What will fans of the penny press do now that the coin is discontinued?

Alonda Emery can’t figure out what she’d call that thing sitting in the corner of her place of employment, the Flameburger in Little Canada. For all of her 42 years, she’s known the machines as penny presses. But what will she call it if nobody has any pennies for the machine to munch between its gears and make into souvenirs? Or, worse, if her boss converts it to accept higher denominations?

“Who wants to call it the nickel press?” she said.

In February, President Donald Trump signed the penny’s death warrant, with an order to cease production of a coin that costs almost four times more to make than it’s worth.

The government minted its last penny in November. Businesses will figure out which way to round change. Future parents will explain strange idioms to future kids (“A defunct 1-cent coin for your thoughts”?). But the pressed penny — a quintessential childhood treat — will forever be altered.

Makers of the penny-smashing machines, including the Little Penny Press Machine Co. in Little Canada, are betting people will instead use quarters or nickels. Or pay a little extra for penny-sized copper disks. And with an estimated 300 billion pennies still in circulation, they will live on at least a little longer. But Emery is already in mourning.

“I think about my future grandkids, and they’re not going to grow up knowing what pennies are. Or doing that,” Emery said, pointing to the machine in the corner that imprints pennies with hamburgers and pancakes.

Two miles northeast of Flameburger, Brian Peters has been waiting for the penny to die. For someone who’s built his career atop the humble coin, he’s calm about its impending disappearance.

Some of his new machines press copper blanks. Others smash quarters or nickels. Starting this year, Peters said, more clients have inquired about a quarter press.

But Newport resident Tom DeGree will not be pressing quarters or nickels, not after he’s pressed several thousand pennies in his 61 years. Collecting the elongated pennies at tourist spots became his hobby and defined his vacations as an adult. But the hobby grew out of childhood, with his parents looking for an affordable way to give souvenirs to all eight of their kids.

The spirit of the quarter press is the same, DeGree figures: With inflation, it’s still an affordable souvenir. But he’s invested a lot into pennies — sometimes more than $50 into rare ones — and a more expensive coin might cheapen his collection.

“If they do start changing to the nickel, I’d probably just stop collecting,” DeGree said.

Thousands of people do what DeGree does, he said. Collectors from Alaska to Florida have shipped pennies to Minnesota’s Largest Candy Store in Jordan, alongside notes asking the shop to feed them to its penny presses and mail them back, said owner Robert Wagner. But Wagner can’t think of anyone who’s sent in a quarter asking him to feed it through the quarter press he bought five years ago.

So, Peters’ company now offers penny-sized copper blanks that he said produce a cleaner image than a real penny, anyway. Some new machines even come preloaded with hoppers of them; all people need to do is tap their credit card and out pops a flattened disk — though it costs more for owners to supply the material themselves, Peters said, and they’ll charge a bit extra.

But everyone knows what it’s like to crank a penny press, said Adam Elazab, who owns Flameburger: how it clicks with each rotation, how it starts to grip just before the penny shoots out. Kids will run up to the restaurant’s machines just to spin the hand crank, said his employee, Emery.

Even Emery’s 16-year-old daughter begged to smash a penny. “It was like ‘Oh, there’s my baby,’” Emery said.

Part of the joy of smashing a penny comes from its life cycle, Elazab said — getting it as change, pulling it from your pocket and cranking an image into it yourself. A machine that uses blanks or spits out its own disks might lose some of that charm, he said.

There’s also symbolism to transforming currency into canvas, said Alyssa Baguss, a Minneapolis artist who presses contemporary art into pennies at local events.

Like Elazab and Wagner, Baguss said she’ll stick to pennies rather than blanks. She said she sees the end of the penny as a boon for her artwork. As pennies become less useful for business transactions, she’s hoping people will be even more willing to sacrifice them to her machine. With 300 billion left, she figures there are plenty more to press.

Elazab said he’ll try to hoard a collection of pennies before they drop from circulation altogether, just so his customers still have something to feed the machine in the corner of his restaurant. In fact, he sees Flameburger as a sort of incubator for a new life of the penny.