Day: November 9, 2025

• The US is slowly bidding farewell to pennies as one-cent production is being phased out.
• Fast-food chains are making small changes to customers’ final bills in the absence of pennies.
• Chains like McDonald’s and Wendy’s have started rounding cash payments up or down to the nearest nickel.

Fast-food chains are bidding farewell to the penny.

Retailers like McDonald’s and Wendy’s are making subtle pricing changes as the US phases out the one-cent coins, rounding the bill up or down if customers do not have exact change.

A McDonald’s representative told Business Insider in a statement that locations in certain parts of the country are experiencing a shortage of pennies. Restaurants may round up or down to the nearest five cents if customers do not have exact change.

“This is an issue affecting all retailers across the country, and we will continue to work with the federal government to obtain guidance on this matter going forward,” McDonald’s statement added.

Wendy’s told Business Insider that, until the government sets an industry standard, it has recommended that its franchisees round down cash transactions to the nearest nickel.

“Franchisees ultimately set their own prices, so rounding may vary by restaurant,” Wendy’s said.

Go To Foods, the parent company of Auntie Anne’s, Cinnabon, and Jamba, echoed Wendy’s guidance.

“At this time, when pennies aren’t available, we’re recommending that franchisees round cash transactions in the guest’s favor,” Go To Foods told Business Insider in a statement. “This ensures trust and consistency while minimizing disruption.”

The three companies added that pricing for cashless transactions would not be affected.

President Donald Trump, citing the high cost of producing low-value coins, announced in February that the US Treasury would stop minting new pennies in 2026. Each $0.01 coin costs $0.03 to make, according to the US Mint’s 2024 report, which also found that production costs had risen by over 20% that year.

A spokesperson for the Treasury previously told Business Insider that it would continue producing the coin until it runs out of blanks, so the currency will eventually fall out of circulation. Phasing out the coin will save the US Mint $56 million annually in materials costs, the spokesperson said.

Dylan Jeon, a senior director of government relations at the National Retail Federation, said in an October 29 statement that the government should provide clear guidance to retailers on how to deal with the lack of pennies.

“Without preemptive federal guidance, retailers and other cash-accepting businesses are exposed to legal risks simply for implementing necessary practices in response to the nationwide penny shortage,” Jeon said.

The US isn’t the only country to have phased out the penny. Canada and Sweden have both stopped production of their one-cent coins, and American politicians across the aisle have long advocated for the US to follow suit.

• John Toomey is Marriott’s chief commercial officer for Asia Pacific, excluding China.
• He joined Marriott in 1996 and has been with the hospitality giant for nearly three decades.
• “The most difficult job for a hotelier is opening a hotel from zero,” Toomey told Business Insider.

Blood, sweat, tears, and great team members.

That’s what it takes to launch a brand new hotel, Marriott International’s chief commercial officer, John Toomey, told Business Insider.

“The most difficult job for a hotelier is opening a hotel from zero, where you don’t have one guest in your hotel,” Toomey said.

Toomey joined Marriott International in 1996 and has been with the hospitality giant for nearly three decades. In his current role, he oversees over 650 hotels run by Marriott in the Asia Pacific, excluding China.

“When you’re starting something from zero, you really feel it,” Toomey said. “It takes great leadership. It takes great team members. It takes everybody coming together to make that hotel a success.”

“It’s not just the day the hotel opens. It’s the six to nine to 12 months leading up to it, from getting the hotel staffing ready to go and selling your heart out,” he continued.

It gets easier if you’ve built up a strong brand

Toomey said the job gets easier once a hotel chain has secured a foothold in a foreign market and has started to build up branding.

He added that customer loyalty programs such as Marriott Bonvoy have made it easier for hoteliers to expand their presence. As of 2024, Marriott Bonvoy had nearly 228 million members worldwide.

“Now that we have such a deep loyalty program, we are in a better position to open hotels than when I was opening hotels 25 years ago,” Toomey said.

“I opened the first four hotels we had in India. Opening those was probably a lot more challenging than the nearly 160 hotels we have there now,” he added.

In June, Kwon Ping Ho, the founder and executive chair of the luxury hotel chain Banyan Group, told Business Insider that “the worst business to be in is hospitality.”

“It is so management-intensive. It is so time and people-intensive, and it is so vulnerable to event risk,” Ho said.

Ho said running a hotel chain effectively is all about building a working culture that prioritizes the customer in everything it does.

“You go to a hotel. You forget about the 10 good experiences you have. One screw-up, you will never forget. People are not very forgiving about screw-ups,” Ho said.

It’s not just hospitality. Business leaders across sectors have also talked about how difficult it is to launch a new venture.

Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, told Khan Academy founder Sal Khan in a 2013 interview that creating companies is not as fun as people think.

“There are periods of fun, and there are periods where it’s just awful. Particularly if you are the CEO of the company, you actually have a distillation of all the worst problems in the company,” Musk said.

“I think you have to feel quite compelled to do it, and have a fairly high pain threshold,” he added.

Jensen Huang, the founder and CEO of the chip giant Nvidia, said in an October 2023 interview on the “Acquired” podcast that “nobody in their right mind” would start a company from scratch.

“Building a company and building Nvidia turned out to have been a million times harder than I expected it to be,” Huang said.

“If we realized the pain and suffering and just how vulnerable you’re going to feel, and the challenges that you’re going to endure, the embarrassment and the shame, and the list of all the things that go wrong, I don’t think anybody would start a company,” he added.