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When you see a penny lying on the ground, do you bother to pick it up and put it in your pocket? A lot of Americans don’t because, well, pennies aren’t worth much anymore. Acknowledging that lack of usefulness, compounded with the cost of minting them, the U.S. government stopped producing pennies in 2025.
With the rise of online banking and the broader digitalization of financial transactions of all kinds, might the days of paper checks be numbered as well?
To get an interesting answer to that question, I turned to Jay L. Zagorsky, a Boston University business school professor who defends the preservation of cash. He quickly obliged, explaining why “American people and businesses still use and need checks.”
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