Carissa Gooding, a pressed-penny collector in Columbus, Ohio, who makes very satisfying-to-watch TikToks in which she cleans souvenir pennies with a Q-tip and metal polish whiletelling stories about where she pressed the coins, recently had a self-described "pennymental breakdown."

She found an old pressed penny from the Cincinnati Museum Center among her things,which led her to drive two hours to the museum, both to see a Barbie exhibit and to checkout the machine—but it was nowhere to be found. An attendant told her they'd gotten rid ofit last year, a result of the cost of maintenance compared to the money they actually makefrom the pennies, not to mention the imminent end of penny minting. "I was freaking out about this silly little penny press," she told me. "After that, I went home and was like, I haveto collect every single penny."

In May, Donald Trump announced that in 2026,the U.S. Mint will cease production of thepenny, one of which costs 3.69 cents to make. What will come of the good old-fashionedAmerican vacation practice of pancaking our smallest monetary denomination? Themachines have become a mainstay in tourist locations such as zoos, museums, theme parks, and historical attractions, and the coins usually feature designs of things you can seeat the sites (the facades of buildings, zoo animals, roller coasters, spaceships, artworks—the options are endless). Though they've become more widespread and DIY in the past halfcentury, pressed pennies have been around for more than 100 years. The first one is said tohave been created for the World's Columbian Exposition, a fair in Chicago, in 1893. It's onlynow, in the twilight year of the penny, that machines for penny pressing—aka pennysquishing, penny smashing, coin elongating—seem to be at risk. Voracious collectors are,perhaps counterintuitively, looking forward to it.

In addition to being some of the cheapest souvenirs, pressed pennies boast a community ofexonumists, the technical name for these enthusiastic collectors. These hobbyists sharephotos and machine locations; they mail pressed pennies to other collectors around thecountry; they build penny chandeliers and set up elaborate displays for their hoards. Andwhile many feel somewhat wistful about the end of the penny, they aren't too concernedthat the practice will die out. In fact, it might even be made more special by the coin'simpending rarity.

Gooding is not so worried about Trump's order having an effect, but she's still concernedthat the machines will start falling out of favor with the destinations that host them. In themeantime, she plans to take advantage of the ones still in use and visit all the pennysquishers in the state. Her most recent sojourn was to the Ohio State Reformatory, wheremuch of The Shawshank Redemption was filmed.("I'm sorry," I asked, "even prisons havepenny pressers?" Gooding confirmed.) Like many other pressing fanatics, she hasexperienced places she might not have visited otherwise, thanks to the draw of crankingout a new elongated coin.

"I'm not someone who necessarily seeks out a museum," she said, "so it forces me to golearn about the history of where I grew up—or birds or whatever."

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Squished Dreams(https://slate.com/life/2025/08/pennies-trump-pressed-collector.html)