I'm starting to think that the true purpose of the deprecation of the penny is to get stores to stop accepting cash because I'm noticing that more and more stores are requesting for exact change or having some new weird change policy. It wouldn't surprise me if they can't keep up with this and have to ditch cash payments all together.

@xianc78 it costs more to mint a penny than the penny itself so it isn't worth doing. Stores ask for exact change but don't require it. Otherwise they have to round up when giving change back which means they are technically "losing money" which we know is the ultimate evil for corporations.