PENNY DRIVE ~ Bring Us Your Pennies, Win a Smokeless Fire Pit!

Did you know that the US government decided to stop minting new pennies? It’s true. The last ones were made on November 12, 2025. And now we need some more pennies. We’re running out! We’ve been getting them from far and wide for months now, and even emptying ancient family buckets filled with pennies plus random pocket lint and foreign coins, but the time has come to ask you for help.

Yes, we will be coming up with a solution for how to change our system to deal with this in the long term, but our IT and Finance departments would really love a little more time before we have to make that switch.

We’re giving away a Solo Stove Bonfire smokeless fire pit

It’s a stainless steel beauty perfect for patios and lawns and small groups of party people just wanting to stare into some flames on a beautiful Vermont night. It’s sold for $299 on their website. Here’s a link where you can learn all about it.

Rules for Bringing Pennies and Entering the Giveaway

• We are accepting pennies between Monday, June 8 and Friday, June 19
• Your pennies should be brought to the Customer Service desk, and we’ll make sure you get your giveaway tickets, etc according to the guidelines below.
• To be transparent: we really want pennies, but we really, really like it better when they’re pre-rolled in those special bank papers. So we’re trying to incentivize you to do that. But we’ll take anything you’ve got as long as it’s not mixed in with tons of weird other detritus. So:
  • If you bring us rolled pennies, we’ll give you the cash value of your pennies plus one raffle ticket for every roll you trade. (Each roll is 50¢.) This is what we greatly prefer! YAAAAAAAAAAAYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY. We’ll have some of the special coin wrappers here you can take for free. (Also feel free to donate rolled pennies if you don’t need the cash back!)
  • If you bring us a pile of unrolled pennies, you’ll get five raffle tickets, but YOU WILL NOT GET THE CASH VALUE in return. UNROLLED PENNIES ARE CONSIDERED A DONATION TO THE CO-OP which is extremely kind. Thank you in advance. If your pile is very huge we’ll probably give you more than five raffle tickets, but don’t tell anyone.
• The winner of the raffle will be chosen on Monday, June 22
• How will you find out if you won? We will post the raffle ticket number by 2 pm, June 22, right here on this web page! We will also put it on our Facebook page and in our Instagram stories.
• If the winner doesn’t respond to us by Monday, June 29, we will pick another winner.
• Please note that we will have no record of your giveaway entry besides the number on the raffle ticket, so SAVE YOUR TICKETS in a safe place! We will not be giving replacement tickets or anything like that if you lose them. You gotta keep track of your stuff.

Thank you very very much for bringing us your pennies 🙂