> I hoped to watch the birth of a new cohort of pennies in person, but a Mint press representative insisted to me that he and other Mint professionals had “no idea” when or where the Mint would ever be making pennies — that these people could not narrow it down by day, or even week, at either facility. Did this mean, I asked, that it was standard procedure at the largest coin-making operation on Earth (Philadelphia), which last year minted more than two billion pennies, to decide “day of” which of six possible denominations it was going to produce? “Yeah,” he said — though, to be fair, there is vanishingly little proof he was paying attention to what either of us was saying.
