How about a label for 2018 cents?

United States Mint Denver Facility

It appears a fountain of new cents has been yielding huge quantities of Denver coins across America.

Why Denver is getting this honor, I don’t know. But the best summary of it came from a reader who lives in Orlando – Philadelphia cent country. He wrote me just an hour before I began writing this column.

Bill Mills tells me, “Just FYI that every store I went to today in Orlando gave me 2018-D cents in change. We are flooded with them!”

His email is just one of many I have received in the past week. Denver cents are showing up in other traditionally Philadelphia territories as well. Look at our Letters column this week.

For at least this week, it seems like we have returned to a circulation finds mentality. I am glad to see readers are paying attention to their change. Better for all of us, they are reporting what they are seeing.

I am glad so many readers are still using change. We keep being warned of our cashless future. But you might be as amused as I am about the word from Sweden that cashlessness has been taken too far. There is not enough use of cash to support the cost of government and business handling cash. That is considered to be a problem.

So, first they try to kill cash, then they complain that it costs too much to keep up the ability to use cash because transaction volume has declined.

But that’s government.

No matter what happens, the Average Joe is just doing it wrong.

Well, this Average Joe will keep using cash to pay daily bills like lunch, gas and groceries. I might be turning down a few extra airline miles, but being in touch with coins and paper money is critical to my well being.

Besides, those gold investors who like to cite the fact that the dollar has lost 98 percent of its value since 1913 ought to do a parallel study of the devaluation of airline miles over the years.

Perhaps there should be a cryptocurrency that uses one airline fare from Chicago to New York City as its unit of account. Getting from here to there will still be necessary no matter what happens to technology in the next 10 or 20 years.

Exchange airline seat miles for goods and services. Bitcoin, watch out.

But in the meantime, I am keeping an eye out for any 2018-dated denomination in Iola. There is hope, considering all the reader letters. They are getting closer. Perhaps this year I won’t have to wait until the July car show for my first encounter. We’ll see.

Perhaps someday the grading services will have a special label for early release cents graded MS-70. Now that would really make collectors scour their change and add another layer of interest to this annual collector ritual.