When Peter Doocy opened his Fox News segment by announcing that the U.S. Mint had stopped making pennies after 232 years, it sounded like the end of a tiny, familiar piece of American life.
Then Pawn Stars host Rick Harrison stepped in and made it clear: the final pennies are worth a lot more than one cent – and they’re only part of a much bigger story about money, the economy, and even fentanyl.
America’s Last Pennies Leave the Mint
On The Sunday Briefing, Peter Doocy explained that the federal government has officially stopped minting pennies because they simply cost too much to produce.
According to Doocy, it cost about 3.7 cents to make a single 1-cent coin, a losing math problem that finally caught up with the Treasury.
In Philadelphia, the mint responded by creating what Doocy called “the ultimate collectors’ items”: the last five pennies ever made.
Mint officials told Fox they plan to auction those final five coins and send the proceeds back to the U.S. Treasury to help pay down the national debt. It’s symbolic more than anything – five coins won’t fix Washington’s books – but the move underlines how seriously the government now takes the cost of small change.
How Much Are the Final Pennies Really Worth?
Doocy turned to Rick Harrison as his in-studio reality check.
If someone walked into the world-famous Gold & Silver Pawn Shop in Las Vegas with one of those last pennies, Doocy wanted to know, what kind of payday could they expect?
Harrison said he’s heard people toss around “million-dollar numbers,” but he doesn’t buy it.
In his view, each of the final pennies will probably fetch “a couple of hundred thousand” dollars at auction, not seven figures.
He reminded viewers that there are already other coins in the numismatic world that legitimately bring a million dollars or more – and in his words, “they’re a lot cooler” than a modern cent.
Doocy, citing what Treasury officials are hoping for, said the government thinks the coins could sell in the $2–5 million range each.
That gap between government optimism and Harrison’s more grounded estimate shows how unpredictable high-end collecting really is. When a few “gazillionaire coin collectors” decide they have to own one of only five items on earth, prices can do strange things.
Why Fingerprints and Flaws Matter So Much
Doocy also raised a detail that has already annoyed serious collectors: the treasurer who minted the last pennies reportedly touched them with bare hands.
Collectors are worried that the oils from his fingertips could eventually corrode the thin copper layer on the coins.
Harrison didn’t dismiss that concern. In fact, he doubled down.
He explained that modern pennies are not pure copper. They’re mostly zinc, with a copper coating on the outside. That thin layer is very sensitive, and even a single fingerprint can damage the surface over time.
In the world of coin collecting, Harrison said, the more perfect the coin, the more valuable it is.
So yes, he agreed, fingerprints do matter – even on a “history-making piece” like the last penny ever minted.
From a collector’s perspective, that actually makes things more interesting. If some of the coins show obvious print damage and some don’t, you could end up with a strange hierarchy: the “cleanest” of the last five might become the most valuable, even though they all came from the same historic moment.
Should You Start Digging Through Your Change?
Doocy then asked the question a lot of viewers probably had in their heads: should people go tear apart their sock drawer and piggy banks looking for valuable pennies now that the coin is done?
Harrison’s answer was blunt: “Almost all the good ones” are already gone.
He said you would have to go through millions of pennies today to find one even worth five dollars.
In earlier decades, when far fewer people collected coins, you really could stumble into rare dates or mint errors in your pocket change.
Now, though, Harrison believes most of the obvious winners have been cherry-picked out of circulation by collectors and dealers over the years.
“If you went to the bank and got $100 worth of pennies,” he said, “you’re probably not going to find one worth more than 5 cents.”
That doesn’t mean it’s pointless to look, just that the odds are heavily stacked against casual treasure hunters. In a way, Harrison is reminding people that the big money here is in those ultra-scarce, headline-grabbing pieces – not the coffee can full of modern cents in the garage.
Pennies, Nickels, and What Inflation Really Does
Harrison also made a bigger point about why the penny’s death was basically inevitable.
He told Doocy that when government “prints a lot of money, the smallest denominations go away first.”
In other words, once inflation erodes the real value of a coin, it becomes harder and harder to justify spending more to make it than it’s actually worth.
Harrison predicted the nickel will likely be “the next thing to go,” saying he believes it now costs around 9–10 cents to produce a single 5-cent piece.
If he’s right, it means the U.S. is minting coins that have less purchasing power than the raw materials and labor that go into them.
His comment is a pretty simple, almost old-school way of describing inflation, and it hits home. When the currency is stretched by years of money printing and higher prices, the coins at the bottom of the chain are the first to break.
What Harrison Sees From the Pawnshop Floor
Doocy also pressed Harrison on something Washington politicians talk about constantly: affordability.
If people are hurting that badly, Doocy asked, are more of them pawning their stuff just to make ends meet?
Harrison said his pawn levels have stayed “right around the same” as the last few years.
He doesn’t see a huge spike in people desperate for small loans, aside from a bump in government workers who came in during the recent shutdown when their paychecks were temporarily halted.
According to Harrison, the bigger change is who is – and isn’t – visiting Las Vegas.
He told Doocy that tourism is down, but mostly because international visitors aren’t arriving in the same numbers. He pointed to weaker Asian economies, a battered Japanese yen, and economic trouble in Canada as reasons fewer foreign tourists are flying in with money to burn.
It’s a reminder that a pawnshop isn’t just a TV set. It’s a kind of street-level economic indicator, and right now Harrison sees a mixed picture: not total collapse, but plenty of stress in the global system feeding into Vegas.
From Small Change to a Deadly Crisis
In the final stretch of the interview, Doocy shifted from coins to something far heavier.
He noted that Harrison lost his son to a fentanyl overdose in recent years and asked about ongoing efforts to stop cartel drug boats and smuggling operations.
Harrison didn’t hold back.
He said drug overdoses now kill more than 100,000 Americans a year, and compared that toll to “dirty bombs going off in multiple cities.”
To him, fentanyl isn’t just another drug problem. He called it a “weapon of mass destruction” and said people bringing it into the country are acting like terrorists.
Harrison argued that if this were sarin gas or a radiological bomb, the U.S. would have “no problem bombing it,” and insisted fentanyl should be treated with the same urgency.
In the segment description, Fox notes that Harrison praised President Donald Trump’s crackdown on fentanyl trafficking, which fits with how strongly he framed the threat.
His language is intense, maybe even over the top in the eyes of some viewers. But it’s also clearly personal. When someone has buried a child because of fentanyl, it’s not surprising they see the drug as a weapon, not just a vice.
A Tiny Coin With a Big Story Behind It
Taken together, the conversation between Peter Doocy and Rick Harrison turned what could have been a cute “fun fact” about the last pennies into something much larger.
Yes, those final five cents might sell for hundreds of thousands – or even millions – apiece, depending on how badly wealthy collectors want them.
Yes, collectors really do care about fingerprints, grading, and microscopic flaws.
But Harrison used the moment to highlight something deeper: small coins disappear when inflation runs wild, pawnshops feel the pulse of the real economy, and behind the scenes, a quiet war over fentanyl is claiming more lives than many traditional forms of terrorism ever did.
For most people, the penny has always felt like almost nothing.
Harrison’s message, filtered through Doocy’s questions, is that even the smallest pieces of money can tell you a lot about what shape a country is really in.
Ed spent his childhood in the backwoods of Maine, where harsh winters taught him the value of survival skills. With a background in bushcraft and off-grid living, Ed has honed his expertise in fire-making, hunting, and wild foraging. He writes from personal experience, sharing practical tips and hands-on techniques to thrive in any outdoor environment. Whether it’s primitive camping or full-scale survival, Ed’s advice is grounded in real-life challenges.
