Reach into your pocket. Or your car cupholder. Or that dish by the front door that exists for exactly one purpose.
There they are. Coins.
You did not want them. You did not ask for them. Somebody handed them to you as change and now they are your problem.
Gif by sleepinggiant on Giphy
Here is the fact that makes this worth twenty minutes of your attention.
It costs the United States government more than one cent to make a penny. Substantially more. It has cost more than a penny to make a penny for roughly two decades running.
The nickel is worse. A five cent coin has cost meaningfully more than five cents to produce for years.
So the government is manufacturing money at a loss, in enormous quantities, and has kept doing it through multiple administrations of both parties.
Why?
Not sentiment. Not inertia, exactly. There are real reasons, they are more interesting than you would guess, and one of them involves a single company in Tennessee that has spent decades lobbying to keep the penny alive.