So does anything cost a penny anymore?

I can't find anything that costs a penny.  Amazon has a few things, like cheap earrings and necklaces or stuff no body in their right mind would ever purchase, but the shipping is usually $5 or more, and all of them are from the Amazon marketplace (sold on amazon.com by other vendors).  There is nothing directly from Amazon that costs a penny that I could see.   Wal-Mart and other online retailers don't have anything for a penny that I could find.  But seriously, if anything is listed at a price point of $0.01 then it's probably grossly overpriced. We round now. Why don't we round a little more and get rid of those pennies?

Redenomination

An alternative to removing the smallest denomination of a currency is a process called redenomination. Redenomination is not the same as revaluation. Though the terms are similar and both deal with money, revaluation deals with exchange rates and pegging a currency to another.  We are talking about redenomination which is changing the currency itself into a new currency.  Redenomination typically happens when inflation or hyper-inflation has eroded the value of a currency so much, that everyday transactions are expressed in thousands, millions, billions, or even trillions of units of a currency.  Eventually, like they did in Zimbabwe, nations will drop a bunch of zeros off the end so that a unit of the "new" currency, for example, will be worth 1,000 or 1,000,000 units of the "old" currency.  In relatively stable economies, usually this causes only a temporary decrease in stability, after which things go back to normal.  But, in highly volatile economies, this is usually the beginning of the end.   Most recently, most of Europe has gone through a redenomination, converting to the Euro.  Of course the main problem with redenomination is that you have to print currency in the new denomination, mint coins in the new denomination, and have a transition period where people can trade in their old currency and coins for the new, and where everyone can spend either the new or the old or both.
Would this be a good idea for the US? Probably not yet. Maybe when the dollar is about as valuable as the penny is today. Sort of like the Japanese Yen. It's worth about one cent. I think Japan needs to start thinking about redenominating their currency.  Maybe they already are.
The problem with redenomination is that there is usually a brief spike of inflation after the transition period, especially if the new denomination has the same name.  Let's drop only one 0 from the current prices.  Your old salary of OldUS$30,000 per year is now NewUS$3,000.  If you make OUS$100,000 now you make NUS$10,000.  But now gas instead of being OUS$4.00 a gallon, is now NUS$0.40.  OUS$60.00 video games, now only cost NUS$6.00.  Initially we are in the same position as before, only things are valued a little differently.  Now after the transition period ends, throw in a quick spike of inflation where everything costs 10 to 20% more than before within a couple years, but your income only goes up by 5%.  Hello recession! This is usually why redenomination is not a good idea.  Especially to drop only 1 or 2 zeros. I think we have quite a long time before we need to think about redenomination.  Eventually we can get rid of cents and fractions of a dollar.  Then when a dollar becomes a lot less valuable than the penny is today, we can think about redenomination.  Retiring coins like the penny has virtually no economic impact.  Redenomination goes for the economic jugular.  It's only for when the currency can no longer handle the current economy.
So let's just drop the penny and move on.  The economy is not going to deflate anytime soon, so we've got nothing to lose, we'll only be saving billions of dollars.

How Heavily Loaded are Your Pockets?

Well, one penny weighs 2.5 grams, so $1 worth of pennies weighs 250 grams or just over 1/2 a pound.  $20 in pennies weighs 5,000 grams or about 11 lbs, and $100 in pennies will weigh about 55 lbs. But to be more accurate, the pennies before 1982 weighed 3.11 grams, so if you have $100 worth of those pennies, then your looking at about 68.5 lbs.  Compare this to $100 in nickels which weighs 22 lbs, $100 in dimes, quarters, or half-dollars which each weigh 5 lbs (hey, I think they planned it that way!), or $100 in dollar-coins which comes in at a trim 810 grams or 1.8 lbs.  Of course, each bill made by the US government only weighs about 1 gram, so you wouldn't even notice if you had a $100 bill in your pocket or not.  Since you won't notice that $100 bill in your pocket, you may as well just give it to me.  😉

Weird Penny Ideas

Wow there are some pretty crazy and artistic uses for the billions of pennies out there.  Pinterest is sporting a few pages (here and here) for the different ways to use these useless copper disks. My favorite is probably the shower tiles.  Either that or the donkey head!

Penny Battery

So you probably already knew that you could make a battery out of pennies.  You'll need a bunch of zinc pennies with the zinc exposed on one side (file or sand the copper coating off on one side).  Cut some cardboard or paper towels or other absorbent material into penny sized pieces and then soak them in an acidic solution like vinegar or lemon juice. Once the pieces are saturated, stack the pennies (all zinc side down) with a piece of the saturated material in between each one.  Then touch the wires from an led light to each end, or attach each end to a small calculator or watch.  As long as the cardboard stays wet, the penny battery will work.  Once the pieces dry out, you'll have to saturate them again. You probably couldn't power your cell phone or DS with it unless you had a big old stack of pennies, but it's still a cool little experiment.  Here is a youtube video that explains the process very well.