Goodbye Honest Abe. It’s been nice knowing you.

The Americans have finally done it. After more than two centuries, the last US penny is rolling off the line, and the mint workers in Philadelphia are putting away the stamping machines for good. Perhaps they will reappear on E-bay and eventually be exported to China to make yuan.

I imagine them sweeping the floor of the mint for stray copper bits and wondering what to do next, the same way a Cuenca bakery closes for the afternoon and suddenly the whole neighbourhood looks puzzled.

The official reason is that a penny now costs nearly four cents to make, and copper is better used for electrical wiring, which is the kind of math that even I can understand. The government also says electronic payments have made the coin pointless in today’s marketplace, and when a country has three hundred billion of the things hidden away in jars and glove compartments, it is hard to argue with that logic.

The unexpected twist is that stores in the United States are already running out of pennies, which suggests that the minute you stop making a thing, everyone suddenly wants one. Human nature is the same everywhere. Try finding a decent pack of AA batteries in Cuenca during Carnival.

Most of us grew up with pennies, so their disappearance feels a little like losing a family member we never really liked but kept around out of habit. In the UK the penny even carried a strange moral weight.

Public toilets used to require a large old copper penny to unlock the door, and the ritual was so common that the phrase “to spend a penny” became the polite way of saying you needed to take a leak even if no coinage was involved. Every British child learned to raise their hand in class and ask to spend a penny, which tells you something about national culture. The penny was not just a coin, it was an essential bodily function.

This little drama has caused quite a stir in the Caribbean. Small islands that use the US dollar or their own dollar-adjacent currencies have their own useless coins to worry about.

Bermuda has the famous Hog Penny, a shiny one-cent piece that costs far more than one cent to mint, partly because it has to be made overseas. It is useless, to be sure, but Its eventual demise would erase a coin that has been clinking around pockets and cash drawers since 1970, when Bermuda dollarized and put the little piggy to work whenever anyone needed to spend a penny, although the Hog Penny originated in the seventeenth century.  When the island first started to mint its own money it commemorated the only mammal on the island other than rats, which were shipped in by the first human arrivals, or cats, which were shipped from Britain on the very next boat to deal with a plague of rats causing an ecological disaster.

The Hog Penny floats around the island with no real purpose, and I suspect that its retirement party is long overdue. The Americans may not notice losing a penny, but a tiny island that has to pay commercial rates to mint them certainly will.

All of this made me wonder what would happen if Ecuador looked closely at its own coins. We use US pennies, so we inherit the quirks of a giant country where people have long since stopped caring about anything smaller than a quarter.

Many of the pennies that arrive here never return home, because Ecuadorians treat them the way everyone else does. They accumulate in jars, fall between sofa cushions, and travel around in pockets until the owner gives up and empties them into the kitchen junk drawer. Every expat I know has at least one jar of them, sometimes mixed with Canadian coins, British coins, and a washer from a plumbing project that went wrong.

At least in the US many banks and savings and loans have machines where you can tip in the contents of your coin jar and get a credit to your account, but I have not seen such a thing here in Ecuador, though we do have a few machines that can crack a $20 bill for you.

The big question is what will happen when the flow of new pennies stops. Ecuador lives on an endless stream of imported coins, most of which arrive by accident in the backpacks and purses of tourists. Sooner or later we will run short. At that point scrap metal dealers will maybe begin to look at them with new eyes. A penny is mostly zinc with a thin layer of copper, and the metal is worth more than the coin itself.

If history is any guide, someone in Guayaquil will figure out how to melt them down, and a local entrepreneur will accidentally create the first illegal penny smelting cartel. I can picture a prison wing full of sacks of pennies, a blowtorch bought at Coral, and the prison management proudly pointing out that inmates are being rehabilitated in the “Recycling Department”.

Would shoppers here in Cuenca notice the slow disappearance of the penny as it melts away? Probably not. Prices in Cuenca already round themselves naturally. The chola who sells carrots on the street is not going to ask you for a dollar and three cents.

Some Cuenca stores already treat pennies the way they treat counterfeit twenties. Hand one over and the cashier will push it back across the counter as if you were trying to pay with a button off your shirt.

Even the supermarkets tend to avoid awkward totals these days. If prices ever do shift, it will be by accident rather than design, and we will all blame it on yet another new tax that no one understands.

So perhaps the Americans are on to something. Scrap the penny and enjoy the savings. Canada did it years ago and barely blinked. The Caribbean is already thinking about it. Bermuda will eventually admit that the Hog Penny is a lovely little relic that makes a fine free souvenir pendant for tourists.

As for Ecuador, we will likely carry on the same as ever, with jars full of coins, the deposit account at the back of the sofa,  the occasional shortage of nickels, and the probability that somewhere, right now, a scrap dealer inside a top security prison is already melting down pennies to make pistols.

Oh, and an old Bermuda ‘hogge money’ threepenny coin recently sold at auction for $96,000, so perhaps your descendents will thank you if you hang onto your pennies after all.