You can't make this stuff up, no matter how hard you try.
I was at my Credit Union the other day. That's were I saw the woman loading up a wagon with $50 dollar bags of pennies. She had five bags loaded and left to get in her car.
Like the nosey person I am, I walked out the door behind her and offered to help her put them into her beat up station wagon. I think they stopped production of that car in 1958, but maybe it was 1959. I thought her car was a beautiful shade of red, until I got closer, seeing it was the color of rust, because it was well, Rust.
Anyway, I struck up a conversation. It went pretty much like this:
"Golly, that is a lot of pennies!" I said.
"Yes, it is," she replied.
"What ya gonna do with so many pennies? Going to play the penny slots at the casino?" I asked.
"Oh, no," she said, "I go through them and find all the pennies dated before 1981."
"Really?" I exclaimed. "Collector, huh?"
"No," she said. "Once I have those picked out, I re-roll the rest and return them to the bank to get some more bags."
"OK," I said with a bewildered look on my puss, "so what exactly do you do with those pennies prior to 1981?"
She looked at me and grinned. "I take them one at a time and scratch them on both sides using a concrete brick. Then I pound each of them into small chunks."
"Hold up just a second," I sputtered. "You deface them and then beat them into little lumps...that's a lot of work! Why in God's name do you do such a thing?"
"Well," she said, "those pennies before 1980 are 95% copper. They are worth more than a penny and I sell them to the scrap metal yard. Supplements my social security."
I bid her a Merry Christmas and got into my junk heap car and thought about it. I know that melting pennies is against the law, but from the sound of things, she makes them pennies look like anything but pennies.
Guess when little old ladies beat the crap outta pennies to supplement their meager income, this country is in far worse shape than even I thought!
Amazing the ingenuity of low income Americans.
Merry Christmas, indeed!!