’m not talking about theMotorola Razr Fold. While it was the talk of the town (after all, it is the company’s first-ever book-style foldable), there’s a premium smartphone with top specs and a sophisticated design: the Motorola Signature.

Recent high-end Motorola phones have had good-looking hardware, but they don’t compete with the Galaxy S25 Ultras or Pixel 10s of the world. They fall short in one or more areas, including display, performance, cameras, software or battery. The Motorola Signature is the company’s first flagship phone that looks confident enough to take on heavyweights like the upcoming Galaxy S26 Plus and the current iPhone 17, without faltering on either hardware or software.

I’ve been using it for a couple of days now, and this Motorola phone doesn’t have any major downsides, especially for the price. The biggest one could be availability: It won’t be coming to the US, but it is now available for purchase in India at an unbeatable price. It undercuts the OnePlus 15, iPhone 17 and the Pixel 10 by almost $150 or more (directly converted from INR).

With the ever-increasing prices of premium phones, the Motorola Signature is the flagship killer we’ve been waiting for. At about $660 (INR 59,999), it is hard to beat, and I can admit I’m finally excited about a Motorola phone that’s not a Razr.

Motorola Signature is lightweight, slim and rugged

The Motorola Signature has a 6.8-inch 1,264×2,780-pixel resolution AMOLED display with support for a 165Hz refresh rate. It is an LTPO panel, so it can be set to 1Hz for an always-on display (like the iPhone 17 series and Galaxy S25 Ultra), thereby saving battery life. Its resolution might not be as high as the Galaxy S25 Ultra’s, but it is a promising screen for gaming and content consumption.

I couldn’t find a game to test its 165Hz refresh rate, but watching YouTube videos, Instagram Reels and reading ebooks — both indoors and outdoors — was a pleasing experience. The screen remains legible in all lighting conditions.

Motorola’s new phone is powered by the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 5 chipset and is paired with 16GB of RAM and 512GB of storage. While it’s not the highest-end chip available (that’d be the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5), it packs plenty of power. I had no issues in day-to-day use, occasional multitasking or gaming. My only complaint was with the camera shutter in low light, but we’ll get to it in a bit.

The Motorola Signature ships with Android 16 with the company’s in-house Hello UI on top. It is a comparatively clean interface with plenty of customization options to fine-tune your experience. One of my favorite features, Moto gestures (twist to open the camera or make a double-chop motion to turn on and off the flashlight) is always handy in unexpected ways.

You get an AI Key on the left side of the phone to trigger Moto AI (uses Perplexity or Microsoft Copilot), but it can only be triggered once you create a Motorola account. You can configure the button to do other shortcuts, like double-press it to take notes and press and hold to trigger Moto AI. But in reality, I didn’t use any of these features in my daily life and would’ve preferred the ability to remap them to a shortcut. Google’s Gemini assistant is also available.

The Signature has a 5,200-mAh silicon-carbon battery and supports 90-watt wired charging and 50-watt wireless charging. Should those speeds hold up, that battery might fill up quickly using either method. It lasted me an entire day on medium use, but on another day, I had to charge it twice when I pushed it with streaming, browsing, Google Maps navigation for 30 minutes and active camera usage. It doesn’t compete with OnePlus 15’s massive 7,300-mAh cell but does well to reduce battery anxiety.

All of this sounds more impressive when you take the Signature’s design into context: The flagship Qualcomm processor’s power, 5,000-mAh plus battery, big AMOLED screen and three 50-megapixel cameras housed in a slim and lightweight design. The new Motorola phone is 6.99mm thick and weighs just 186 grams. For context, the Galaxy S25 Plus, with a smaller battery, measures 7.3mm thick and weighs 190 grams, while most recent big phones weigh 200 grams or more.

I shifted from the iPhone 17 Pro Max and enjoyed using the Motorola Signature because it weighed less. But I didn’t expect it to be so light. The Signature feels good in my hand. I’m glad it doesn’t have sharp flat sides like the Galaxy S25 Ultra. Plus, I love its linen-inspired finish on the back, which sets it apart from the competition. Like its Edge siblings, the Signature is rated IP68 and IP69 for dust and water resistance (meaning it can survive being submerged under a meter of water for 30 minutes and high-pressure water jets), so there’s no fear of dust and water damage.

Improving on the 2 weakest links

Most Motorola phones that I’ve used in recent years, including the $1,300 Razr Ultra have one or two downsides: software support and/or cameras.

The Signature marks a new beginning for the brand as it joins the ranks of Samsung and Google with seven years of Android OS software and security updates. This is on par with Google Pixel and Samsung Galaxy phones and better than what OnePlus offers. I hope this new software update policy is implemented on more Motorola phones launching in 2026.

Secondly, the Motorola Signature (finally!) introduces an impressive camera system. On the back, you get three cameras: a 50-megapixel main camera with OIS, paired with a 50-megapixel telephoto camera with a 3x zoom lens and OIS, and a 50-megapixel ultrawide camera. This is the first Motorola phone with cameras that I wouldn’t trade for another setup during my vacations.

Photos from the primary and telephoto cameras have better color accuracy than previous Moto shooters. Images have a slightly warmer tone and are saturated — not as much as the OnePlus 15, which delivers much more saturated tones. I prefer Signature’s look in most scenarios.

However, the ultrawide-angle camera retains fewer details, and OnePlus does better in that regard.

The telephoto lens struggles with edge detection in low-light portraits, but I loved using it for architecture shots and capturing scenery around me. It can deliver some stunning shots even in 6x. Mind you, it has 3x optical zoom, but I shot the above photo in 6x, and it has a nice bokeh, good details and an overall pleasing look.

Motorola Signature final thoughts

Overall, the Signature has solid cameras for the price and the best optics yet for a Motorola phone. But there’s one hindrance: The camera shutter in low light is slow to process images. For instance, I wanted to snap a few action shots during a badminton game, but I missed some great smashes because the camera wouldn’t allow me to capture images faster.

The Motorola Signature marks a solid flagship comeback for the brand. It has a big and bright display, a capable processor, a versatile camera setup and good battery life. This phone is hard to fault in its price segment.

The Signature is now available to purchase in India at a starting price of INR 59,999 (approximately $660) for the 256GB variant. It will go on sale in Europe for €999 (approximately $1,170) with 512GB storage in the base version. Motorola has plans to launch its new flagship phone in more countries across the Middle East, Africa, Latin America and Asia-Pacific regions. However, the Motorola Signature won’t be coming to the US.

Technologies

Today’s NYT Connections: Sports Edition Hints and Answers for Feb. 5, #500

Here are hints and the answers for the NYT Connections: Sports Edition puzzle for Feb. 5, No. 500.

Looking for the most recent regular Connections answers? Click here for today’s Connections hints, as well as our daily answers and hints for The New York Times Mini Crossword, Wordle and Strands puzzles.

Today’s Connections: Sports Edition is a tough one. As an old-school Minnesota Twins fan, I was excited to see the last name of our most legendary player on the grid. If you’re struggling with today’s puzzle but still want to solve it, read on for hints and the answers.

Connections: Sports Edition is published by The Athletic, the subscription-based sports journalism site owned by The Times. It doesn’t appear in the NYT Games app, but it does in The Athletic’s own app. Or you can play it for free online.

Read more: NYT Connections: Sports Edition Puzzle Comes Out of Beta

Hints for today’s Connections: Sports Edition groups

Here are four hints for the groupings in today’s Connections: Sports Edition puzzle, ranked from the easiest yellow group to the tough (and sometimes bizarre) purple group.

Yellow group hint: QB is another one.

Green group hint: Hit it out of the park.

Blue group hint: Great gridiron signal-callers.

Purple group hint: Half of a thousand.

Answers for today’s Connections: Sports Edition groups

Yellow group: Football positions, abbreviated.

Green group: Members of the 500-HR club.

Blue group: First names of QBs to throw 500 career TDs.

Purple group: ____500.

Read more: Wordle Cheat Sheet: Here Are the Most Popular Letters Used in English Words

What are today’s Connections: Sports Edition answers?

The yellow words in today’s Connections

The theme is football positions, abbreviated. The four answers are CB, OT, S and TE.

The green words in today’s Connections

The theme is members of the 500-HR club. The four answers are Banks, Bonds, Foxx and Killebrew.

The blue words in today’s Connections

The theme is first names of QBs to throw 500 career TDs. The four answers are Aaron, Drew, Peyton and Tom.

The purple words in today’s Connections

The theme is ____500. The four answers are ATP, Daytona, Indy and WTA.

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Technologies

Today’s NYT Mini Crossword Answers for Thursday, Feb. 5

Here are the answers for The New York Times Mini Crossword for Feb. 5

Looking for the most recent Mini Crossword answer? Click here for today’s Mini Crossword hints, as well as our daily answers and hints for The New York Times Wordle, Strands, Connections and Connections: Sports Edition puzzles.

Need some help with today’s Mini Crossword? The Across clues were kind of tricky today, but the Down clues helped me fill in the grid. Read on for all the answers. And if you could use some hints and guidance for daily solving, check out our Mini Crossword tips.

If you’re looking for today’s Wordle, Connections, Connections: Sports Edition and Strands answers, you can visit CNET’s NYT puzzle hints page.

Read more: Tips and Tricks for Solving The New York Times Mini Crossword

Let’s get to those Mini Crossword clues and answers.