Coins
(that pass by hand)Item No. 19
“We lose the weight of small value. There's something irreplaceable about holding something worth almost nothing and it still being real.”Tap. Insert. Swipe. QR Code? App? Venmo? Alipay? WeChat? Paypal? Let’s just say there isn’t a shortage of ways for us to exchange our currency. Currency is our system of money. We exchange that for goods and services. To pay for the things we buy. A long time ago, some of us may have bartered for goods, with grain, or something else, but nowadays, some sort of plastic or app will mostly do for us to make our purchase. In between bartering and digital funds we were using lots of cash and lots of coins.
Coins? Those flat, circular pieces of precious metal that one could hold between two fingers. Rough, a bit worn, maybe even warm, depending on how long it rested in our palm. It was worth something because the government said so. No matter what it was worth, a coin was something we could touch. Our senses told us it was real. If we had a bunch of them, they’d weigh down our pocket, or purse, or wallet. And when we spent it, we could really feel it before we let it go. The exchange was also a physical exchange. There was no clerk peering out from behind a register or til, waiting for us to use our fingerprint or card or phone to swipe, tap or insert our digital currency, rather, they held out their own palm, so that we could drop our coin into it. Our hands may have touched in that moment, a brief human encounter, the briefest, in our moment of exchange, but still that touch was an encounter with another person.
And when we handed it over? Losing our coin was real. We watched it leave, and we knew who we’d handed it to.
Later, if we’d happen to find a penny on the sidewalk, we’d consider that good luck.
But mostly, now, there’s no reaching into one’s pocket for a penny or two, or finding one on the sidewalk. This is because our currencies are evolving into a digital first space.
Most of us know the penny, at least is officially on its way out. The mint will stop producing this copper coin this year! Why would this be the case? Well, it turns out it costs pennies to produce pennies and it's costing more pennies than ever to produce pennies and the purchasing power of a penny these days is low. That little copper covered zinc sphere just isn’t worth its weight in copper covered zinc anymore.
So we enter the penny–that is, coins that pass by hand, into The Last Catalog. We’ll say our goodbyes to the penny, and all the rest. It’s only a matter of time, it seems, before we’ll go all in on digital and other coins will disappear. The Swiss are leading the way, what's the chance that most of the rest of us won’t follow?
What is the cost of losing coins that pass by hand, the penny, for starters?
What coins carry, ultimately, is materiality, the quality of being a real thing in the physical world, with weight and wear and history pressed into them. Digital currencies, on the other hand, exist, nowhere.
So the cost? We lose the weight of small value. There's something irreplaceable about holding something worth almost nothing and it still being real. Something solid, minted, government-stamped. A belief that even the tiniest unit of value deserves a physical form. A world of digital fractions doesn't feel that way.
And remember the good luck penny? A found coin? A penny on the sidewalk is a tiny gift from nobody. Finding a quarter in a coat pocket from last winter is a minor joy so specific it doesn't have a name, but everyone knows it. These small encounters with money as a physical, losable, findable thing connect us to the randomness of fortune in a way that a digital currency never will. We can find money that can be lost. This teaches us something about impermanence and luck and attention (that digital currency won't.)
And lastly, what about the thrown wish? The wishing well is still a place to make a hope feel real. A penny tossed, feels like a wish that just might come true.
Other specifications:
Empty jars of pennies left to grandchildren. Empty beggar’s cups. Empty street musicians hats.
By the way, coins accumulate time in the way no digital thing can. Years into the future, we can still unearth a coin.