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
Hard up, a kid wanting candy, or anyone a few pennies short so they don’t have to use another dollar and end up with more change.
And even ‘hard up’ is a bit extreme, but if a single parent is getting hot dog buns and is fifteen cents short, they’d usually take those pennies, just to give you an idea what we mean.