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NATCHEZ — Local business owners have mixed reactions to the potential halt on penny production.

On Sunday, President Donald Trump directed the United States Treasury not to produce any more pennies, citing the rising cost of producing the one-cent coin as the reason.

Associated Press reported a loss of $85.3 million in the 2024 fiscal year that ended in September on the nearly 3.2 billion pennies produced. According to AP, every penny costs nearly $0.037 to produce, which is up from $0.031 the year before.

A place consumers might find themselves short of exact change is when buying stamps for postage. It now takes $0.73 to purchase one stamp from the post office, or $0.93 cents if buying them indirectly from another retailer like the Postal Shoppe.

Carol Smith, owner of The Postal Shoppe LLC in Natchez, said customers will often come in with dollar bills to buy stamps. Even if they only need one stamp, they will wait for her to crack open a new roll of pennies to get their exact change back, she said.

“It doesn’t matter if it’s only two cents, they want their two cents back,” she said.

Smith added, “I think running out of change would be an issue anywhere,” but for the Postal Shoppe specifically, “we use pennies every day” and often many times a day.

“We keep pennies on hand with at least two extra rolls in a drawer and once we get low, we replenish the rolls,” she said.

If banks run low on pennies, Smith said she may need to start collecting them in jars wherever she can. However, Tom Graning, owner of Go Mart and Wardo’s Poboys, says he wouldn’t miss the penny, even if he were to run out.

“We go through a lot of pennies, giving them out more than taking them in. I wouldn’t miss them at all,” he said. “It doesn’t bother me in any way. A lot of people bleed them. They’ll just put them in the ‘give one, take one’ container up front. We have a lot of that. No one really pays any attention to the penny.”