the National Association of Convenience Stores and the Walgreens drugstore chain have estimated that handling pennies adds 2 to 2.5 seconds per cash transaction. Assume that the average citizen makes one such transaction every day, and so wastes (to be conservative) 730 seconds a year. The median worker earns just over $36,000 a year, or about 0.5 cents per second, so futzing with pennies costs him $3.65 annually.

In today's Washington Post, Sebastian Mallaby says we should get rid of the penny ( I agree ), and he estimates the value of this long-overdue reform:Multiply that last figure by the number of Americans, and you find that getting rid of the penny would free up economic resources valued at about $1 billion a year.