I grew up in the 90s and aughts. These containers were frequently around cash registers in convenience stores and perhaps other small businesses. I don’t remember them being so consistently branded, but my experience then would have been limited to going into a handful of stores in the same locale. Of course, Canada ditched pennies (1 cent pieces) from cash transactions just over 10 years ago (we now round for cash transactions).
A penny felt like a meaningful amount of money to me as a child. More than anything, when I look back at them, these little containers stimulated my understanding of karma and perhaps theory of mind (e.g., mentalizing a future customer helping themself to an available penny and how they’d feel as a result). Looking back, I think that’s pretty neat.
I don’t know why, but these things popped into my head as I was doing the dishes. I was assured that, thankfully, there’s a Lemmy community for this :D
They are all around here. The US will never get rid of them as we’ve got a big corporation that keeps lobbying for pennies to keep being made. That company by the way is the company that makes the blanks for pennies. So they’ll stick around forever, since the lobbying effort is cheaper then coming up with a new business plan that doesn’t involve survival on the governments dime(or penny as it were).
I stopped picking up pennies. It’s no longer worth the time or effort to get them.