My three-year-old daughter and I typically wrap up our evenings with a pre-bedtime stroll around our northwest Washington, D.C., neighborhood. The nightly ritual ends back at home when I pry the fistful of coins she invariably finds on our walk out of her hands.

My daughter’s unerring ability to find coinage along our route doesn’t require any special gift, although her great eyesight and proximity to the ground do help. Rather, her prospecting is successful because pennies, nickels, and even dimes are simply more bother than they’re worth for most people these days. Rather than carry a pocketful of nearly worthless metal, people increasingly discard their coins as soon as they can.