[HN Gopher] The last-ever penny will be minted today in Philadel...
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The last-ever penny will be minted today in Philadelphia
Author : andrewl
Score : 721 points
Date : 2025-11-12 16:10 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.cnn.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.cnn.com)
| hrimfaxi wrote:
| I watched a video on the demise of the penny and its predicament
| was so succinctly explained: everyone gets pennies as change but
| few carry them around let alone spend them, so we are stuck
| producing ever more. One news outlet even did an "experiment"
| where they threw hundreds of pennies on the ground in a city on a
| busy morning and not one person stopped to pick any up.
| basscomm wrote:
| > everyone gets pennies as change but few carry them around let
| alone spend them
|
| It's not just pennies, it's all coins. In a former life I
| worked in retail and almost nobody would fish around in their
| pockets for exact (or even near) change. They'd always hand me
| bills for their purchase _even if they had just completed a
| transaction and had the coins in their pocket_. That was in the
| 90 's, and I still see it happening today, even though I'm no
| longer in the retail world.
| Retric wrote:
| I'd regularly use quarters in vending machines, but not waste
| time during a retail transaction.
| Symbiote wrote:
| In most other countries, since prices are shown including
| all taxes you can often have the money ready while waiting
| in line etc.
| guntars wrote:
| Another aspect of the idiotic "we don't know what your
| tax is going to be" system (they do know it, actually) is
| that prices will typically end with .99 and the tax will
| push it over the next dollar and cause a bunch of change
| to be returned, instead of a single penny.
| dylan604 wrote:
| > but not waste time during a retail transaction.
|
| we could just go back to writing checks while we're at it.
| zahlman wrote:
| It's amazing to me that people consider "saving time while
| paying money" to be a good thing.
|
| I will never "tap" my debit card as long as I have any
| legal option. Everyone else can wait for me to exercise my
| consumer rights, by inputting my PIN, verifying the amount
| displayed on screen etc.
| Retric wrote:
| Wasting people's time is rude here not illegal.
|
| Courtesy may seem outdated to some, but it can
| occasionally come back to bite people. Being overly rude
| to waitstaff is something I'm concerned with around
| promotions because of how they might treat people inside
| the company. Without better information you extrapolate.
| zahlman wrote:
| ... How is this related to what I said?
| Retric wrote:
| > It's amazing to me that people consider "saving time
| while paying money" to be a good thing.
|
| If you're checking it at a grocery store it's likely
| there's someone in line behind you waiting to pay, it's a
| fairly common aspect of physical transactions. Waiting
| for you to count out your pennies is the kind of thing
| that evokes rage in people because it's so rude.
| zahlman wrote:
| > If you're checking it at a grocery store it's likely
| there's someone in line behind you waiting to pay
|
| I usually use the self check-out which is usually not at
| all busy when I get there.
|
| > Waiting for you to count out your pennies
|
| I was explicitly talking about using a debit card, and as
| I established repeatedly throughout the thread, my
| country hasn't used pennies for over a decade.
|
| But on the occasions that I pay cash, I do try to make
| exact change, because that's courteous _to the cashier_
| (and also just satisfies my aesthetic sense). I 'm quick
| about this, because being the sort of person who posts on
| Hacker News, my mental arithmetic is pretty good.
|
| > is the kind of thing that evokes rage in people because
| it's so rude.
|
| I've had people in front of me "waste" far more time than
| that because they had to cancel items (and deliberate
| over what to send back), struggle to pull things out of
| their cart, etc. It doesn't bother me. If I urgently
| needed to be somewhere else I would have planned my trip
| for another time. It already takes quite a while because
| I walk both ways (which I also enjoy quite a bit by the
| way).
|
| People ITT are talking about the value of time, but I
| can't reasonably value each second equally. Time is not
| nearly as fungible as money; ten seconds saved on an
| outing is just not going to translate into ten seconds
| spent on my projects. Nor can I make myself feel as
| though every moment not spent on acquiring capital is
| equally wasted.
|
| And I deeply resent the implication that using XYZ
| technology to save time is a moral imperative.
| Retric wrote:
| For a cashier sorting a customers change and presumably
| multiple small denomination bills is more effort than the
| rote action of handing out change. Handing exact change
| is therefore significantly slower for everyone else.
|
| > using SYZ technology to save time is a moral imperative
|
| Saving other people's time is the imperative, the
| technology bit is simply how that happens. People can for
| example fill most of a check out before they know the
| exact amount, but you rarely see it.
| robocat wrote:
| I've seen a pattern where people that value their own
| time at $0 unfortunately often value the time of others
| at $0. Worse is valuing others at $0 and your own at
| $lots (which is also common).
| zahlman wrote:
| Interesting.
|
| I don't know what to make of the idea that I'm "not
| valuing my time" by carefully considering my purchases
| and caring about security. Or that the seconds I take on
| this are so important to both myself and others, compared
| to the time spent browsing the store shelves, getting to
| and from the place, etc. Heaven forbid I choose the
| cashier instead of a self check-out this time, and try to
| strike up a conversation.
| quesera wrote:
| Entering your PIN and using a debit card is the least
| secure/safe version of electronic payment.
|
| Tapping (NFC) or dipping (EMV) are safer and faster for
| everyone.
| zahlman wrote:
| How do you figure?
|
| My threat model includes people stealing the card. I can
| have tap disabled on the card, and then thieves don't
| know my PIN. Yes, yes, that's like 13 bits of entropy.
| But it's not like they can use a computer to brute-force
| it.
| vlovich123 wrote:
| I think your threat model is incomplete. You're far more
| likely to have your card cloned and pin stolen through a
| fake terminal. I've actually had that happen to me vs 0
| times have I had fraudulent transactions due to a stolen
| card.
|
| Tap/dip payment is non cloneable even by a fake terminal.
| Outside the US tap+pin/dip+pin is even common but banks
| for some reason really are averse to requiring Americans
| to add a pin to credit cards.
| zahlman wrote:
| > fake terminal
|
| ... at the self-checkout of a major grocery store?
|
| > Outside the US tap+pin/dip+pin is even common
|
| As far as I can tell "dip + pin" is exactly what I do
| with a debit card. This is literally the first time I've
| ever heard the term "EMV", so I looked it up:
|
| > EMV cards are smart cards, also called chip cards,
| integrated circuit cards (ICC), or IC cards, which store
| their data on integrated circuit chips, in addition to
| magnetic stripes for backward compatibility. These
| include cards that must be physically inserted or
| "dipped" into a reader
|
| As far as I can tell, that exactly describes my debit
| card.
|
| > but banks for some reason really are averse to
| requiring Americans to add a pin to credit cards.
|
| Well, yes, the entire selling point of tapping the card
| is that you don't spend those precious seconds on
| entering a pin. And my point here is to reject that
| culture of hurrying up (at the potential expense of
| carelessness).
| ocdtrekkie wrote:
| I used to do this for vending machines but now it's common
| to need more than eight of them per transaction so it's
| kinda silly.
| triceratops wrote:
| That's incredibly bizarre. If I have coins my first instinct
| is to spend them ASAP so I don't have to carry them around.
| expedition32 wrote:
| Nowadays I pay for everything with my phone but back in the
| day I too hated using coins. Having to calculate and fish out
| coins? Ain't nobody got time for that.
| basscomm wrote:
| > Having to calculate and fish out coins? Ain't nobody got
| time for that.
|
| It's not that hard or time consuming if you actually use
| your change instead of letting it accumulate. I typically
| have less than a dollar in coins on my person at any given
| time because I spent it.
|
| If you're paying in cash, you either take time to count the
| change you're going to spend, or you take time waiting for
| the cashier to count the change you're going to get. Or you
| go cashless and avoid the whole thing
| zahlman wrote:
| It's amazing to me that there are people with this mindset.
| I enjoy the process.
| zahlman wrote:
| I pay exact change whenever I can.
|
| And on the occasions where I can only make (exact change +
| simple amount), I often get deer-in-headlights looks from
| cashiers who can't do mental arithmetic and apparently
| haven't learned how to get the machine to understand payments
| of more than one physical bill or coin.
| zahlman wrote:
| I legitimately don't understand why people object to this
| strongly enough to downvote it without comment.
| ssl-3 wrote:
| The majority of the comment was spent on being
| disparaging towards people who work in retail.
|
| (Entering a discussion about that kind of topic can be a
| pretty sure way to invoke Godwin's Law, so the most sane
| and civil option is to downvote and walk away.)
| forinti wrote:
| I like using coins because I'm always looking for
| commemorative coins. It's an interesting investment: you can
| immediately double or triple your money. Unfortunately, you
| rarely find them.
|
| I also keep the obvious fakes.
| technothrasher wrote:
| The best unexpected coin I found in the drawer when I was
| working at a liquor store was an 1844 Belgian 1/2 Franc in
| with the dimes.
| jwrallie wrote:
| People are very lazy to do basic math. I always minimize the
| coins I am carrying by doing math on my head so that the
| combined value of a certain coin never exceeds the amount of
| the next available coin/bill, that way I never exceed the
| carrying capacity of my wallet.
|
| Most people I know just pocket everything and put on a box at
| home for undetermined time.
| kevincox wrote:
| It's not even just that. Coins are heavy, large and noisy.
| Bills are way more convenient and cards even more so. If we
| could solve privacy issues with cards I would say get rid
| of all bills. Maybe just keep a few $100s in my wallet in
| case my cards get declined for some reason.
| mooreds wrote:
| I remember moving out of a place (decades ago). I was the last
| roommate out, and so was stuck with some of the cleanup (wanted
| to get that deposit back!).
|
| One of the things we had was a ton of pennies (no idea why). I
| had no room in my car, so I spend a few minutes late at night
| flinging pennies out onto the sidewalk after a long day of
| cleaning the place.
| dylan604 wrote:
| Would it not have been better/easier for all involved to have
| just set a container of all the pennies on the street on your
| way out? If someone really could use them, you're kind of a
| dick for making them pick them up one at a time, but if they
| were all together...
| kristopolous wrote:
| I actually do that for numismatic reasons now. After today they
| will only increase in scarcity.
|
| Not that I imagine they'll ever be valuable mind you... I
| should really just go and get $5 worth somewhere. That would
| satiate my desires
| dmd wrote:
| > not one person stopped to pick any up.
|
| Isn't that the old joke about the economist?
| gniv wrote:
| Random anecdote: I go to a boulangerie almost daily (as one
| does here in France). There is one close to me that started
| charging 12 centimes for slicing the bread. I got annoyed with
| this and nowadays make a point to take lots of small change
| from the coin jar and use it. They don't seem to mind.
| m463 wrote:
| I use quarters in parking meters sometimes.
| SkyPuncher wrote:
| Only place I've ever noticed them is the $0.01 pony ride that's
| been sitting at my grocery store for 30 years.
|
| Even they've gotten the hint and simply leave a tray of pennies
| next to it so people can actually use it.
| cartoonworld wrote:
| They're probably doing that so your kid or some kid can use
| it and leave the penny tray because they aren't trying to
| make money off of it anymore.
|
| It's just for fun, sounds like a nice gesture.
| SkyPuncher wrote:
| Yep. That's exactly what is was.
| MarkLowenstein wrote:
| I always pick them up. Every penny buys enough pasta to keep
| you alive for another 15 minutes. So in case I ever go broke,
| I've staved off my eventual starvation by 15 minutes.
| comradesmith wrote:
| I like this perspective :)
| hrimfaxi wrote:
| How did you arrive at this conclusion?
| MarkLowenstein wrote:
| It was always just an estimate but today I verified it with
| a chatbot before I made any claim about the time. Caught it
| in a mistake too, which I untangled by reminding it that
| food calories are actually kilocalories.
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| Many countries eliminated their pennies without chaos or unfair
| burdens on shopkeepers. In Canada, the process was widely popular
| after the fact even though newspaper articles prior to the
| elimination intimated it wouldn't be due to their "both sides"
| style of reporting.
|
| It's indicative of the current US administration that they
| managed to screw this up despite many examples world wide of how
| to do it properly.
| terminalshort wrote:
| If you believe this is going to cause chaos or significant
| burdens on merchants I have got a bridge to sell you (but I
| don't take pennies). This quote tells you all you need to know.
|
| > The government's phasing out of the penny has been "a bit
| chaotic," said Mark Weller, executive director of Americans for
| Common Cents. The pro-penny group is funded primarily by
| Artazn, _the company that provides the blanks used to make
| pennies_.
| zahlman wrote:
| The same thing happened many years ago with the same company
| (previously called Jarden Zinc).
|
| > Americans for Common Cents is a non-profit lobbying group
| dedicated to the protection of the one-cent coin. The group
| is primarily interested in preserving the penny for economic
| and historical reasons. In 2012, Executive Director Mark
| Weller was paid $340,000 by Jarden Zinc to discuss issues
| relating to minting with members of Congress and the US
| Mint.[41] Weller has acknowledged this funding, saying that
| "We make no secret that one of our major sponsors is a
| company that makes the zinc 'blanks' for pennies."[42] Weller
| has testified on multiple occasions before Congress. In 2020
| Weller testified that the use of cash protects privacy,
| provides economic stability and "is a public good" that
| should not be replaced by mobile money.[43]
| quickthrowman wrote:
| Unfair burden?? I think you're blowing this out of proportion..
|
| Credit card fees are 2-4%. Rounding to the nearest nickel costs
| at most $0.02 (1,2 round to 0; 3,4 round to 5)
|
| It is cheaper for the merchant to round to the nearest nickel
| for any transaction of _one dollar or more_ than it is to pay
| CC merchant fees.
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| It costs on average 2 cents because without legislative
| authority to round to closest the retailer must round down
| and eat up to 4 cents of difference.
|
| Cash costs retailers money too. Safely transporting it to the
| bank, et cetera. For many, cash is more expensive than credit
| cards.
| ezfe wrote:
| They can reprice items to minimize rounding
| zahlman wrote:
| > Cash costs retailers money too. Safely transporting it to
| the bank, et cetera.
|
| Yes, and now they won't have to incur that cost for
| pennies.
| zahlman wrote:
| > even though newspaper articles prior to the elimination
| intimated it wouldn't be due to their "both sides" style of
| reporting.
|
| No idea what you're talking about here. This isn't a left-vs-
| right issue, and journalism gave the concerns approximately the
| attention they merited.
|
| > It's indicative of the current US administration that they
| managed to screw this up despite many examples world wide of
| how to do it properly.
|
| No, it's indicative of problems uniquely caused by existing
| American governance and law. When we did it, we didn't have an
| issue analogous to the one with SNAP payments described
| throughout the thread, because our welfare programs don't work
| that way and our legal code isn't designed to enable the same
| kind of future pedantry. Besides which, the Biden and Obama
| administrations (and others before them) didn't even _attempt_
| this as far as I 'm aware, despite that the US penny being
| costly for _quite some time_. (As far as I can tell, the
| current cost is mostly _not_ due to the cost of the base metal,
| which is almost all zinc since 1982. Checking commodity prices
| and doing some back of the envelope math, switching back to
| copper would cost them an _additional_ two cents per penny.)
| Analemma_ wrote:
| Honestly nickels and dimes, and maybe even quarters, should go
| too. It's ridiculous that we don't have $1 and $2 coins in
| widespread circulation in the US (we have a $1 coin but nobody
| uses it).
| JohnFen wrote:
| I'd mourn the loss of the quarter. I use those quite often.
|
| > (we have a $1 coin but nobody uses it)
|
| Because they keep designing it in the stupidest way, making it
| easy to confuse with a quarter. I don't know why they do that.
|
| That said, I do prefer paper $1 bills over coins. Paper is
| lighter and easier to carry. But I'd only slightly grumble if
| we replaced it with a reasonable coin.
| terminalshort wrote:
| It's a completely different color than a quarter.
| JohnFen wrote:
| That doesn't help if you're in dim lighting or have vision
| problems.
| 45764986 wrote:
| If you have vision problems, US currency is totally
| unfriendly to you. Unlike other countries, which have
| bills of different sizes, all the US currency bills are
| the same size, so getting change as a blind person is
| basically relying on the honesty of whoever is behind the
| counter.
| JohnFen wrote:
| Absolutely true. It's one of the several crazy design
| problems with US paper currency.
| terminalshort wrote:
| That would explain why 1% of people don't use the $1
| coin. It doesn't explain the other 99%.
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| 99% of people have Darkvision? What is this, a D&D party?
| terminalshort wrote:
| Yeah, since I often buy things with cash in places that
| are so dark I can't see the coins that's a major
| consideration for me. JFC what planet do you live on?
| basscomm wrote:
| That's why the dollar coin was redesigned in 2000. The
| old dollar coin had a reeded edge that was too similar to
| a quarter, so it was sometimes hard to distinguish if you
| had vision issues (or if you didn't have vision issues
| because they were about the same size as a quarter). The
| new ones have a smooth edge so you can tell them apart
| from quarters without having to look at them
| JohnFen wrote:
| True, and the new design is better than the old because
| of it. But it hasn't resolved the issue enough to really
| matter. Some less subtle physical difference is required
| -- put a hole in it, make it an obviously unique size,
| whatever.
|
| At least that's how it seems to me. It's an interesting
| design issue. I don't personally care too much -- I'm
| fine with the paper bill -- but I do have curiosity about
| why the coin designers have made the decisions they did
| about the $1 coin.
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| If your fingertips can sense the color of things in your
| pocket, I'd love to learn more.
| basscomm wrote:
| > That said, I do prefer paper $1 bills over coins. Paper is
| lighter and easier to carry.
|
| Sure, but how many $1 bills do you typically carry around? If
| it's more than four, then you can trade them in for a $5 bill
| just about anywhere.
| panzagl wrote:
| Bring back the Eisenhower dollar!
| basscomm wrote:
| We also have a $2 bill that nobody uses for whatever reason.
|
| I never understood the objections to the $1 coin, especially
| after the redesign to make it more distinct from a quarter. $1
| coins are great for buying stuff out of vending machines since
| you don't have to fight with a dodgy bill acceptor or a mangled
| bill.
| devmor wrote:
| > We also have a $2 bill that nobody uses for whatever
| reason.
|
| It's because retailers wont accept them - they think they're
| counterfeit because no one uses them. A catch-22 situation,
| really.
| JohnFen wrote:
| I've never had a retailer refuse to accept a $2 bill,
| although a couple of times the clerk summoned the manager
| about it.
|
| But I've never found a retailer willing to give a $2 bill
| as change.
|
| The resistance to the $2 bill is a very weird cultural
| thing.
| ewoodrich wrote:
| Dispensaries in OR/WA love $2 bills, for some chains
| they're as unremarkable as a $1 and must special request
| them in bulk to keep on hand for making change.
| toast0 wrote:
| > But I've never found a retailer willing to give a $2
| bill as change.
|
| Mostly retailers don't stock $2 bills (because they're
| weird), so if a customer brings a $2, the cashier will
| put it in their their exceptional bills area, which
| usually is just large bills. No change is made with
| exceptional bills, so twos don't get recirculated.
| ssl-3 wrote:
| It's hard to even get $10 bills in change these days
| because of the ways that retailers handle putting larger
| bills into the safe, and getting smaller bills for change
| out of the safe.
|
| "Alright. Your total is $25.13. You're paying with $100?
| No, no, it's fine; I just hope you like fives and ones."
| orangecat wrote:
| Yeah. My proposal would be to have 10 cent, 50 cent, and $1
| coins (rounding everything to the nearest 10 cents), with $2
| the smallest bill. And probably you could drop the $5 bill at
| that point.
| ianferrel wrote:
| There's _a lot_ of physical infrastructure that works with
| quarters, and it 's probably not worth giving that up for
| slightly improved coinage. Just drop all the coins smaller
| than a quarter.
| basscomm wrote:
| That only works if you completely reconfigure sales tax
| orangecat wrote:
| _There 's a lot of physical infrastructure that works
| with quarters_
|
| Very good point and I think I'm convinced.
| toast0 wrote:
| There's also the 3rd amendment. It would be worthless to
| say soldiers can't demand change for the vending machine,
| when nobody at all can get quarters.
| silisili wrote:
| My only real objection I guess, and the reason I don't carry
| change of any sort, is because it's constantly falling out of
| my pockets. I'm rather tall, so many seating positions put my
| knees higher than my waist, which I think contributes to
| that.
|
| Further, since I don't have enough pockets to have a
| dedicated change pocket, it's always getting caught up in my
| keys and/or pocket knife.
|
| Nobody really gave us training on this stuff, do other
| countries use a coin purse or some such?
|
| Lastly, they're just comparatively heavy.
|
| I just carry cash around in either a clip or a "front pocket
| wallet" I think they're called, and it seems more convenient
| all around.
| basscomm wrote:
| > Nobody really gave us training on this stuff, do other
| countries use a coin purse or some such?
|
| Americans also use coin purses or rubber coin pouches, but
| I mostly only see older generations using them.
| acheron wrote:
| This was a whole thing in the 70s. There was a 3 step plan:
|
| 1) Bring back the $2 bill (it had not been printed for a
| decade+)
|
| 2) Redesign the $1 coin (Eisenhowers being too big and heavy)
|
| 3) Stop printing $1 bills
|
| Unfortunately they never got to step 3, which made 1 and 2
| pointless, and here we are.
| nicole_express wrote:
| Honestly I'd rather just not have coins at that point, rather
| than try to push $1 and $2 coins. Then I can just carry my
| wallet for bills and not have to worry about keeping track of
| coins separately.
|
| Gotta do something to make the $2 bill popular though, no idea
| how.
| Brendinooo wrote:
| Nickels and dimes certainly have predecent. When the US killed
| the half-penny in 1857, it had a purchasing power of somewhere
| around 19 cents from 2024.
| delecti wrote:
| Quarters might be premature, but the half-cent was discontinued
| when it was worth a (modern equivalent) of $0.12-17. Even 20-30
| years ago, when I was just starting to interact with money
| enough to have an opinion, I thought it was a hassle to deal
| with anything smaller than a quarter. The same logic behind
| getting rid of pennies (they cost more to make than the face
| value) also supports doing at least nickels.
| JohnFen wrote:
| > The same logic behind getting rid of pennies (they cost
| more to make than the face value)
|
| I've honestly never understood why this is a valid reason to
| object to the coin. Coins aren't used only once, so that they
| cost most to make than their face value doesn't seem very
| important, unless the differential is much, much larger than
| it actually is.
| delecti wrote:
| I get what you mean, but the Mint does "sell" currency in a
| sense, so it's not a terrible point to make. It also serves
| as a decent benchmark for the "should we even bother"
| aspect; should we lose money by literally making money?
| mkehrt wrote:
| Sorry Europe and Canada, $1 and $2 coins are just absolutely
| _terrible_. I never want to have to think about where my change
| is. Bills are much lighter than coins and stack with the rest
| of the bills.
| ecshafer wrote:
| I want to get rid of bills and move to only coins. We can
| carry coin pouches and act like a medieval/fantasy novel
| character.
| balamatom wrote:
| IMO best would be some kind of money where you could
| physically break a given piece of cash into two pieces of
| half the value.
| mkehrt wrote:
| So pieces of eight?
| emodendroket wrote:
| When I was in Japan everything was all-cash and the smallest
| bill was the equivalent of a $10, with equivalents to $1 and
| $5 coins being in common circulation. Most wallets they
| sold/people had had a coin pocket to account for this.
| CGMthrowaway wrote:
| Used to use dollar coins at toll booths all the time. That was
| before ez pass
| BenoitEssiambre wrote:
| At least nickels should go so we can always round by one digit.
| MrHeather wrote:
| >But with 20 million customers a year, and 17% of them paying
| with cash, the policy will eventually cost Kwik Trip a couple of
| million dollars a year, McHugh said.
|
| If we figure two-fifths of cash transactions need to be rounded
| up and the store is losing an average of 1.5 cents each time,
| their expected losses would be around $2,000, yeah?
| patch_collector wrote:
| 20m customers * 17% * 4 cents * 'x' transactions per customer =
| $136,000 * x
|
| I suppose this makes some sense. In a worst case situation, if
| every customer makes 10-20 transactions per year, and they
| always round down the maximum possible amount, they would lose
| millions per year.
| tengbretson wrote:
| In many parts of Wisconsin the value of `x` could very easily
| be 100+, so I'd say this checks out.
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| If we make the maximally pessimistic assumption that every cash
| transaction would require rounding down four cents, that's
| 68,000 customers per year times four cents, which is $136,000
| per year.
|
| A more reasonable assumption that half of transactions require
| rounding down cuts that in half, I suppose.
| delecti wrote:
| > Kwik Trip, a family-owned convenience store chain that
| operates in the Midwest, decided to round down cash purchases
| in stores where it hasn't been able to find pennies.
|
| They're rounding all cash transactions down to the nearest
| nickel, so an average of 2 cents per transaction, 3.4 million
| customers, gives me $68,000 assuming each "customer" makes a
| single transaction per year. If they mean that there are 20
| million unique customers, not 20m transactions, then the a long
| tail of customers who make frequent small transactions in cash
| could make their claim check out.
| velcrovan wrote:
| Whatever the total ends up being, it's basically a marketing
| expense that they're electing to make. Probably they do it
| for a year and then switch to rounding to the nearest nickel,
| which is what everyone else will be doing.
| giantg2 wrote:
| I would bet they have a way to write it off.
|
| Edit: why disagree? Can't the write it off as a loss,
| uncollected account, or promotional? Maybe even goodwill
| toast0 wrote:
| Writing it off as a loss isn't useful.
|
| Without a write off, their income is $X (what they actually
| collected), with a write off, their income is $Z (what they
| should have collected) - $Y (what they didn't collect), but
| $X = $Z - $Y. There's no material difference between
| counting what they actual collect as income vs what they
| should have collected minus the goodwill discount. Unless
| there's some specific tax justification (maybe accounting
| differences could justify remitting less sales tax overall
| and retaining more of the funds, etc)
| giantg2 wrote:
| Why wouldn't the write off be useful? I think your
| formual needs to add "+ ($Y x .3)" for tax deduction if
| you frame as promotional or other tax write off
| strategies.
|
| It won't be the same as what they would have collected
| without rounding, but it will be better than if you
| didn't write off anything.
| pants2 wrote:
| Certianly the costs in employee time making change in pennies
| and stocking / transporting / changing pennies is way higher
| smelendez wrote:
| They must mean unique customers, not customer transactions.
|
| They have about 878 stores, according to Wikipedia, so if it
| was transactions, each store would only see about 62
| transactions per day, which is way too low.
| terminalshort wrote:
| Sure. But multiply by whatever number you want and it is
| still the same percentage of revenue.
| terminalshort wrote:
| I get $20,400 (20m * 17% * 40% * 0.015). But that's still
| nothing for a company that does 20 million POS transactions a
| year.
| jermaustin1 wrote:
| It's cheaper than the credit card fees, that's for sure.
| pessimizer wrote:
| What's more contemptible: that CNN refused to spend the 30
| seconds that it would take to do the math; or that it
| interviewed a "spokesman" that also didn't spend 30 seconds to
| do the math, and was sure that nobody would check?
|
| This is the kind of article that should be written by AI (or
| not written, really.) If you completely fictionalized the empty
| interviews, nothing would be lost.
|
| Maybe the "spokesman" has been told to angle for a government
| subsidy for the inconvenience of losing pennies? And from a gas
| station, which add that goofy fraction of a cent at the end of
| their pricing.
| paxys wrote:
| 20 million customers doesn't mean 20 million transactions.
| Considering we are talking about a convenience store I'm sure a
| large chunk of their customers visit every day, some probably
| multiple times a day.
|
| Assuming 3.4 million customers (cash users) and 2.5 cents
| average loss per transaction, it would only take one visit a
| month for them to cross a million dollars in losses.
|
| Of course at that scale it's not like that million or two is
| really making a difference to their bottom line. Doing some
| quick Googling their annual revenue is estimated to be $6-7
| billion.
| Jblx2 wrote:
| >visit every day, some probably multiple times a day
|
| Anyone have data on what percentage of the population visits
| convenience stores 500+ times per year? Sounds pretty
| inconvenient.
| axiolite wrote:
| Plenty of people stop somewhere to get hot breakfast and
| coffee every day. If you also need something that can't set
| in your car all day (e.g. milk) that would be a second trip
| in a day.
|
| Whether that's convenient or not depends on location... If
| it's right off your route to work/home, a stop may only add
| a couple minutes to your drive.
| drsopp wrote:
| Oo, I'd like to get a roll of these. But I live in Norway.
| UltraSane wrote:
| could get rid of dimes and nickels as well.
| 45764986 wrote:
| Yes. I used to work at a movie theater, where all transactions
| were to the nearest $0.25 because it made it easier for the
| kids like me behind the counter to count the change and not
| lose track... seemed sensible at the time and that was 20 years
| ago.
| guywithahat wrote:
| It would be cool to remove the hundredth place in general; just
| dimes and half dollars, although I don't see that happening any
| time soon
| didgetmaster wrote:
| Many are reporting this as if failing to mint new pennies each
| year is going to produce some kind of shortage. There are
| billions of pennies sitting in drawers or jars in homes across
| the nation (I certainly have one with about a thousand pennies in
| it).
|
| I doubt anyone who needs a penny will be unable to find one
| within the next 100 years.
| JohnFen wrote:
| Most of the stores in my area have started requiring people to
| pay with exact change or by card because they can't get pennies
| to make change.
|
| Personally, I think stores should just start setting prices to
| avoid the need for pennies, but that would be too easy, I
| guess.
| knollimar wrote:
| If your sales tax rate is 8.875%, what do you price a banana
| at to avoid change?
| randerson wrote:
| This problem is easily solved in countries that use VAT
| knollimar wrote:
| It really isn't; it's just acceptable to accumulate this
| rounding error I'm implying in those countries. Which is
| fine, but should be acknowledged.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| You price it including sales tax. Sticker price is final
| price.
| rufus_foreman wrote:
| If someone is buying a banana for resale, or buying with
| WIC or SNAP benefits (among other things), they would not
| owe sales tax. So if the price included sales tax, the
| sticker price would not be the final price.
|
| You do not know the final price until you know how they
| are paying for it, what they are using it for, and when
| they are buying it (among other things).
|
| Falsehoods programmers believe about sales tax (among
| other things).
| carlosjobim wrote:
| Then that discount can be deducted by the cash register
| when it's time to pay.
| knollimar wrote:
| this is me preempting: yes I know I picked a bad example
| since produce isn't often taxed. Assume it's a
| prepackaged organic banana.
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| $10
| ianferrel wrote:
| Setting prices to avoid the need for pennies is probably
| technically challenging given the combination of requirements
| to post prices and sales taxes that don't always round the
| same way.
|
| If the effective tax rate is 7.432%, you can price single
| items so that the price plus tax ends up in a multiple of
| $0.05, but if you get a purchase with multiple items, you
| either need to round _somewhere_ or post prices that are like
| $9.346263437.
| thayne wrote:
| sales tax should be charged per item, not for the total
| transaction, so that it's possible to list prices that
| include the sales tax.
| MrZander wrote:
| Sales tax varies by state/county/city. It is generally
| not cost-effective to have each individual store label
| all their products with local sales taxes applied.
| ryandrake wrote:
| I see this excuse all the time, but why not? This
| calculation does not need to happen more often than the
| product prices are adjusted. There's no difference in
| effort between labeling something "$5.52+tax" and
| labeling it "$6".
| MrZander wrote:
| The difference is _where_ the product is labeled. Is it
| labeled nationally like Arizona Iced Tea? Is it labeled
| at a regional bottling facility? Or is it labeled at the
| store itself? And what about when tax rates change, you
| gonna go pull all the labels off everything in the whole
| store and update them?
|
| Most of this could be resolved by not putting the prices
| on the products themselves, but that isn't as good of an
| experience for the shopper.
| thayne wrote:
| > Most of this could be resolved by not putting the
| prices on the products themselves
|
| That is already often the case. Prices are usually on the
| shelves not on the product itself at many stores. And
| when purchasing online there is no reason that the sales
| tax couldn't be included in the listed price.
|
| Also sellers could just charge the same price everywhere
| and take the sales tax out of the revenue.
| nkrisc wrote:
| It generally is, or at least per category of items.
| Different items can have different (or none) sales tax
| rates.
| JohnFen wrote:
| Good point. I forgot about sales tax. That also seems
| fixable by adjusting tax law, but adjusting law is always
| more hassle.
| madcaptenor wrote:
| For example, $0.93 * 1.07432 = is $0.9991176 exactly, which
| rounds to $1.00. But if you buy a dozen such items then
| $0.93 * 12 * 1.07432 = $11.9894112 exactly, which rounds to
| $11.99.
| timeinput wrote:
| Imagine a world where they just posted the price you would
| pay at the register on the shelf instead of some number
| that is ~93.082% of the price you would pay.
|
| I know it's hard to imagine the price on the shelf being
| the price that you pay, but I believe it is possible even
| in complex tax situations.
| ianferrel wrote:
| I live where there is no sales tax, so it's not hard to
| imagine!
|
| But good luck convincing every state, county,
| municipality, and other weird governing body that
| requires something other than that and also collects a
| weird sales tax.
|
| Or go with the solution that papers over all that
| nonsense: a flexible and maximum $0.04 per purchase
| discount.
| timeinput wrote:
| I mean it's not on the state, county, municipality, or
| weird governing body to put the prices on the shelf at
| the store. Nation wide advertising might be different (is
| that still a thing? There were always asterisks that made
| a dollar menu not always a dollar anyway), but the
| literal price on the shelf / menu / ... at any given
| physical building could price things appropriately for
| the physical location that they are on.
|
| I live in a place with a fixed VAT (that is included in
| the price on the shelf / menu / ...), but grew up in the
| US in several different weirdly taxed localities. It's
| just such a silly argument to say "we can't write the
| correct price on the shelf because the laws vary." The
| register knows the correct price, the labels on the shelf
| are computer generated, and updated regularly. The labels
| at many nation wide fast food type places are displays
| anyway.
|
| If Baarle-Hertog and Baarle-Nassau can make it work I
| feel like it's at least imaginable that stores that
| already automate this weird complex tax code could print
| accurate labels instead of inaccurate labels, with an
| accurate calculation at sales time.
| gblargg wrote:
| What if businesses issues their own penny coupons that
| could be used in future purchases? If you bought from
| there regularly you'd on average only have a couple of
| them.
| ianferrel wrote:
| This is what happens when you wish on a monkey's paw to
| get rid of pennies.
| jandrewrogers wrote:
| It isn't that simple. There are stacked tax jurisdictions
| that can change their fraction of the tax independently. Some
| of those taxes are conditional at point-of-sale so the exact
| rate varies from customer to customer.
|
| It is a mess but also not easy to unwind or patch over.
| c22 wrote:
| There's a cash-heavy business I work with that's already having
| a hard time sourcing the pennies they need. I guess they're all
| in a jar under your desk.
| MangoToupe wrote:
| I have a hard time believing any business relies on access to
| Pennies when all cash transactions can be rounded to a nickel
| in some way amenable to both parties. I imagine most
| customers just don't give a damn.
| c22 wrote:
| I'm pretty sure they're considering doing this, but I don't
| know what all the pros and cons or complexities are.
| didgetmaster wrote:
| It seems to me that if there was truly a shortage of pennies,
| banks could offer to pay 2 cents for every penny someone
| turned in (still far cheaper than minting a new one) and
| enough people would pull out their penny jars and cash them
| in.
| allknowingfrog wrote:
| That...actually seems economically sound, but it's also a
| strong argument for the idea that pennies are effectively
| worthless.
| c22 wrote:
| Now we've unlocked a new lucrative business model where we
| can cut the customer out entirely! Simply buy pennies from
| the bank on the dollar and sell them back for 100%
| profit...
| mrweasel wrote:
| I don't know how accurate this is, but someone posted on Reddit
| some Burger King is already having a hard time getting pennies
| from their bank:
| https://old.reddit.com/r/mildlyinteresting/comments/1opdlm2/...
| embedding-shape wrote:
| > I doubt anyone who needs a penny will be unable to find one
| within the next 100 years.
|
| Based on my experience with the universe, this ability of being
| able to find something whenever you need it, only happens until
| you start expecting it and when you really need it, you're not
| gonna be able to find it anywhere. Maybe "Murphy's law" isn't
| what I'm looking for but something similar? For when what you
| really need is no longer there, universe always works against
| you? Can't recall.
| johnisgood wrote:
| Selective attention or confirmation bias with a hint of
| cosmic irony?
| nayuki wrote:
| We eliminated pennies in Canada in 2012 and the transition was a
| non-issue. The vast majority of retailers would round cash
| transactions to the nearest $0.05, but a few would round down to
| the nearest $0.05 in favor of the customer.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Withdrawal_of_low-denomination...
|
| Canadian cash is better than American cash in several ways: No
| penny, durable polymer banknotes (instead of dirty wrinkly cotton
| paper), colorful banknotes (instead of all green) that are easy
| to distinguish, $1 and $2 coins in wide circulation (instead of
| worn-out $1 bills).
| simonw wrote:
| The linked article raises a few problems that the US could have
| with that solution:
|
| > Four states - Delaware, Connecticut, Michigan and Oregon - as
| well as numerous cities, including New York, Philadelphia,
| Miami and Washington, DC, require merchants to provide exact
| change.
| delecti wrote:
| If the US _properly_ got rid of pennies (instead of Trump
| just doing another end-run around congress, by ordering the
| Mint to stop making them, on shaky legal ground), the
| legislation could easily supersede those state laws.
| throwawaymaths wrote:
| What exactly is the law?
|
| Can you show me the statute requiring the treasury
| department to coin pennies?
| delecti wrote:
| Article 1, Section 8 of the constitution gives Congress
| the authority responsibility to coin money. And in the
| coinage act of 1792, 31 USC 5111(a)(1), congress directs
| that the treasury "shall mint and issue coins described
| in section 5112 of this title in amounts the Secretary
| decides are necessary to meet the needs of the United
| States", with the list in section 5112 explicitly listing
| the penny (31 USC 5112(a)(6)). It's clearly intended to
| instruct the treasury to mint pennies without congress
| needing to proscribe the varying amount every year. It
| also clearly demonstrates the intent that pennies "shall"
| be produced.
|
| https://spectrumlocalnews.com/mo/st-
| louis/politics/2025/04/3...
| https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/31/5111
| https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/31/5112
|
| The fact that all of that gives leeway for "'none' is all
| that's necessary" is why I said the legal basis was
| "shaky" and not "baseless". I think getting rid of
| pennies is good, but this is something that Congress
| needs to do, rather than continually abdicating its
| responsibilities.
| mjd wrote:
| I think this is wrong.
|
| As far as I can tell the relevant statute is 31 USC SS5112,
| and it _does not_ require the minting of all authorized
| coins:
|
| "(a) The Secretary of the Treasury *may mint* and issue
| only the following coins: ... (6) ... a one-cent coin that
| is 0.75 inch in diameter and weighs 3.11 grams."
|
| (Emphasis mine)
|
| There may be another clause somewhere that requires the
| Treasury to issue all coins, but that seems unlikely to me.
| The _number_ of coins to issue of each type is left to the
| discretion of the Treasury; why wouldn't that include the
| option to issue none?
|
| https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/31/5112
| delecti wrote:
| I addressed in another reply that "'none' is all that's
| necessary" is probably a defensible interpretation of the
| law (the more relevant portion being in 5111 rather than
| 5112), but the penny being explicitly listed makes it
| clearly not the intention of congress. That's why I said
| it's a "shaky" and not "baseless" legal ground. The law
| is clearly written with the expectation that there will
| be _some_ , which is why Congress felt the need to pass
| the Coinage Act of 1857 to phase out the half cent.
|
| I think we should get rid of the penny, but it's
| Congress's responsibility to do that, and they haven't.
| I'm opposed to Congress abdicating its power and
| responsibility like that.
| mjd wrote:
| You're right, 5111 is more pertinent here.
|
| 5111(a)(1) says "shall mint and issue coins" but
| qualifies it explicitly with "in amounts the Secretary
| decides are necessary to meet the needs of the United
| States". This is a clear delegation of authority.
|
| If you don't think zero pennies is a permissible amount,
| what about one penny? Two? What minimum number are you
| arguing for here, and what's your justification for it?
|
| If Congress had wanted to set a minimum number, they
| could have done so.
|
| Reading it as "shall mint" is wrong, I think. "Shall"
| qualifies the whole clause "mint in amounts the Secretary
| decides (etc.)".
|
| Understood that way, 5111 makes it _unlawful_ to mint any
| pennies if the Secretary decides that none are necessary.
| isleyaardvark wrote:
| If Congress had wanted to get rid of the penny, they
| would have done so, since they specifically have the
| power to "coin money" under Article 1, Section 8.
|
| In fact they have introduced a bill to do just that, that
| has not passed yet, which means they have not done that.
| delecti wrote:
| > If Congress had wanted to set a minimum number, they
| could have done so.
|
| I don't think this is necessarily a sound argument. The
| current presidency is full of examples of aspects of laws
| being used in ways no president previously had. Those
| laws existed, but I don't think it follows that congress
| intended for those powers to exist.
| ianferrel wrote:
| This seems like a non-issue as long as they round the price
| down. Because there's no law that the store can't discount
| their total by a small amount and then provide exact change.
|
| "Congratulations customer, we have a special coupon today for
| $0.03 off your purchase. Here's your change :)"
| MostlyStable wrote:
| I don't see why you couldn't do it in either case. If you
| modify the actual price, then you _are_ giving exact
| change. Why wouldn 't round() be as valid a price
| modification as floor()?
| simonw wrote:
| Maybe sales tax makes that harder?
|
| I guess you could calculate all of your prices such that,
| once sales tax is added, they round to a 5 cent value.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| You don't need to do that. Compute the total sale, then
| figure the tax, then round. You don't need to round per
| item.
| ianferrel wrote:
| Presumably "increase the price a small amount to avoid
| giving exact change" is exactly the sort of thing that
| laws requiring giving exact change were designed to
| prevent.
|
| There will surely be some customer pissed about the extra
| 2 cents they were charged who will raise hell over the
| exact change law.
|
| But what customer is going to be upset over a small
| discount?
| simonw wrote:
| > In addition, the law covering the federal food assistance
| program known as SNAP requires that recipients not be
| charged more than other customers. Since SNAP recipients
| use a debit card that's charged the precise amount, if
| merchants round down prices for cash purchases, they could
| be opening themselves to legal problems and fines, said
| Jeff Lenard, spokesperson for NACS.
| giantg2 wrote:
| So how do they account for people who use coupons or
| rewards cards today? Those create a discount that
| technically result in charging some customers less than
| others, including SNAP users. In the case of rounding,
| you wouldn't be charging SNAP user any more that other
| users who use cards for payment. The point of the law was
| to prevent stores from charging surcharges etc on food
| stamp users back in the day.
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| Rewards are taken from merchant fees. The retailer isn't
| party to that rebate. Likewise, coupons are almost always
| funded by the manufacturer who returns those monies to
| the store.
| giantg2 wrote:
| "Rewards are taken from merchant fees."
|
| That would be true for credit card fees, but not for
| stuff like loyalty card discounts.
|
| "Likewise, coupons are almost always funded by the
| manufacturer who returns those monies to the store."
|
| It doesn't matter. The store is the one charging the
| customer. As stated, the law says the store cannot charge
| SNAP recipients more. Thus it would be a violation if we
| are taking it strictly.
| darthcircuit wrote:
| When I lived in Australia, those paying with card were
| charged the exact amount. Those paying cash would round
| to the nearest 5 cents, in the customer's favor. I
| suspect the same will happen here.
| dghlsakjg wrote:
| So just round snap transactions too, not just cash ones.
| Now SNAP recipients are never paying more than any other
| customer for the same basket of goods.
| skylurk wrote:
| > require merchants to provide exact change
|
| All the items in my dad's farm shop were priced so they came
| out to a round dollar amount after tax, and that was 40 years
| ago.
| tempodox wrote:
| But less decent people can't resist the dark pattern of
| using $x.99 prices everywhere.
| mulmen wrote:
| At big retailers the price tag code indicates what type
| of price it is. For example the last digits can mean:
|
| 0: full
|
| 9: sale
|
| 8: reduced
|
| 7: clearance (item will not restock)
|
| I forget the exact system Sears used but we could tell at
| a glance if a deal was really "good".
|
| I'm curious if Sears and WalMart used different systems
| and if WalMart exploited knowledge of the Sears system to
| signal better prices to shoppers. Like a full WalMart
| price being .97 and clearance being .94.
| redwall_hp wrote:
| That sounds close to the Sears system to me, but they
| used the tens place. 8x was used for returned big ticket
| items, like appliances and treadmills. It would start at
| 88 and the rightmost digit would decrement to indicate
| how many weeks it had been sitting there.
|
| It was 00 for full, 99 for sale (the majority of items,
| except for the one week every year they established the
| full price for that product), 8x for clearance.
| mulmen wrote:
| Ah yeah, I forget the details. It was a sophisticated
| system. I'm curious of the origins. Did this have
| bookkeeping or business reporting benefits in the pre-
| digital age? Even when we were using computers at the
| turn of the millennium it helped signal discount
| eligibility without having to update and synchronize
| inventory with promotional offers.
| mulmen wrote:
| It's far more complicated than that. There is no one sales
| tax for everyone.
|
| Oregon residents didn't pay sales tax when making purchases
| in Idaho. Washington charges sales tax on out of state
| purchases if that state's sales tax is less than
| Washington's, including if it is zero.
| criddell wrote:
| How do they deal with sales tax? Connecticut has a 6.35%
| sales tax so if I buy something for $1, the total will be
| $1.0635.
| wasabi991011 wrote:
| Paying cash, you would pay $1.05.
| criddell wrote:
| I'm referring to states that don't allow rounding.
|
| > in some states, merchants could face legal trouble for
| rounding up or down
|
| It seems obvious to me they are already rounding to the
| $1/100. Why is rounding to $1/20 a problem?
| wasabi991011 wrote:
| Ah I see. Yeah I agree then.
| UncleSlacky wrote:
| They could do what every other country does, and include
| the sales tax in the shelf label price.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| I honestly don't know why we don't get rid of nickels and dimes
| as well. What can you still buy that costs less than $0.25?
| blendergeek wrote:
| Bananas
| stetrain wrote:
| Yes, the quarter is pretty much the smallest useful unit of
| US currency and even that usefulness is shrinking pretty
| quickly.
|
| If we would adopt a policy of including local sales tax in
| advertised prices, skipping to whole dollars would be pretty
| painless.
|
| The main reason to keep at least quarters is all of the
| various coin-op machines that are still in service.
| FredPret wrote:
| The US has too many tax permutations for this to be
| practicable. Companies would have to make prices a bit
| higher to accommodate unexpected sales tax increases in
| some or other jurisdiction.
|
| There's a small industry that specializes in knowing what
| the sales tax for a particular transaction should be at the
| moment it goes through.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Forcing the simplification of all those taxes doesn't
| seem like it has a downside, to me.
| FredPret wrote:
| That would centralize power to the larger taxing
| authority.
|
| Right now, there's a huge number of elected people in the
| US who wield real local power through these taxes and
| other rules that they can make.
|
| It's a headache but we live in the computer age and we
| can automate administrative things like tax calculation
| at checkout; we should be using systems to aid
| decentralization and democratization instead of the
| opposite.
| stetrain wrote:
| Knowing the sales tax at a particular in-person store is
| more feasible, and that's the only case where you have to
| deal with cash.
|
| If I'm buying online with a digital transaction you can
| charge whatever cents are necessary.
| FredPret wrote:
| You then still have the issue of standardized advertising
| prices.
|
| Right now, a company can say they sell gadget X for $999,
| which would not be possible if they had to work out item
| taxes.
|
| The other possibility is that they now have to mark X up
| to take into account the most pessimistic possible tax
| rate and advertise the marked-up rate.
| phantasmish wrote:
| When we got rid of the half-penny, it was worth more in 2024
| cents than the dime is now.
|
| We waited so long past when we should have gotten rid of the
| penny that now a coin _ten times as valuable_ is also
| worthless enough that we ought to get rid of it.
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| My employer has a 55C/ vending machine with a dodgy bill
| validator.
| RandomBacon wrote:
| I was once at a place that had a vending machine that
| accepted U.S. Currency as well as coupons. I wish I saved
| one of those coupons and reverse-engineered it and see if
| it worked on other machines, oh well.
| HarHarVeryFunny wrote:
| So how would you propose paying for something that cost
| $0.40, or would you just like to see all prices be multiples
| of 25c?
|
| BTW, the reason for wanting to get rid of the penny isn't so
| much the low purchasing value, but more that they cost more
| to make (~4c) than their face value, so the government loses
| money making them. The same is true of nickels.
| ahmeneeroe-v2 wrote:
| American banknotes have numbers on them to easily distinguish
| the different values!
| ceejayoz wrote:
| Not everyone can see.
|
| Australian notes vary in size for this reason.
| Arubis wrote:
| Which is great if you are fully abled! But for folks for whom
| sight isn't as strong, additional aids (different colors,
| different sized banknotes for different denominations) are
| super helpful.
| filleduchaos wrote:
| Some currencies also have braille-like embossments so that
| if you're totally blind, you can still pick out the correct
| denominations.
| zahlman wrote:
| Being fully sighted, I still appreciate it.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curb_cut_effect
| ajmurmann wrote:
| From dealing with Euro notes, I like being able to look down
| at the money in the wallet and pull the right notes out based
| on color. With USD I need to take the bills out of the
| wallet.
| afavour wrote:
| > The United States is the only country that prints all
| denominations of currency in the same size. The US and
| Switzerland are the only two countries that use the same
| colors for all of their various bills. Needless to say, this
| sameness of size and color make it impossible for a blind
| person to locate the correct bills to make a purchase without
| some sort of assistance, or confirm that he or she has been
| given the correct change by the sales clerk. Even people with
| partial sight may have trouble distinguishing a $1 bill from
| a $10, especially if the bill is old and worn.
|
| https://afb.org/blindness-and-low-vision/using-
| technology/ac...
| SoftTalker wrote:
| It's a bit odd that the mint doesn't emboss the
| denomination in braille on each note. I'd think that there
| would be a way to do that and have it hold up pretty well
| in circulation?
| Maxion wrote:
| Braille does not help everyone. Most people with vision
| issues are not legally lind and do not know braille.
| whoaoweird wrote:
| It's wild to see you downvoted. Only about 10% of blind
| people know braille. There are many _more_ people who
| have visual impairments but are not blind. Braille is not
| a universal solution (though I would rather have it than
| not have it).
| justsomehnguy wrote:
| But you don't need _to know_ braille to learn how the
| most common bills are marked.
|
| Just like you don't need to know Japanese to count the
| exact amount of yen bills.
| axiolite wrote:
| Chiming in to complain that a good, working solution to a
| problem just doesn't happen to solve ALL PROBLEMS is just
| banality or perhaps pedantry. Unless it was also
| proposing an alternative that might do better...
|
| Braille on money also doesn't help dyslexic quadrplegics
| with dysesthesia... Checkmate.
| whoaoweird wrote:
| I think that's an extremely ungenerous read here. The
| thread is about how different size bills and different
| color bills solve a lot of problems with people who have
| low vision. Adding braille solves the same problem, but
| for a subset of people that different sized/color bills
| solves.
|
| If you have a good, working solution that's widely used
| worldwide, and someone suggests a worse solution that
| works for fewer people, it's more than fair to point out
| that "your solution is worse, less common, and works for
| fewer people".
|
| Your last sentence is a low effort strawman, I'm not sure
| why you felt it necessary to include.
| justsomehnguy wrote:
| You need a week of low-key exposure to learn how each
| bill is marked.
| yesfitz wrote:
| Anyone able to feel the dots could learn to distinguish
| bills this way without learning braille beyond that,
| regardless of their vision.
|
| Anyone who didn't find the feature useful could ignore
| it.
| sequoia wrote:
| In canada it's "one cluster of dots = $5, two clusters =
| $10, three = $20" and so on. You just feel the number of
| dot clusters & count, no braille involved.
| wasabi991011 wrote:
| I think I've seen that blind people in the US have a
| little machine that they can use to add the braille
| themselves. Also from a quick google search there's also
| electronic bill readers that can be provided to blind
| people for free if they qualify.
|
| In Canada the bills are embossed with braille by the
| mint. There may be other accommodations too, but I
| haven't looked it up.
| macintux wrote:
| > I think I've seen that blind people in the US have a
| little machine that they can use to add the braille
| themselves.
|
| That solves half the problem, but you still don't know
| whether you're getting correct change.
| zahlman wrote:
| Not braille; see
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45904000.
| varun_ch wrote:
| Switzerland has same colors for all of the various bills?
| As far as I can tell, that has never been true
| HansHamster wrote:
| This also confused me. The current ones have very
| distinct colors and also all the previous series used
| different colors as far as I can tell: https://en.wikiped
| ia.org/wiki/Banknotes_of_the_Swiss_franc
| JJMcJ wrote:
| The ten dollar bill has a somewhat different color than the
| other currency, somewhat yellowish.
| nayuki wrote:
| > The United States is the only country that prints all
| denominations of currency in the same size
|
| Let me assure you that all Canadian banknotes are the same
| size too, 6.00 inch x 2.75 inch (152.40 mm x 69.85 mm). I'm
| not sure how the article got this fact wrong.
|
| As a side note, Canadian banknotes don't have braille, but
| have an ad hoc system of bumps: https://en.wikipedia.org/wi
| ki/Canadian_currency_tactile_feat...
| zahlman wrote:
| > Although similar in appearance to braille, it differs
| because standard Braille was deemed too sensitive.
|
| Yes. This system is more resistant to wear and tear.
| axiolite wrote:
| > Let me assure you that all Canadian banknotes are the
| same size too [...] not sure how the article got this
| fact wrong.
|
| Because Canada is just part of the U.S.
|
| (flame away)
| nayuki wrote:
| > Because Canada is just part of the U.S.
|
| As a Canadian, I'm amused to hear this because it is
| basically true as a first approximation.
|
| Random factoid - Canadian coins ($2, $1, $0.25, $0.10,
| $0.05, $0.01 (withdrawn)) come in almost the same
| denominations as US coins ($1 (uncommon), $0.05 (rare),
| $0.25, $0.10, $0.05, $0.01), and they are the same
| diameter and thickness, but maybe having different weight
| and magnetic properties. It's kind of scary that Canadian
| coins are essentially state-sanctioned counterfeits of US
| coins.
|
| Another weird thing is that the National Basketball
| Association (NBA) has 29 American teams and 1 Canadian
| one... making it more of an international basketball
| association. I think another sports league with
| "national" in its name also crosses national boundaries.
|
| If you take a random person and teleport them between a
| random mix of Canadian and US cities, I think they'll
| find it hard to tell the two countries apart. The primary
| language is English, the accent is the same, the streets
| and buildings look the same, people watch/listen/read
| much of the same media, and so on.
|
| One party trick that I practice when traveling in America
| is to not volunteer information about where I'm from, and
| see how long I can blend into groups of people and
| conversations until someone suspects something or asks a
| direct question. Needless to say, I can last pretty long,
| and even debated things like US federal politics. The
| internal diversity of people within the US (e.g. skin
| color, accent, beliefs) really helps an outsider like me
| blend in.
|
| Also note that there is a one-way relationship going on.
| Canadians know more about the US than what's necessary
| for life. Heck, even the state broadcaster CBC will put
| out entire news segments (e.g. 5 to 20 minutes) on US-
| specific issues. Knowing about the US - whether it's
| major companies, cities, TV series - is unavoidable to
| Canadians. But ask the average American about anything
| related to Canada, and you'll likely get a blank stare.
|
| However, some of the differences between Canada and the
| USA include: Guns(!), personal and state violence,
| healthcare, social safety net, political polarization,
| income, prestige, number of big companies, French
| language, atmospheric climate.
| extraduder_ire wrote:
| > Another weird thing is that the National Basketball
| Association (NBA) has 29 American teams and 1 Canadian
| one
|
| The NHL is a better example of this, I think.
| 0xffff2 wrote:
| Presumably that's "I think another sports league with
| "national" in its name also crosses national boundaries."
| in the OP.
|
| With the recent conclusion of the "World" Series, my mind
| actually went to the Blue Jays first, but they're in the
| American League. At least that one's technically correct.
| testing22321 wrote:
| > _If you take a random person and teleport them between
| a random mix of Canadian and US cities, I think they 'll
| find it hard to tell the two countries apart. The primary
| language is English, the accent is the same, the streets
| and buildings look the same, people watch/listen/read
| much of the same media, and so on._
|
| On the surface, I agree 100%. Dig deeper and the
| differences are stark.
|
| Years ago I came from Australia to work at a ski resort
| in the US. I stayed 6 months, had a great time. At the
| end I went to Canada to see a friend. After 30 minutes in
| Canada I felt more at home than after 6 months in the US.
|
| Canada is a friendly, kind, gentle place, everything the
| US is not.
|
| I've now lived in Canada for 20 years, been to almost
| every province and territory. I've also and travelled
| extensively in the US (40+ states). It's a fun place to
| visit and parts are spectacularly beautiful, I do not
| want to live there. Now I have a young daughter it's
| doubly so.
|
| Yes, I'm generalizing and using broad strokes. The thing
| about generalizations is they're usually right.
|
| Canada feels like being surrounded by friends and family,
| I have no doubt the expression "dog eat dog" comes from
| the US.
| axiolite wrote:
| > Canada is a friendly, kind, gentle place, everything
| the US is not.
|
| In what ways do you find northern midwest US states
| (Minnesota, Wisconsin, etc.) substantially less
| "friendly" than Canada?
| testing22321 wrote:
| As I was driving my daughter to daycare this morning I
| saw the garbage men. A road worker filling in pot holes,
| a person holding the stop sign and someone digging a hole
| in the road. They all have the same healthcare I do.
| Canadians all pay taxes, and work together for the
| betterment of everyone, and it shows. It's a community, a
| society people are happy strangers have a good standard
| of living.
|
| The US is a competitive sport where everyone is competing
| with everyone else. Driving past a lowly person holding a
| stop sign it's just literally "sucks to be them" and no
| ability to help or do anything about it.
|
| There are 30 million people in the US without health
| insurance. There are none in Canada. Medical issues are
| the number one cause of bankruptcy in the US. In Canada
| there are none.
|
| Obviously health care is just one example, and there are
| plenty of kind and friendly people in the US. But living
| under conditions like that is not a happy, healthy
| society of people that care about strangers and care for
| each other. It's a "look out for me" place.
|
| The more I go there (I was down there last week), the
| more I see the vast majority of Americans live in a
| scarcity mindset. Of course the high GDP means not scarce
| in terms of consumption, but in terms of things that
| actually impact quality of life day to day.
| axiolite wrote:
| Sounds like a lot of projecting... The U.S. doesn't have
| single-payer healthcare therefore it's a dystopian hell-
| scape where everyone hates each other.
|
| > "sucks to be them"
|
| There are large swathes of the US where I would be
| shocked to hear anyone express that sentiment. There are
| other parts where I would not be shocked, but then the US
| is 10X bigger than Canada so you do get to pick and
| choose which version you'd like to be part of.
| testing22321 wrote:
| Of course healthcare is just one example of many, and as
| I said originally, yes I'm generalizing a very large
| country and population.
|
| I'm giving my observations over 20 years in Canada and
| exploring the us extensively.
|
| > _so you do get to pick and choose which version you 'd
| like to be part of._
|
| Thank you, you have proved my point better than I did.
|
| You literally just said "there are parts of the country
| where my fellow countrymen, People who make the country
| function, have families , hopes and dreams have a crappy
| life. I just choose not to be there"
|
| That is my point exactly. The us is not a community where
| people care for each other. They just ignore or move away
| if they can.
| kbolino wrote:
| All U.S. bills in common circulation (all denominations
| except $2) have been different colors for 20 years.
| ebruchez wrote:
| > The US and Switzerland are the only two countries that
| use the same colors for all of their various bills.
|
| Factually absolutely incorrect for Switzerland, and easy to
| verify. Swiss bank notes are and have been some of the most
| colorful (and pretty, I should say) around, and all have
| different sizes.
| nkrisc wrote:
| And it would be even easier to distinguish them if they were
| different colors in addition to the printed numerals.
| IshKebab wrote:
| This is a joke right?
| iammattmurphy wrote:
| Even though I never use cash, I'm really not a fan of coins, so
| I wish we did have $1 bills.
| bigfishrunning wrote:
| We do have $1 bills. And coins!
| totallykvothe wrote:
| I'll agree on all but one point. The cotton/linen notes feel so
| much better in the hand than the candy wrapper plastic of
| Canadian bills. I know it's a dumb reason, but I just hate the
| feeling.
| SCUSKU wrote:
| Plus US dollars just have that smell to them. I wouldn't mind
| though if we rotated out some of the faces on the bills, e.g.
| Andrew Jackson
| verdverm wrote:
| let's wait a few years before rotating faces to avoid
| debating another blatantly illegal thing Dear Leader would
| propose (actually he already did but it was out of the news
| rather quickly)
| dmd wrote:
| You do know who would be the first person to rotate in,
| don't you.
| nilamo wrote:
| It would obviously be someone as equally legendary as
| Washington or Jefferson; noted American Paul Bunyan. We
| can even call them Big Blue Bucks.
| debatem1 wrote:
| My politics and his don't line up but I'm not against
| this. It would be pretty interesting to see the impact on
| cash usage, and faces on money are pretty archeologically
| useful-- at least on coins.
| bregma wrote:
| Is that what cocaine smells like?
| khannn wrote:
| Cocaine and feces smells like freedom
| stevage wrote:
| Australian here. Barely anyone uses cash anymore. It's weird
| to see debates about moving towards technology we had 35
| years ago which we don't even use anymore.
| jchw wrote:
| But, a cashless society is not a panacea. It may be higher
| tech and more convenient, but it can have significant
| privacy costs, not to mention the issues with payment card
| networks engaging in censorship, charging fairly high
| transaction fees, and pushing the problem of fraud on their
| networks to every merchant. Considering the payment card
| network market is seemingly impossible to enter, and
| governments don't seem to be able or perhaps willing to
| regulate things, there are ways in which cashless is a
| downgrade. It would be nice if we could back up and try to
| resolve some of these issues in a durable by-design way,
| but sadly it's probably never happening.
| PostOnce wrote:
| Electronics continue to fail in severe weather events, and
| cash keeps working, which is important when we're talking
| about food.
| stevage wrote:
| Does it? What about weather that stops the ATMs being
| refilled? Takes a lot of weather to bring down satellite
| internet...
| testing22321 wrote:
| Going to the US feels like going backwards in time in many
| ways. Banking, public transit, healthcare, education.
|
| A friend from Australia came to visit and after a day
| driving around New York State said "it feels half finished"
| stevage wrote:
| Yeah I had the weird experience in 2020 of using tap to
| pay at several places where the server had never seen it
| used before.
| revicon wrote:
| There are several US states where, by law, retailers are not
| allowed to give preferential treatment to credit card paying
| customers over cash paying ones. Which means, in those states,
| retailers will be required to always round transactions to the
| cash paying customer's benefit, where in other states the
| retailer is allowed to round to the nearest 5 cents. This is
| going to cost large retailers millions.
|
| Interestingly many of them had already put the work into
| updating the cash register software to allow for this due to
| the penny shortages during covid.
| bongodongobob wrote:
| It doesn't cost anyone anything. They can just raise prices 3
| cents or whatever.
| phantom784 wrote:
| It gets tricky because sales tax is added on top of the
| sticker price.
| UncleSlacky wrote:
| Then include the sales tax in the sticker price, like
| every other country does.
| phantom784 wrote:
| Unfortunately I think this is much easier said than done.
| No single store is going to want to make this change,
| because it'll make their prices look higher than the
| competitors'. It'd require legislation, (and even that'd
| likely be state-by-state legislation).
|
| It also means a company wouldn't be able to advertise a
| single price for a product nationwide, since sales tax
| rates vary by state (and many times even within a state).
|
| Also worth noting that Canada also doesn't include sales
| taxes.
| revicon wrote:
| The statistics on consumers evaluating the purchase of
| something that is $9.99 vs $10 is well proven.
|
| Switching to round number prices would cost retailers a
| whole lot more.
|
| https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S00224359
| 9...
|
| https://www.researchgate.net/publication/23547242_Penny_Wis
| e...
|
| https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S00224359
| 0...
| zahlman wrote:
| The rounding is applied to an entire-after tax bill, not
| to shelf prices.
|
| Again: Canada actually did this many years ago. The
| effect you predict did not appear.
| atq2119 wrote:
| Let those large retailers put pressure on their suppliers.
| Prices haven't exactly been stable recently. I really don't
| think it matters, but if it did (as you claim) then surely
| some downward pressure is a good thing.
| knorker wrote:
| US notes also stink.
| knorker wrote:
| I don't get the downvotes. I'm not saying "stink as in I
| don't like it". US notes literally smell, and I've not gotten
| that from other currency.
|
| It's not even controversial. If you Google it you'll find
| that it's even a deliberate anti counterfit technology.
| noir_lord wrote:
| Same in UK but we also _size_ each face value differently.
|
| Which helps partially sighted people and is a good visual
| check.
| extraduder_ire wrote:
| It doesn't happen very often, but resizing coins when a new
| design is created strikes me as annoying.
|
| Last time I was in the UK I also found it funny how large the
| 2p coin is compared to its value.
| expedition32 wrote:
| In my country they round up if you pay in cash but they keep
| the cents for electronic payments.
|
| So for instance 1.69 in cash would be 1.70 but if you pay with
| your phone it stays at 1.69
| kpw94 wrote:
| > $1 and $2 coins in wide circulation (instead of worn-out $1
| bills).
|
| This has its own pros/cons...
|
| One advantage of $1 bill over coin is the majority of people in
| US don't need a wallet with zipper to hold coins. Five $1 bills
| is much less bulky and much lighter than five $1 CAD or five
| 1EUR coins
| wasabi991011 wrote:
| Of course everything has its pros and cons, but not all of
| them are worth considering.
|
| The amount of wallets with zipper is a country is not worth
| considering when discussing what coins should be minted.
| jamincan wrote:
| I would contend that 5 bills are more bulky than 5 coins. The
| only upside of dealing with US bills when travelling in the
| US is that you feel like a millionaire when you pull out the
| massive wad of bills from your pocket.
| mynameisash wrote:
| > the transition was a non-issue
|
| I'm reminded of when Minnesota passed the Minnesota Clean
| Indoor Air Act (MCIAA) close to 20 years ago. (Some)
| restauranteurs - along with the GOP - made pronouncements about
| how this would destroy the economy. No one would go to out to
| eat or for a drink again. Doom and gloom.
|
| Last I checked, there are plenty of restaurants open in the
| state, and things are going fine. In fact, just before the
| MCIAA went into effect, I had a newborn, and we went out to eat
| one time with him in tow. We asked for a non-smoking area but
| were placed immediately next to a family chain smoking. We
| decided to never go out to eat again until we could do so
| without risk of second-hand smoke.
|
| My point is that there are frequently these predictions of
| things being impossible or even just incredibly difficult and
| not worth the effort, and in the end, it's not a big deal.
| MrMorden wrote:
| People overestimated the importance that smokers placed on
| being able to smoke in public.
|
| A Japanese airline (Air Do) tried reintroducing the smoking
| section in the 1990s. It did not go well for them, and
| Japan's tobacco use rate was several times the US's.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > I'm reminded of when Minnesota passed the Minnesota Clean
| Indoor Air Act (MCIAA) close to 20 years ago. (Some)
| restauranteurs - along with the GOP - made pronouncements
| about how this would destroy the economy. No one would go to
| out to eat or for a drink again. Doom and gloom.
|
| Yeah, they had done the same thing when California did the
| same thing _30_ years ago. The fact that it didn 't happen
| then didn't stop them from doing it everywhere else similar
| laws were subsequently proposed.
| Projectiboga wrote:
| The US has been moving to colored denominations for awhile now.
| spiderice wrote:
| Better is very subjective here. I hate the colorful, plastic,
| canadian money. It feels toyish, like monopoly money. Whereas
| USD feels much more nice to deal with.
| chawco wrote:
| As a Canadian with kids who recently bought Monopoly, I can
| you tell you that American money objectively feels much more
| like Monopoly money...
| shrubble wrote:
| Canadian Tire Company should be the ones designing the bills,
| however...
| rz2k wrote:
| I am suspicious of any claims about relative cleanliness. As
| with wooden vs plastic cutting boards, our intuitions are
| likely misleading.
|
| To be an effective fomite the currency has to not kill the
| microbe, and it has to readily give up the microbe to the next
| recipient. Organic materials like cotton or linen seem more
| likely to simply absorb a viral envelope or bacterial cell
| wall, thereby rendering it ineffective. Furthermore, the porous
| nature makes it more difficult for the note to give up any
| microbe that isn't immediately killed before it naturally dies
| over time.
|
| A brief search of the scientific literature doesn't seem to
| show any conclusive results, but it does seem like the relative
| performance is pathogen specific.
| zahlman wrote:
| "Dirty" also connotes physical appearance, you know.
| biztos wrote:
| If you can't crumple it up and throw it at someone, it's
| not real money.
| pjdemers wrote:
| Paying by card doesn't round, the amount charged is exact
| cents, or at least that's the way it worked last time I was in
| Canada.
| codyb wrote:
| All green notes are barely there anymore... the dollar bill
| itself. Even the five has some color now.
| munificent wrote:
| _> We eliminated pennies in Canada in 2012 and the transition
| was a non-issue._
|
| That's because Canada had a plan, thought it through, and
| rolled it out.
|
| In the US...
|
| _"We had a social media post (by Trump) during Super Bowl
| Sunday, but no real plan for what retailers would have to do,"
| he said, referring to the president's February announcement._
|
| We have a deranged old man posting random shit on social media
| determining federal policy, so of course it's a chaotic
| shitshow.
|
| We elected a clown, we got a circus.
| MrMorden wrote:
| Unlike serving as a Republican politician, clowning requires
| a lot of work and training. It's nothing resembling an
| unskilled job. Ringling Bros. would do a lot better.
| kccqzy wrote:
| I simply don't like coins because they are heavy. I will
| continue to prefer $1 bills over $1 coins. Agree with the rest
| of your points though.
| wrs wrote:
| That's because in Canada you actually prepared for the
| transition, instead of just proclaiming it in a tweet.
| PeaceTed wrote:
| Very similar to the Australian system. We eliminated the 1 and
| 2 cent coins in 1992 without issue.
|
| Also has the polymer based colouful bank notes. Far easier to
| tell what you are handing over. Also given us some good names.
|
| $5 (Pink) = Prawn/Piglet
|
| $10 (Blue) = Bluey
|
| $20 (Red) = Lobster/Red back
|
| $50 (Yellow) = Pineapple/Banana
|
| $100 (Green) = Avacado
|
| So you get sentences like "They needed cash so I threw a
| pineapple at them".
| nayuki wrote:
| > Very similar to the Australian system
|
| Yes, and in fact:
|
| > Once the design and substrate were chosen, the Bank of
| Canada negotiated a contract with Note Printing Australia
| (NPA) for the supply of the substrate polymer and the
| security features implemented in the design. The substrate is
| supplied to NPA by Securency International (now known as
| Innovia Films Ltd). The Bank also negotiated for the rights
| to the use of intellectual property associated with the
| material and security features owned by the Reserve Bank of
| Australia.
|
| -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frontier_(banknotes)
|
| And the material is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polypropyle
| ne#Biaxially_orient...
| fastball wrote:
| Having $1 bills is so much nicer than having $1 coins. I don't
| want more coins, thanks.
| linsomniac wrote:
| >Canadian cash is better than American cash in several ways:
| [...] $1 and $2 coins in wide circulation (instead of worn-out
| $1 bills).
|
| I especially liked that the $2 coin breaks into 2 $1 coins if
| you drop it right. ;-)
|
| (j/k, IIRC that was an early manufacturing defect)
| bytesandbits wrote:
| I mean. I can't remember last time I used cash. Not in the last
| 5 years that is for sure. Once I paid someone with Venmo as
| that was the only way they could take it. Other than that time,
| I don't remember using cash at all. In SF the two only moments
| I can recall needing cash for is either some old self-service
| laundromats or funnily, chinatown where most of it is still
| cash. In fact recently a bunch of locations I go to often have
| become cashless. So you wouldn't be able to pay cash even if
| you wanted to. Business that are cash only do it for one
| reason, and one reason only, and we all know what that reason
| is. Slowly but steadily the volume of retail consumer cashflow
| is turning to digital. Cash is not going away today. Many
| seniors don't want / know how to use digital payments. Trends
| show we are moving toward all-digital. Probably 10 years from
| now +95% of retail will be cash-less.
| biztos wrote:
| Are they different sizes so the blind can easily use them?
| dreamcompiler wrote:
| US $1 coins are available at banks but most Americans don't
| know they exist and if you hand one to a service person as a
| tip they sneer at you as though you handed them a quarter or
| foreign money.
| bob1029 wrote:
| I wonder how long of not minting new pennies it would take for
| the average collectible value of the existing stock to reach
| break-even again.
|
| I feel like pennies fall out of circulation at a very high rate
| compared to other denominations.
| firefax wrote:
| Can any coin collectors let me know what, if any, effect this may
| have on the collection of steel pennies I have secured in my
| bunker in the woods?
| ireflect wrote:
| Finally!
|
| Here is a delightful article from NYT from last year on this
| topic. Truly fascinating and bewildering.
|
| https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/01/magazine/worthless-pennie...
| bigbadfeline wrote:
| _> Finally... NYT from last year... Truly fascinating and
| bewildering_
|
| Yeah, really bewildering, happiness inflated by inflation.
| FergusArgyll wrote:
| > When Robert Whaples, an economist at Wake Forest University,
| published an article in 2006 about the imperative to eliminate
| America's 1-cent coin, he received a personal note: "Get it
| done, and you will deserve the Nobel Prize!"
|
| Everything makes sense now...
| thayne wrote:
| I'm a little worried this will encourage vendors to increases
| prices up to the next 5 cent mark, which will cause inflation
| that we really don't need more of right now.
| timbit42 wrote:
| In Canada, most prices still end in 99. You still pay to the
| cent if you're paying with a debit or credit card, which the
| vast majority of customers are these days.
| phantasmish wrote:
| Gas stations price to the tenth of a penny per gallon. There is
| no 1/10 cent coin. Works fine.
| warmwaffles wrote:
| That's because the law requires them to charge that extra
| 9/10. It's silly.
| phantasmish wrote:
| It doesn't require it. There may still be (I dunno) fixed
| per-gallon taxes in the tenth-penny-per-gallon range, but
| stations aren't forced to handle it the way they do.
| lbourdages wrote:
| This has not been an issue in Canada. There is sales tax, which
| basically randomizes the last digit.
| hnburnsy wrote:
| Finally, can we next stop making dollar bills and add a two
| dollar coin.
| mannyv wrote:
| And the people rejoiced!
| throw0101d wrote:
| So Obama wanted to wanted to ban the penny, but it was deemed
| illegal to do so and efforts to get rid of the law requiring it
| did not pass:
|
| * https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2025/02/10/trump-us-mi...
|
| * https://www.local3news.com/obama-wants-to-retire-the-penny-b...
|
| It's not that keeping the penny around is (necessarily) a good
| idea, but that there are, you know, laws, and people (including
| the President and cabinet folks) should kind of follow those
| laws. So has the law been amended to not require the minting of
| the penny anymore?
|
| * https://abcnews.go.com/US/trumps-order-scrap-penny-make-cent...
|
| * https://www.npr.org/2025/02/10/nx-s1-5292082/trump-penny-min...
|
| Is there some 'new interpretation' that has been 'found' that
| allows Sec. Treasury to not mint pennies? Or is this change one
| made by fiat / executive order?
|
| * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penny_debate_in_the_United_Sta...
|
| There's only semi-consideration been given to this; the retailers
| want official rules passed on how round should be done
|
| * https://www.rila.org/focus-areas/finance/main-street-busines...
|
| For example, one subtly:
|
| > _Ensure rounding for cash customers does not violate terms of
| the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). The SNAP
| program sensibly requires that SNAP customers cannot be treated
| differently than other customers.2 These provisions prohibit
| treating SNAP customers less favorably or more favorably than
| other customers. That means that rounding the price of food for a
| cash customer in either direction risks creating a violation of
| SNAP regulations for stores that participate in the SNAP
| program._
| mattnewton wrote:
| You already know the answer.
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| The president is now immune to obeying the law and can pardon
| all of his stooges.
| SauntSolaire wrote:
| These are the types of comments people start making when
| they've been mindkilled by politics.
| dgrin91 wrote:
| My understanding from something I read months ago - its a new
| interpretation. Specifically the law instructs the gov to make
| as many pennies as is necessary, but does not define what that
| is or how to calculate it. If the government deems necessary =
| 0, then you dont need to make any more.
|
| Since the law is still on the books its still legal tender, and
| production may restart at any moment.
| rando001111 wrote:
| to my knowledge the legislation only says that the executive
| branch needs to make the "necessary" amount of pennies. the
| argument is that because they're losing money literally
| printing money that the "necessary" amount is zero and that
| therefore doing this follows the law because zero is an amount.
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| I don't understand why it costing more than face value to
| mint is such a bad thing
| rando001111 wrote:
| This is one of the stupidest comments I have seen on the
| internet bar none. Wasting money is bad. I should not have
| to explain further.
| jrmg wrote:
| A penny is reused over and over again, every time it
| changes hands. It's not _necessarily_ bad that it costs a
| few cents to make one if it has utility.
|
| It costs more to make a ceramic mug than it does to fill
| it with coffee. That doesn't make a ceramic mug
| uneconomical, because it's used lots of times and the
| cost amortizes.
|
| ...Having said that, I don't think there's actually much
| value to having an individual token of exchange that
| signifies as little value as a penny does - it would be a
| good idea to stop making them even if they cost far less
| to make than they do.
| rando001111 wrote:
| does it change hands? when was the last time you actually
| used a penny to buy something? do you ever deposit your
| pennies into your bank account?
|
| most people throw them in a change jar and forget about
| them.
| jrmg wrote:
| I agree with you on that - that's what my last paragraph
| was trying to convey. I don't think pennies are
| necessary, and we are (were) wasting money making them.
| Nickels and dimes are probably in the same boat.
|
| But I was replying to your reply to a comment which said
| "I don't understand why it costing more than face value
| to mint is such a bad thing" which you antagonistically
| and derisively called "one of the stupidest comments I
| have seen on the internet bar none". It wasn't a stupid
| comment.
| daedrdev wrote:
| I would prefer if we do not spend billions of dollars each
| year on pennies when we could do something actually
| productive with that money.
|
| People do not reuse pennies. They are lost and forgotten
| about much of the time.
| jdpage wrote:
| A better measure, assuming that pennies facilitate value
| exchange[1], would be whether the cost to mint a penny
| exceeded the marginal increase in GDP[2] due to having that
| additional penny available.
|
| [1]: This assumption may not be true; if they're worth so
| little that people lose track of them, they could actually
| make it harder to exchange value.
|
| [2]: Making the GDP higher is also a very debatable
| measure, but I think this generalizes to other dollar-
| denominated measures of prosperity.
| viburnum wrote:
| That was before Trump v. United States (2024)
| Amorymeltzer wrote:
| Some interesting complications with rounding I had not heard
| about before were mentioned here, worth noting I think,
| especially given the prominence of SNAP in the news lately:
|
| >Four states - Delaware, Connecticut, Michigan and Oregon - as
| well as numerous cities, including New York, Philadelphia, Miami
| and Washington, DC, require merchants to provide exact change,
| according to the National Association of Convenience Stores
| (NACS).
|
| >In addition, the law covering the federal food assistance
| program known as SNAP requires that recipients not be charged
| more than other customers. Since SNAP recipients use a debit card
| that's charged the precise amount, if merchants round down prices
| for cash purchases, they could be opening themselves to legal
| problems and fines, said Jeff Lenard, spokesperson for NACS.
|
| >"Rounding down on all transactions presents several challenges
| beyond the loss of an average of 2 cents per transaction," Lenard
| said. "We desperately need legislation that allows rounding so
| retailers can make change for these customers."
| phantom784 wrote:
| For the SNAP law, could they just round down SNAP purchases in
| the same way to be compliant?
| mattnewton wrote:
| They probably will, but that means a POS software update on a
| tight deadline.
| wongarsu wrote:
| It's not like pennies just cease existing. You just can't
| buy them from the mint anymore.
|
| I bet if you give customers an easy and free way to deposit
| change or to turn it into larger denominations you easily
| get enough pennies to delay ther update a couple years
| mattnewton wrote:
| There are a lot of solutions, as everyone has mentioned.
| The problem is not hard, it's "what color to paint the
| bikeshed" territory. But we're still having to solve a
| problem on a tight deadline based on a tweeted
| proclamation with no federal legislature specifying
| exactly what solutions are allowed and what solutions
| conflict with existing law.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| Or, in reality, most commodity POS systems are actually
| able to support various countries and tax regimes, and is
| plenty ready to be configured a variety of ways and work
| perfectly fine in changing systems.
|
| For example, the exact same physical hardware in American
| supermarkets for self checkout is also used in countries
| like Australia that have _more_ coins than the US, and the
| machines literally do not have enough coin slots for every
| coin, so they just don 't dispense certain coins in that
| place.
|
| The POS market is rather robust and has been around the
| block for quite a while and has no problem managing quite
| literally arbitrary fees. Businesses in our city added a
| "cost of living" fee to all bills (just raise prices FFS,
| so dumb) and they didn't have to go out and buy new POS
| systems, because POS systems are very configurable.
|
| Like, other industries that have been selling software
| products for decades are actually kind of good at their
| jobs and it's really just software as a service that
| reliably makes garbage. POS software can handle all sorts
| of things you probably don't even realize.
|
| Go lookup all the functionality that Square advertises
| their POS systems have, and understand that they are new
| entrants to the market and do not have all the features
| that legacy vendors have built up over decades. The
| functionality has been so thoroughly figured out for so
| long and so straightforward, that a POS you bought in the
| 90s is likely still fit for service today.
|
| Meanwhile, retailers are actually open to improving and
| modernizing their POS infrastructure regularly. They added
| those coupon printers to existing stacks and didn't have to
| do anything special because POS systems are absolute
| legends of interoperability. They use extremely
| standardized ports, including a special supplementary power
| version of USB, and are very tolerant to mix and match
| hardware. POS vendors even sell their hardware without
| forcing you to buy their software. The system is very open.
| anticorporate wrote:
| The SNAP equal treatment rule requirement works in both
| directions: Prices cannot be higher _or_ lower for SNAP
| recipients. As a retailer, there is an option to request a
| waiver, though.
| phantom784 wrote:
| How does this work with coupons, discount for loyalty card
| holders, etc.?
|
| Presumably that's fine because a SNAP recipient has access
| to those same discounts. So wouldn't this be the same - the
| "cash rounding" discount is available to SNAP and people
| paying cash?
| rtkwe wrote:
| Anyone can have a coupon the law is about not special
| fees or discounts to SNAP recipients, and since EBT/SNAP
| cards are essentially debit cards them always being
| charged exact change could be litigated as differential
| pricing in theory, which in a country as big and sue
| happy as the US means someone will try it eventually.
| jkaplowitz wrote:
| So, that sounds like a yes, they could round up or down
| SNAP purchases just like cash purchases.
| Uvix wrote:
| No, because they'd still be paying less/more than people
| paying with credit cards, debit cards, or checks.
| wat10000 wrote:
| Round them all. Why is this so difficult?
| Uvix wrote:
| Retailers will reject ever rounding down because they
| lose money, and customers will reject ever rounding up
| because they lose money.
| zamadatix wrote:
| Completely different discussion. Regardless, you skipped
| explaining why these options worked for Canadian Penny
| (just 12 years ago) at a time when their penny had more
| buying power than the current US penny, yet the exact
| same thing cannot ever possibly work for the US penny.
|
| Things don't just happen to cost *.99 today either, the
| market just has wiggle room for bullshit about values.
| With inflation, the coinage that corresponds to also
| inflates over time. The penny is long past its time.
|
| Furthermore:
|
| > Rounding to the closest nickel will cost consumers
| about $6 million a year, according to a July study by the
| Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond. That is fairly modest,
| coming to about five cents each across 133 million
| American households.
|
| The US lost ~$85 million minting pennies in 2024 because
| they cost more to make than they are worth. That's over a
| 10x savings, not a loss. 5 cents is also less than
| 0.00006% of median household income in 2024.
|
| If people were actually that worried we'd have had laws
| about credit card transaction fees decades ago.
| SkyPuncher wrote:
| IMO, this is a strawman that is either going to be ignored
| or fixed easily.
|
| The law did not account for every possible situation.
| Removal of the penny from national currency is clear a
| situation where minor variations on otherwise normal
| transactions would not be in violation of the intent of the
| law.
|
| It'd be like TSA griping that your 100ml bottle of
| mouthwash was overfilled by .1ml because of slight
| variations in the filling process. Nobody cares.
| anticorporate wrote:
| I work in admin for a retailer. We got a nastigram from
| USDA last week reminding us that we were in no
| circumstances to help SNAP recipients in any way. The
| current administration very much does not care what the
| intent of the law is, and is actively looking for trivial
| violations as an excuse to punish SNAP recipients and
| SNAP retailers. It would not surprise me at all to see a
| retailer banned from the program for how they round
| pennies.
| SkyPuncher wrote:
| Again. Context matters.
|
| Last week, the government was in a shutdown and it was
| unclear if SNAP benefits were going to go out. That's not
| the same as rounding pennies.
| nofriend wrote:
| just make the price a multiple of five cents
| mattnewton wrote:
| State and local taxes make this infeasible
| saalweachter wrote:
| Retailers don't, like, _have_ to add sales tax on top of
| listed prices.
|
| They just have to pay it.
| strbean wrote:
| Now is our chance to switch to European style "you pay
| the price it says on the shelf"!
| Galacta7 wrote:
| That makes too much sense, which is why it won't happen.
| Though I'd be all for it.
| Octoth0rpe wrote:
| More specifically, if Americans stopped have a daily
| reminder of how much is paid in taxes (which IMO isn't
| egregious by any stretch), one party would have a tougher
| time whipping anti-tax sentiment.
| EasyMark wrote:
| I don't think this will happen in our lifetimes. It's
| like not moving the day hour ahead/behind twice a year. A
| wholly stupid idea that will likely never be fixed on the
| federal level because of inertia.
| syntheticnature wrote:
| No, it's illegal in many, looks like most states:
|
| https://www.avalara.com/blog/en/north-
| america/2019/07/retail...
| cestith wrote:
| IIRC, in New York it's illegal to absorb sales tax on
| individual items because by law it's a consumer tax
| collected by the business and explicitly not a tax on the
| business itself, but - and it's a pretty big exception -
| anything sold as a bulk good can include the tax in the
| price. That includes things like liquid fuels, grains or
| candy by the scoop in the supermarket, loose
| sand/gravel/salt/whatever for outdoor use, and things
| like that. It's been a long while since I had to set up
| an ecommerce site for New York though.
| 1718627440 wrote:
| Who actually pays the tax depends on the Elasticity of
| the consumer and the business. Who the law says it should
| be collected from, is really irrelevant.
| cestith wrote:
| Go run a local retail business in conflict with state law
| and regulations. Then tell me how irrelevant those laws
| are.
| 1718627440 wrote:
| The law only says by whom and how the tax is collect, it
| doesn't specify the tax burden, because it can't, that's
| only observable and happens due to supply and demand.
| cestith wrote:
| The guidance published by the state says explicitly that
| a business collects the tax from the consumer as an agent
| of the state, and that the taxes collected belong to the
| state rather than to the business. If it was a tax on the
| business, then it could be paid later out of the
| business's general funds.
|
| Whether you believe the above or not - and I'm not going
| to discuss that part further, because this is all easy to
| find online - the fact remains that most sales taxes must
| be charged separately from the product price at checkout.
| There are, as I said, exceptions for bulk goods.
| 1718627440 wrote:
| So what? You can collect taxes how you like, the tax
| burden still depends on the Elasticity.
| bogeholm wrote:
| > State and local taxes make this infeasible
|
| I don't see why that would be the case? In my country, most
| prices with VAT (which is what you're charged) are nice,
| round numbers, but not the price without VAT.
|
| I suppose the stores set a target price, and then adjust it
| a bit to make the price + VAT a "nice" number.
|
| Is there a reason that couldn't be done to make all prices
| + VAT multiples of 5c?
| jandrewrogers wrote:
| Several reasons, it really is a mess.
|
| The local tax is set by multiple independent tax
| authorities that change their taxes independently, the
| tax you see is the aggregate of those independent
| authorities computed separately, which do not coordinate
| with each other.
|
| Some of these taxes are conditional at point-of-sale,
| late-binding the taxes, such that different customers are
| subject to different rates across these tax authorities
| such that it is unlikely to round to exactly 5c.
|
| It is widely illegal to not display the true price and
| taxes paid separately. Trying to retcon a price and taxes
| for rounding purposes that is also strictly consistent
| across customers so as to not violate the law is not
| trivial.
|
| And on top of all of this, the Federal government does
| not have the authority to regulate the way States and
| various locales structure their sales taxes. It is a
| herding cats problem.
| metabagel wrote:
| > It is widely illegal to not display the true price and
| taxes paid separately. Trying to retcon a price and taxes
| for rounding purposes that is also strictly consistent
| across customers so as to not violate the law is not
| trivial.
|
| Having lived in Europe, this should be changed. It makes
| it infeasible to keep track of your total bill as you
| shop. The amount without tax should be printed on the
| receipt, if you care to reference it.
| jandrewrogers wrote:
| The issue is that the legal change would have to be made
| independently across thousands of decentralized tax
| authorities. Herding that many cats is infeasible so it
| can't be part of a plausible solution. In some
| jurisdictions, the legal process required to make the
| changes have effectively insurmountable voting
| thresholds.
|
| It may not be convenient but any realistic solution has
| to recognize the hard facts that shape the nature of
| problem.
| weberer wrote:
| Having lived in Europe and New Hampshire, I much prefer
| New Hampshire's solution to the problem. Just abolish
| sales tax! Its annoying for everyone involved. The state
| can get enough money from income tax. There's no need to
| double-dip.
| pests wrote:
| I've seen stores advertise "we pay your sales tax" like
| furniture outlets. Wouldn't this allow for legal priced
| items?
| rtkwe wrote:
| Lots of localities total taxes aren't whole percentages
| so it potentially gets tricky making prices work in those
| systems such that you can make whole 5 cent tax included
| prices with whole cent base prices. Do most POS systems
| support arbitrary precision item prices?
| EasyMark wrote:
| I think that's what has to happen here. Things will be
| priced in such a way that the final price is a multiple
| of 5. That's a pretty easy thing for an inventory pricing
| system can figure out. We already do it for fractions of
| a penny, not sure why it would be a big deal for a
| fraction of a nickel
| ssl-3 wrote:
| > Is there a reason that couldn't be done to make all
| prices + VAT multiples of 5c?
|
| Yes, there are reasons that can't be done.
|
| We don't have VAT in the States; we instead [usually]
| have sales tax.
|
| And therein: We have something like twelve thousand
| different sales tax districts, all set at different
| percentages by combinations of states, counties and
| municipalities.
|
| Some cities have multiple sales tax rates even within
| their bounds. My own tiny little city is at the
| intersection of 3 different counties, and has 3 different
| sales tax rates: A store on one side of the road has a
| different tax rate than a store on the other side, and
| one down the block a ways has yet a third rate.
|
| This reality doesn't have to be ideal. It doesn't have to
| make sense. This is what we have whether it is awesome or
| terrible or some combination of both.
|
| It would take a monumental amount of effort to unwind all
| of that and turn it into something nationally-unified
| like VAT. This process would take a very long time
| (perhaps decades), in part because some states don't have
| sales tax at all and introducing a uniform VAT would
| represent a very different way for them to go about the
| ways in which they conduct both commerce and taxation.
|
| ---
|
| Of course, there's other ways to inject something sane
| and predictable in the decommissioning of the penny, and
| there's a number of of them mentioned elsewhere in other
| comments. But using any of them would have required
| utilizing an ounce of planning or forethought, and we
| didn't do "planning" or "forethought" here.
|
| The decision to stop producing came from On High, and was
| presented in the form of a social media post[1] from the
| President that declared that it simply would be this way.
| There was no public planning or discourse involved.
|
| We can talk about whether that's an awesome or terrible
| way to enact policies, but it doesn't really matter
| because that business has already been concluded -- with
| all of the swiftness and grace of eating a ham sandwich.
|
| [1]: https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/posts/11397
| 72249337...
| hollasch wrote:
| It's just American custom to exclude some taxes from the
| posted price. Many countries include all taxes in the
| price, something I've always wished we would do in America.
| After that, I'd love to see the elimination of the custom
| of always ending fuel cost per gallon in 9/10 of a cent.
| smallerize wrote:
| Rounding sales tax on each item will often result in a
| different price than rounding once for the total. The
| store will collect the wrong amount of tax that way.
| estimator7292 wrote:
| Come on, this is not complicated. It's elementary
| algebra. You sum the rounded prices, then add a credit or
| surcharge of 2 cents to make the tax come out to a round
| number.
|
| The tax is on the actual, real amount in your transaction
| subtotal. You are charged sales tax on the actual, real
| money you pay for the _entire transaction_. Then you
| multiply by 1.06 or whatever the tax rate is. That 's how
| sales tax works.
|
| If one rearranges the equations as we all learned in 5th
| grade, one can compute the amount that the subtotal must
| be to get a round number after tax. Then you charge or
| credit the customer the difference.
|
| Alternatively, the retailer can simply pay the 4 cent
| difference in sales tax.
|
| That's it. You either do algebra or just pay the
| difference. It is not complicated.
| mattnewton wrote:
| You have to do this algebra per state and locale, and
| your reward is higher advertised prices than the shop
| next door. I think you both underestimate the problem and
| overestimate everyone involved in retail, especially the
| consumer.
|
| I'm not saying it's hard, I'm saying there is enough
| friction where it's just not going to happen without
| legislation mandating it.
| metabagel wrote:
| > it's just not going to happen without legislation
| mandating it.
|
| Obviously, and I don't think anyone said otherwise.
| mattnewton wrote:
| Well, _this_ is happening without legislation mandating
| it (that's kinda the problem, our federal legislature
| doesn't legislate much and is being largely ignored)
| rtkwe wrote:
| They're saying include the sales tax in the price and set
| the item's price such that the sum of price + all taxes
| is an even increment of 5 cents. Gets a little tricky
| with fractional sales taxes but that's only a problem
| where POS systems strictly enforce 2 digit cents (not
| sure if that's the case).
| extraduder_ire wrote:
| I'm in Ireland where EU law mandates posted prices
| include all taxes and charges, and fuel prices are still
| advertised with a .9 or .8 at the end.
|
| They're selling a liquid, so even if it were all priced
| in whole cents you'd have to deal with fractional cents.
| nilamo wrote:
| Oh no, a made up problem that's easily solved by changing
| the price slightly in any direction, whatever will we do.
| estimator7292 wrote:
| With some 5th grade algebra, one can adjust the total of a
| transaction to result in a round number after taxes.
|
| Besides that, the law (at least where I live) is that the
| tax must be paid, but it does not specify _by whom_. It 's
| completely feasible for a retailer to pay the 2 cent
| difference in the tax and charge the customer a round
| number.
|
| Is this really the state of American education where a
| percentage calculation makes a very simple situation
| literally impossible? You can think of no other way to
| overcome the complicated calculations of _checks notes_ x
| times 1.06?
| axiolite wrote:
| Even with just a 6% tax, you end up with prices that need
| 4 digits of precision after the decimal (e.g.: $11.6494).
| That issue extends over a wide range of pre-tax/input
| prices, so one would have to DRASTICALLY change the
| prices so that the price including 6% tax rounds to even
| a penny, let alone a nickel.
|
| While you could calculate a price that (after tax) would
| round a single item to the nearest nickel, it's
| completely IMPOSSIBLE to do so with unknown numbers of
| multiple items.
|
| In addition, tax rates in the real world aren't just
| single-digit percentages. They have precision of 1/1000th
| of a percent, making such a calculation much more
| challenging.
|
| Arizona: 10.725% Hawaii: 4.712% Minnesota: 7.875% etc.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sales_taxes_in_the_United_S
| tat...
|
| And sales tax rates can be different from ONE CITY BLOCK
| TO THE NEXT, so a company with more than one location
| would find it IMPOSSIBLE to advertise their prices at
| all.
| tgsovlerkhgsel wrote:
| Just show the price including tax. (half-sarcastic, because
| obviously that would be an unpopular change for sellers
| because it makes the visible number go up, but it would
| solve two problmes...)
|
| They could still set the post-tax price to something that
| results in round numbers, at downside of the pre-tax price
| having more decimals.
| axiolite wrote:
| > Just show the price including tax.
|
| With a tax rate as precise as 1000ths of a percent in
| many jurisdictions*, you'd need extreme precision on the
| price tag (e.g. $11.798625), OR you need to substantially
| overcharge for tax (rounding up the tax to the penny or
| nickel on each individual item, instead of on the total
| of ALL items).
|
| And sales tax rates can even be different from ONE CITY
| BLOCK TO THE NEXT.
|
| * Arizona: 10.725% Hawaii: 4.712% Minnesota: 7.875% etc.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sales_taxes_in_the_United_S
| tat...
| 1718627440 wrote:
| No, you still round the number, that goes on the price
| tag and adjust the other.
| EasyMark wrote:
| Since that is a state thing, it can never happen and is
| likely outside the power of Congress to enforce,
| especially with our current activist federal supreme
| court.
| drdec wrote:
| It's the same way with the penny.
|
| Tax on a 0.99 item isn't coming out to an exact penny
| multiple.
|
| So stores are already dealing with this situation
| mattnewton wrote:
| Yes, stores are dealing with this alongside a whole legal
| framework today. They would not have the benefit of that
| for any changes without pennies, and in a few cases may
| open themselves to legal liability by underpaying state
| sales tax, overcharging snap recipients, etc etc. We
| don't know because this was just a tweet decree by the
| executive while the legislature has been paralyzed.
| drdec wrote:
| You have missed the point.
|
| The situation where pennies exist already has all the
| problems concerning rounding after sales tax. Things are
| rounded to whole pennies. The same solutions can be
| applied to round things to whole nickels.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| So, lobby for changes to the structure of those taxes so
| that's not a problem. Tthe simple solution is changing them
| from surcharges adding a percent _onto_ posted prices to
| making them a percentage taken out of the posted price; so
| that coin availability is only an issue in the improbable
| event that you are paying your sales tax bill in cash.
|
| Of course, retailers don't want tax-inclusive posted
| prices, but... ::shrug::
| janalsncm wrote:
| You can price as a multiple of nickels and round the tax
| separately. It's the same thing as with sub-penny rounding.
| EasyMark wrote:
| Well I'm guessing that's about to change isn't it? unless
| you always pay by card, and I don't think that is the
| intent of this law. I assume they will always just round up
| and make citizens suck it up, because laws general favor
| the business and corporate classes, at least the recent
| ones.
| AnotherGoodName wrote:
| They can round down the card transactions too if it's really a
| problem to charge differing amounts.
|
| For those that seriously think this would be a major problem
| there was a comedy skit circulating in Australia when this
| happened. A guy would push his car to the petrol pump, fill
| with 2c of petrol, rounded down to 0. The guy at the counter
| just laughed at it. You could in theory do this 1000 more times
| (would take hours) for $20 of free petrol. At least until the
| worker got sick of it and enforced the whole right to refuse
| service.
| mortar wrote:
| I had this same idea and seem to recall even trying it, but
| it was mostly thwarted when they added minimum liquid
| delivery amounts.
| SkyPuncher wrote:
| > enforced the whole right to refuse service.
|
| This is what everyone forgets. If you can't provide exact
| change, then you can refuse service.
| whycome wrote:
| It's a self-service gas station. Refuse...yourself? You
| pumped the gas before paying.
| thescriptkiddie wrote:
| in the us, gas stations require you to pay before filling
| dmix wrote:
| If you pay with cash you're going to be going to the
| cashier first anyway.
| oktoberpaard wrote:
| In the Netherlands cash payments get rounded to the nearest 5
| cents, in both directions. Card payments are not rounded. If
| I'm not mistaken, you can still demand exact change according
| to the law and you're allowed to pay the exact amount (cents
| are still legal tender). Most merchants wouldn't be able to
| give you exact change, so it depends on the situation what
| would happen. I've never heard of such a situation happening,
| though.
| pests wrote:
| If someone demands exact change is it allowed to give them
| more? What if you don't have the exact change?
| BenjiWiebe wrote:
| You could always refuse service, I guess.
| oktoberpaard wrote:
| Apparently I was wrong about that part. Only the part about
| cents still being legal tender was correct. So you can pay
| the exact amount, but not demand the exact change.
| coded_monkey wrote:
| You are mistaken. Merchants are allowed to round to the
| nearest 5 cents and you can't do anything about it (except
| pay by card). Of course, budget stores like Lidl and Aldi
| still use them but any other corporation is not going to
| care.
|
| http://www.nederlandsemunten.nl/Artikelen_over_munten/De_cen.
| ..
| oktoberpaard wrote:
| Thanks for the correction. So only the part about legal
| tender was correct, which is probably what I was confused
| with. The relevant part:
|
| > The one and two cent coins will remain legal tender, and
| retailers can choose whether or not to participate. The
| Netherlands cannot declare the smallest coins worthless on
| its own in Europe; this must be arranged in Brussels.
|
| The government page about this: https://www.rijksoverheid.n
| l/onderwerpen/betalingsverkeer/vr...
|
| > Of course, budget stores like Lidl and Aldi still use
| them but any other corporation is not going to care.
|
| What do you mean with this? Surely the Lidl and Aldi don't
| give exact change by default in the Netherlands in 2025?
| a_c_s wrote:
| Right, but getting fined in this situation means the government
| is incompetent. They should just tell retailers the "right"
| thing to do and not fine any retailers that follow the
| guidelines.
|
| The idea that this is complicated legally is an example of why
| so many Americans are so frustrated with their government.
| Common sense should rule the day, not mindless legalism.
| rtkwe wrote:
| The issue with "common sense" is there's no way to run
| anything based on it because you'll get 100 different ideas
| of what that means in any situation. 90% of customers would
| be fine with the rounding to the nearest 5 cent plan but
| there's a streak of stubborn people who'd refuse to accept it
| and waste some legal time trying to get proven 'right' so the
| stores want legal clarity so they don't have to deal with
| that.
| dec0dedab0de wrote:
| I think they should just change the prices to make it work out
| after tax. It's not that hard.
| janalsncm wrote:
| It's the same issue for sub-penny rounding which happens
| without issue. It's the same principle.
| CheeseFromLidl wrote:
| Did anyone ever make a simulator for pennies hitting the floor
| like in the top video?
| ck2 wrote:
| Well no, apparently ANY President now has almost ANY power
|
| so the next President could order a new penny made with their
| face on it
|
| sure they could, look at the east-wing and tell me what limits of
| power a President has
| mattnewton wrote:
| Any Republican president maybe. The Supreme Court and a Fox
| media circuit would never let the opposition ignore congress
| like this.
| Night_Thastus wrote:
| I'd say screw it, get rid of nickles and dimes as well. Quarters
| can stay, for now.
|
| It's a complete waste of money and time continuing to mint such
| low-value currency. It can't be used for just about anything.
|
| Unfortunately, I do see the problem with part of this. For a
| handful of items where it does matter, it will force people to
| use cards more if they want to avoid rounding. And the card
| providers already have a choke-hold on retailers, and the whole
| thing is basically a scheme that funnels money from the poor to
| the wealthy via interest and fees on the consumer, interchange
| fees, and rewards programs.
| datadrivenangel wrote:
| But add a $3.50 coin so that we can strongly incentivize coffee
| to stay below a certain price.
| rustystump wrote:
| Also for the memes...
| datadrivenangel wrote:
| It would be exceedingly funny is 75% of the value.
|
| Maybe make it be a $3.33 coin?
| binarymax wrote:
| $0.67 coin is on the way
| nostrademons wrote:
| $0.666. Half the population would think it's the mark of
| the beast, the other half rounds up to 6-7.
| redfern314 wrote:
| and the third half of the population thinks it's
| egregious that a repeating fraction has been truncated!
| balamatom wrote:
| It's worth about $2.70
| quijoteuniv wrote:
| Just take a zero out of everything and change the name from
| dollar to something else!
| darth_avocado wrote:
| * _dllar*_
| edm0nd wrote:
| dolla
| forinti wrote:
| US Peso
| Galacta7 wrote:
| Night City eurodollars?
| cpeterso wrote:
| Decadollars
|
| 100 dollars = 10 decadollars
| wffurr wrote:
| USA Fun Ticket
| RobotToaster wrote:
| There used to be a $10 coin called an eagle, may as well be
| violently American and call it eagles.
| dennis_jeeves2 wrote:
| Old trick. The last I checked about 10+ countries have done
| it.
| binarymax wrote:
| My local just went from $3.50 to $4 this week :(
| sugarpimpdorsey wrote:
| Gourmet high-end Keurig pods are like $0.50 each. Make your
| own coffee.
| drivebyhooting wrote:
| I wonder if the gourmet high end plastic ends up in the
| brew.
| wffurr wrote:
| It pairs wonderfully with all the plastic in your water.
| sugarpimpdorsey wrote:
| As opposed to the plastic pipes your water runs through,
| the plastic water filter, plastic coffee maker, and
| plastic travel mug you pour it into?
| drivebyhooting wrote:
| I usually don't run high pressure boiling water through
| my plastic pipes.
| 0_____0 wrote:
| If you go through coffee regularly, it's actually quite a
| nice thing to invest in. There are a really amazing
| number of craft roasters throughout the country, and
| simply having a quality grinder is enough. And you don't
| need a crazy espresso setup to enjoy it. My setup
| consists of a motorized flat burr grinder, a 20$ kettle
| from target, and a pour over funnel. The quality is so
| much higher than anything you can get from a pod that's
| been sitting around with pre ground coffee, and it only
| takes a couple minutes while you're waiting for Claude to
| rewrite your codebase in Rust or whatever it is "Hackers"
| do these days
| skylurk wrote:
| There's some really good hand grinders these days too,
| minimal effort and only takes a minute.
| 0_____0 wrote:
| It can wear on you a bit if you make lots of coffee but I
| went years with a Hario skerton hand grinder until my
| partner got sick of it and got us a reasonably priced
| election burr
|
| Truly you could be making great coffee at home with <$75
| of equipment. Gram scale, eBay secondhand conical hand
| grinder, department store kettle, pourover funnel,
| filters.
| sugarpimpdorsey wrote:
| I want a cup of coffee not a science project.
| 0_____0 wrote:
| If a gram scale and a grinder that has one knob and one
| button is too much to deal with then I guess you do need
| K-cups after all.
|
| 300g of water over 17g of freshly ground beans will
| pretty much always beat the K-cup on quality, is cheaper
| and produces less waste. You don't even need fancy beans,
| my go-to is the store brand bean from the supermarket.
| jimbokun wrote:
| If you want to save money get a Moka pot instead of that
| Keurig garbage.
|
| Even cheaper, tastes better, and takes only slightly
| longer to make.
| mikkupikku wrote:
| You can solve this problem even better by drinking
| instant coffee. Bonus points for it making yuppies
| cringe.
| loloquwowndueo wrote:
| lol gourmet (coffee) and keurig pods don't go together in
| the same sentence.
| 0xffff2 wrote:
| Not a 1-1 comparison. For my daily double shot espresso,
| actual gourmet locally roasted coffee costs me just over
| $2. My coffee equipment cost enough that factoring in
| some kind of depreciation for it seems necessary, which
| would put my costs somewhere in the ballpark of $3 all in
| with a 5 year full depreciation. Paying someone else $4
| for a them to make a coffee doesn't actually sounds that
| crazy if it's good coffee.
| jimbokun wrote:
| One of the things I admire most about Italy is how they have
| held the line on the price of an espresso.
|
| It's still just slightly over EUR1 if you drink it standing
| at the bar.
|
| They really have their priorities straight when it comes to
| food and drink prices.
| sgerenser wrote:
| So they charge more for an espresso if you want to drink it
| seated? Or take it away?
| jimbokun wrote:
| It costs more to drink it seated.
|
| I don't think I ever took away a coffee during any of my
| vacations in Italy, and very rarely so anyone else doing
| so, either. Either drinking it standing at the bar or
| seated at a table.
| jabbany wrote:
| I know this is supposed to be a joke but... businesses have
| pushed for this the other way around in the past, asking for
| a new coin to raise prices.
|
| > The Coca-Cola Company sought ways to increase the five cent
| price, even approaching the U.S. Treasury Department in 1953
| to ask that they mint a 7.5 cent coin.
| [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fixed_price_of_Coca-
| Cola_from_...]
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| The wikipedia article says that this was specifically the
| price of a 6.5oz Coke.
|
| The obvious way to raise the price by 50% is to cut the
| amount by a third, selling 4.33oz Cokes.
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/BottleDigging/comments/1kng6aq/coc
| a... suggests that Coca-Cola was comfortable producing
| bottles in several different sizes.
|
| Now, a 4 1/3 oz Coke is obviously too small to be worth
| bothering with. But that's also true of a 6 1/2 oz Coke.
| These sizes seem more like something you dispense with an
| eyedropper than something you drink. A normal can is 12 oz!
| Who'd want to buy a six-ounce beverage?
|
| You can address both problems at once by doubling the price
| and increasing the volume all the way up to 8.67 oz.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| When I was a kid, most sodas had a short can size of 8oz
| available, good for "lunches" and similar.
|
| Funny story, Coca Cola just announced thin 7.5oz cans
| last month, to be available in January.
|
| Shrinkflation is often done by phasing out an old size,
| often by jacking up the price first to aid the sales of
| the "family size" version on its way out, and then
| introducing a "New" size that's just a bit smaller.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| When I was a kid, there already weren't 8oz cans.
|
| But even if there had been, an 8oz can is 23% bigger than
| a 6.5oz bottle. 6.5oz is ludicrously small. How did that
| become a commercial size in the first place?
|
| As far as I can tell, a juice box today is 6.75oz, but
| you buy them in bulk and they're not actually large
| enough to be good for a small child's lunch.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| Well sugary beverages are a treat, not exactly something
| you should be encouraging a child to drink a lot of or
| drink often. That's why that dumb logan paul lunchables
| ripoff is awful for coming with that large drink.
|
| But not everybody agrees with that kind of statement so
| here's a better one: Small soft drink cans are really
| good for single serve cocktails.
|
| A single "cup" of coffee is also 6oz, so it's not exactly
| an abnormal drink size.
|
| As a glass bottle is strange though. But it tends to feel
| more "Premium" to people
|
| Soft drink companies cater to literally everyone. They
| eagerly want to sell to both my friend who drinks several
| liters a day and my grandma who treats half a can of coke
| as a nice treat and people like me who used to like soda
| but now mostly use it for mixing drinks and the
| occasional treat. That's why they sell multiple different
| formulas of "Coke without sugar" and why there's so much
| diversity in just the "Citrus flavored" sub category. I
| miss Vault and Sierra Mist.
| paulmooreparks wrote:
| I think it's a generational thing. I used to mow the lawn
| for an elderly distant cousin, in the hot Florida summer
| weather. She would invite me in afterward for a snack and
| a 6.5oz Coca-Cola. I would guzzle mine in a couple of
| seconds. She would pour half of hers into a glass, over
| ice, and put the bottle back into the refrigerator.
|
| Wine glasses have also gotten bigger over the years.
| JJMcJ wrote:
| The last time a coin was dropped was the half penny in the late
| 1850s, when I think it was worth about 25 cents today, so there
| is a precedent for what you are suggesting.
| EvanAnderson wrote:
| CCP Grey has a nice video and discusses the precedent:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y5UT04p5f7U
| jjk7 wrote:
| Only if the increased revenue from rounding doesn't go into
| retailers pockets but rather is redistributed somehow. i.e. to
| reduce sales tax
| jrochkind1 wrote:
| A noticeable number of places around me in an urban area in the
| USA already now have signs up saying they won't make any coin
| change at all! Pay with a card, or exact change, or they'll
| round up to the dollar keep the difference.
|
| Sometimes the sign says "due to the penny shortage" and has
| been up for a year or whatever, I dunno. But they aren't just
| not giving you pennies in your change, they are refusing any
| coins in your change. I am curious as to the motivation, I
| could guess but it's not obvious to me. They will still take
| coins as payment, just not give them as change.
| jjmarr wrote:
| You can either put payments into the register or the safe.
|
| If it goes into the safe, it's nearly impossible to steal
| because there's a time lock preventing the cashier from
| accessing it. But you can't make change.
|
| This means you have a optimization problem to have the
| minimum possible cash in the register to meet all change
| needs.
|
| Eliminating denominations makes the optimization problem
| easier, if nothing else.
| jrochkind1 wrote:
| I wouldn't think there is enough coinage in a register to
| be interesting as a theft target, but i don't know! I think
| they would still make bill change, but maybe I
| misunderstood, sure. Next time I see one I'll use cash to
| find out!
| darth_avocado wrote:
| If the Pennies go away, you can no longer get things for
| pennies on the dollar.
| droptablemain wrote:
| The famous little jingle "shave and a haircut, two bits"
|
| Most people today have no clue what a "bit" is.
|
| I imagine the future will hold something similar for the
| penny in all the idioms and cultural phrases we have. What
| the hell is a penny?
| barbazoo wrote:
| What is a bit, a penny?
| dec0dedab0de wrote:
| 1/8, so 2 bits is a quarter.
|
| it comes from old spanish coins that they would cut into
| eight pieces, or bits.
|
| I learned that after watching one of the pirates of the
| Caribbean movies and googling pieces of eight.
| retrocog wrote:
| THIS exactly and oops, I replied too quickly :)
| patrickthebold wrote:
| Half a quarter.
| retrocog wrote:
| Exactly. Two bits is a quarter because the US silver dollar
| was modeled on the Spanish Pillar Dollar, also called
| pieces of eight. Hence 2/8 (two bits) = 1/4.
| fstarship wrote:
| It's kind of like lots of imperial measurements where we
| use metric still have these in idioms.
| paulmooreparks wrote:
| "I would walk 500 kilometers" just doesn't sound as
| romantic.
| mtmail wrote:
| Soon one can no longer add 2 cents to a discussion.
| hyperdimension wrote:
| I guess my opinion rounds down to nothing now. I guess that
| fits my track record.
| nerdsniper wrote:
| The half-penny was discontinued in 1857. Adjusted for inflation
| it was worth 37 cents in todays money when it was discontinued.
| cft wrote:
| And hell, put Bank of Zimbabwe on the bills.
| Night_Thastus wrote:
| I don't like inflation either. The fact that it's 'normal' or
| 'required for growth' to me sounds like economic bollocks and
| a lot of pretending that it doesn't cause issues in the long
| run.
|
| But it's here to stay, nothing we can do about it.
| zahlman wrote:
| > The fact that it's 'normal' or 'required for growth' to
| me sounds like economic bollocks
|
| Please see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CnoDKqlcR4Y
| bbarnett wrote:
| I know you're referencing more than pennies, but to speak to
| pennies, I find the current rounding noise in the US to be
| weird. Likely, it's just more of the media, talking heads, and
| youtube personalities trying to turn a nothing into something,
| story.
|
| Back when we did it in Canada, I don't recall a single person I
| knew concerned about penny rounding. Everyone was sick of
| pennies. No one cared. Everyone was happy. And the math seems
| fair enough:
|
| https://www.budget.canada.ca/2012/themes/theme2-info-eng.htm...
|
| Basically, if something is $1.01 or $1.02, you round down. If
| it's $1.03 or $1.04, you round up. Rounding is to be applied
| after all taxes are paid, etc.
|
| Of course, there was also central guidance and, well, everyone
| just followed it. It's called "having a society".
|
| People blathering on about stores fixing the rounding are
| morons, there's no way to do so if you buy more than one item.
| No one gets ripped off with the above method. In the end, it
| just works out.
|
| And really, _who cares_?! It 's a penny.
| ryanmcbride wrote:
| Rounding is such a weird boogeyman to me because people are
| like "the companies are just going to use it to get more
| money from the customers" but, they're doing that anyway.
| They don't need this excuse to raise prices they'll just do
| it anyway.
|
| Same thing when people complain that raising minimum wage
| will increase prices, meanwhile prices have increased for 50
| years completely separate from wages. They don't need the
| excuse to raise prices they're just gonna do it anyway.
|
| If they want companies to not raise prices the only answer is
| regulation, but regulation is communism and therefore bad.
|
| I'm so god damn tired.
| 542458 wrote:
| > If they want companies to not raise prices the only
| answer is regulation
|
| Or competition. Consumer electronics are much cheaper than
| they were in the past, and that's not because of
| regulation. (To be clear, I'm not saying that regulation is
| wrong or anything, I'm saying that "use regulation to lower
| prices" and "remove barriers to competition to lower
| prices" are both tools in the toolbox.
| ryanmcbride wrote:
| Since I'm already doing armchair stuff I'll just say that
| there's an argument to be made that consumer electronics
| HAVE to be cheaper due to the extremely inflated cost of
| essentials right now, which is the result of lack of
| regulation. It's not the system regulating itself it's
| just more bottom line chasing.
| metabagel wrote:
| Right. Most gas stations list prices ending in 9/10 of a
| cent.
| emodendroket wrote:
| Let's face it, these arguments are simply post hoc
| rationalizations. If the proposal were instead to introduce
| a "milli" coin people would find some way that meant you
| were getting ripped off too.
| hn_acc1 wrote:
| This. A large chunk of the US population has been
| programmed that ALL CHANGE from when they were children
| in the 1950s is bad.
| gosub100 wrote:
| thats a strawman argument
| simpleguitar wrote:
| As the article points out, there are laws that say people who
| pay via SNAP debit cards "cannot be charged more than
| others".
|
| If cash payments are rounded down, but debit card payments
| aren't, they are in violation of state law.
|
| The article also points out that rollback of pennies in
| Canada and other places were planned, addressing these kinds
| of issues. USA is doing it with no such planning.
| internetter wrote:
| Can you not argue that the average is the same and thus the
| law isn't violated?
| immibis wrote:
| Does the law say the average price must be the same, or
| does it say the price must be the same?
|
| Reality: the supermarket does it the common sense way,
| and never gets sued, but if they do get sued, the outcome
| is "you must now refund 2 cents from every SNAP
| transaction you ever did"
| hcknwscommenter wrote:
| Very unlikely that would happen. The way similar issues
| have been dealt with in the past is that settlement is
| negotiated to something "reasonable" (at least arguably
| so) and administrable. Probably the settlement amount
| would just go to a fund that the state would then
| distribute according to its priorities.
| maxerickson wrote:
| It's probably the case that the real risk is being
| suspended from SNAP for failing to comply with their
| rules.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| No, because the law applies to individual transactions,
| not averages.
| wat10000 wrote:
| So, round down debit cards too? This seems like a really
| easy problem to solve.
| emodendroket wrote:
| SNAP is a major source of revenue for grocers so it seems
| like you wouldn't have to prod them very hard to do that.
| meandthewallaby wrote:
| They're all easily solvable problems. The issue, as GP
| mentioned, is that the pennies are just stopping without
| the thought through these problems and planning for the
| solutions. This was done via a social media post, not a
| well thought out transition like Canada had.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > The issue, as GP mentioned, is that the pennies are
| just stopping without the thought through these problems
| and planning for the solutions.
|
| That's not an "issue". That's the way things that
| actually happen, happen.
| wat10000 wrote:
| If they're easily solvable then why do you need planning?
|
| Changing the currency on a whim by executive fiat is
| stupid, but that's just principle. In practical terms, I
| really have a hard time caring about the problems this
| specific change creates.
| jakefromstatecs wrote:
| > If they're easily solvable then why do you need
| planning?
|
| Easily solvable problems still need coordination. Do you
| want to go to one store and have your change rounded up
| then go to another and have it rounded down?
| wat10000 wrote:
| Sure, who cares? This could already be happening today
| with rounding fractional pennies. I have no clue if
| stores round up, or down, or split at .5, or what. But
| obviously they're doing _something_ , since there aren't
| physical fractional pennies and my card statements never
| show more than two decimal digits, so it's not a new
| problem. This would make the problem five times worse,
| but five times insignificant is still not something I'm
| going to worry about.
| dyslexit wrote:
| The article also points out that some states and a lot
| cities require retailers to provide exact change. Congress
| would need to pass legislation to allow rounding
| nationally. I'm guessing in the meantime they'll continue
| holding pennies from previous years?
| unethical_ban wrote:
| If the national government literally stops creating a
| certain precision of money, i expect the "exact change"
| requirement should be invalid.
| thatguy0900 wrote:
| You volunteering your business to be the the test legal
| case for that? Or are you stocking pennies?
| bdangubic wrote:
| "change will be provided via Venmo" sign at the entrance
| :)
| anticensor wrote:
| Payers are allowed to complete transaction using a single
| method, you can't violate that right.
| patrickthebold wrote:
| Is gas sold as a whole penny amounts in those locations?
| Where I am it's always something and 9/10ths of a cent.
| ryandrake wrote:
| Allowing gas stations to denominate their prices by the
| 10th of a cent has always struck me as a just an
| underhanded and extreme way to practice the "9.99" retail
| psychological trick. Why not allow retailers to price
| things 9.99999? Ridiculous.
| cwmma wrote:
| It's because technically the dollar is divided into
| Dimes, Cents, and Mil. (this is why dimes say 'One Dime'
| on them instead of 'Ten Cents'.
|
| So while the mil isn't really used anywhere else that
| regular people see any more due to inflation, it is a
| valid division of the dollar and that's why they are able
| to get away with it.
| LadyCailin wrote:
| So do whatever they do with mils but for the penny too.
| They don't nor have they ever minted a mil coin, so the
| procedure for this is already well established if this is
| correct.
| dimensional_dan wrote:
| Has a Mil ever been minted?
| munk-a wrote:
| It has not - and it's been more than 150 years since the
| last sub-cent denomination (the half penny) was minted.
| Fritatta wrote:
| Not by the US mint but they exist:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sales_tax_token
| georgefrowny wrote:
| There is no such decipence division in the UK, but fuel
| is still sold with a vestigial .9 pence on the end. In
| fact, since the denomination is per litre, not gallon,
| the .9 is about 4 times more significant.
|
| When the final calculation of XX.YYY litres * AAA.9
| pence/litre is done, it's then rounded off to 1 pence.
|
| Currency conversions are also frequently done with
| readers that aren't a round multiple of pence, even in
| official government tables: https://www.trade-
| tariff.service.gov.uk/exchange_rates/view/...
| Aloisius wrote:
| _> (this is why dimes say 'One Dime' on them instead of
| 'Ten Cents'._
|
| No, it's purely stylistic. We tend to spell out
| denominations on coinage and "dime" is just the American
| spelling of disme, meaning a tenth.
|
| The capped bust dime from 1809-1839 had "10 C." rather
| than "One Dime". Similarly, the capped bust quarter said
| "25 C." instead of the modern "Quarter Dollar", the half
| dollar said "50 C." rather than the later "Half Dollar"
| and the half dime said "5 C." rather than the later "Half
| Dime."
|
| Most of the 18th century and early 19th century coinage,
| besides half pennies and pennies didn't have their
| denomination written on them at all.
| munk-a wrote:
| I'd like to clarify that point a bit.
|
| They're allowed to get away with it because of a
| dysfunctional lobbying driven government. Mils don't
| exist in the common knowledge and if any reasonable
| person looked at this they'd call it out. It is useful in
| accounting but a Mill has never been minted and the last
| half penny was minted in 1857. It has never been possible
| using issued physical legal tender in the US to pay a
| debt of $3.129
|
| The Mill doesn't exist because of some archaic need -
| it's pure dysfunction and the utilization of it in gas
| prices is a practice that should and very easily could be
| made illegal.
| ryandrake wrote:
| Yes, the "Mill" discussion looks to be totally
| irrelevant. [1] and [2] seem to back up my claim that, at
| least in modern times, it's purely a "just-below pricing"
| psychological trick and has nothing to do with the Mill
| unit.
|
| $4.999 looks a lot smaller than $5.00 to everyday people
| and it makes the gas company more money than $4.99.
| That's all there is to it.
|
| 1: https://www.cbsnews.com/minnesota/news/why-do-gas-
| prices-alw...
|
| 2. https://www.cnn.com/2022/06/14/energy/why-gas-prices-
| fractio...
| Fritatta wrote:
| Certain states have manufactured plastic mill tokens in
| the 1920s and 30s to aid in the payment of taxes:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sales_tax_token
| patrickthebold wrote:
| of course 9.99...(repeating) is mathematically 10, so I
| have a hard time being against allowing that.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| Turns out the station charges you a round number of cents
| per gallon. Then there are federal taxes, which are,
| IIRC, 24.5 cents per gallon. And then there's state tax,
| which varies from state to state but seems to always be
| x.4 cents per gallon.
|
| So I don't think it's just "evil retailer tricks".
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| Actually, I'd say by all means, allow them to price
| things $9.99 so we can all agree it's equal to $10 and be
| done with it.
| Ferret7446 wrote:
| The amount is only rounded at the end of the transaction.
| Those fractions make a difference if you're buying more
| than a few gallons
| what wrote:
| Is the amount rounded before or after taxes? Must be
| after or you have to round again. So who eats or gains
| the rounding? The merchant or the tax collector?
| gus_massa wrote:
| Here in Argentina the law says they must be rounded down.
| Initially it was for 5 AR$cents, and some shops still has
| the oficial sign that says AR$ 0.05.
|
| We unofficially drop the coins/bills when the reach
| ~US$0.03, so now we dropped the AR$50 bills and everythig
| in cash is rounded down to AR$100 (US$0.07).
|
| (The only exception is the photocopy shop 2 blocks away
| from home.)
|
| Credit cards are charged the exact ammount, with cents
| that are irrelevant.
| Telemakhos wrote:
| So, implement sales tax like Europe does VAT and include
| it in on the shelf price, and make sure all shelf prices
| end in 0 or 5. Then, adding up items in a cart will also
| end in 0 or 5, and the tax is already included, so there
| is no math beyond the addition that could change the
| total to anything ending in something that is not 0 or 5.
| No matter how people pay, cash or card, the price will be
| the same, and it will always end in 0 or 5. As an added
| bonus, customers don't have to wonder how much tax
| they'll pay, because that's already included in the
| price.
| munk-a wrote:
| America is allergic to baked in taxes - you've got to
| keep the appearance of a deal even when there isn't one.
| America also embraces a lot of junk and hidden fees -
| ticketmaster is a great example of this.
|
| I think consumers would love having baked in taxes and
| clear prices and were the government functional I'd hope
| that a consumer advocacy agency could enforce this - but
| that's simply not where we are right now.
| linguae wrote:
| Additionally, having baked-in taxes a la Japan would
| change how advertising works, since we don't have a
| uniform sales tax (unlike Japan). For example, I live in
| San Ramon, CA, which has a sales tax rate of 9.75%. If I
| drive just two miles north to Danville, the sales tax
| goes down to 8.75%. If I drive a few miles south to
| Dublin, the sales tax goes up to 10.25%. The reason is
| because California has a base statewide sales tax of
| 7.25% (with 1% of it going to local governments), and
| city and county governments are free to add up to 4% for
| local sales taxes.
|
| By comparison, in Japan the consumption tax is 10% for
| most items (8% for groceries and takeout), and it's the
| same nationwide.
|
| In addition, there are sometimes fees that are prohibited
| by law from being baked in. For example, California has a
| statewide ban on free "single-use" bags in grocery stores
| and some other businesses. These businesses are required
| to charge their customers for bags, and they are not
| allowed to bake it into the price. Some municipalities
| have extended this to disposable cups as part of an
| effort to discourage them in favor of reusable cups. For
| example, Santa Cruz mandates a 25 cent fee on disposable
| cups. The Costco $1.50 hot dog + drink combo is normally
| $1.50 + sales tax, but in Santa Cruz it's $1.50 + $.25
| mandatory cup fee + sales tax (yes, the cup is taxable).
| I have yet to see someone bring a disposable cup to
| Costco or to other places where paper cups are sold,
| however.
|
| Having baked-in taxes will require big changes about how
| taxes and fees work in America, the land of extra sales
| taxes, extra fees, surcharges, and tipping.
| munk-a wrote:
| Some good news though - having baked in sales tax being
| required in advertising actually aligns marketing
| lobbying with pushing for harmonized sales taxes which
| I'd generally consider a more just system. IMO adding
| random regressive taxes in different counties to make up
| budget shortfalls causing very strange market effects is
| a bad thing.
| kasey_junk wrote:
| America isn't against baked in taxes because of the
| appearance of a deal, it's because there is the large
| part of the population that is against _taxation_. Their
| argument (which is probably right) is that if you bake in
| the tax then it will be ignored by more buyers and it
| will be easier to raise.
|
| Lots of odd American customs can be explained by this
| phenomenon. The other major difference in the states is
| that we don't have many places that only have federal
| taxes. States and every locality from the county to the
| water reclamation board can have tax authority. Those 2
| things in conjunction go a long way to explain the
| differences you see in US tax treatment.
| beowulfey wrote:
| You can do this with State taxes too, but I think your
| impression that people just ignore it is correct. A good
| example of this is gas prices. Gas in CA is 70c per
| gallon, vs about 25c per gallon in the Northeast. This
| gets baked into the price, and is way more expensive in
| CA, but people need to buy gas. So you just have to pay.
| And since it is everywhere in the state, most people
| don't notice the difference.
| cratermoon wrote:
| Penalizing the poor further?
| lostapathy wrote:
| Yes, let's solve a tricky problem the hardest way
| possible.
| benregenspan wrote:
| > they'll continue holding pennies from previous years?
|
| I think most of the ones from previous years are all in
| people's junk drawers, couches, etc., and only go back
| into circulation when someone decides to dump them into a
| Coinstar machine. Retailers are already reporting
| shortages.
| hypeatei wrote:
| > there are laws that say
|
| Hmm, maybe this is why it should be handled by Congress and
| not at the whim of the executive. They can handle all this
| in one piece of legislation.
| close04 wrote:
| If the law is slow to change or there are no available
| pennies, the stores can adjust the prices to match the
| expected rounding of prices. I can't imagine someone
| being prosecuted from rounding a penny but it's a quick
| and easy way to avoid any doubt.
| hypeatei wrote:
| > I can't imagine someone being prosecuted from rounding
| a penny
|
| Under this executive, I wouldn't be so sure. If a grocery
| chain starts deviating from the law, then the government
| can use it against them to further a political agenda
| like we've seen with Eric Adams for example.
| connicpu wrote:
| The easy thing for stores to do then seems to be apply
| the cash rounding to EBT and card transactions.
| cpfohl wrote:
| This seemed so obvious to me...
| tdeck wrote:
| Even easier would be to make a gift to Trump's ballroom
| or buy into one of his many crypto schemes or Truth
| Social stock.
| jjcm wrote:
| > the stores can adjust the prices to match the expected
| rounding of prices
|
| Not necessarily. Anything measured by weight will still
| be subject to this issue.
| varenc wrote:
| Anything measured by weight is already rounding prices to
| the nearest cent. If something is $1/lb and I have 0.995
| lbs of it, I get charged $1.00 not 99.5 cents. Presumably
| just rounding to the nearest 5 cents isn't that
| different.
|
| Of course we don't expect anyone to be charged fractional
| cents because our currency doesn't support it. So just
| changing our smallest currency unit from 1 cent to 5
| cents.
| jjcm wrote:
| > Presumably just rounding to the nearest 5 cents isn't
| that different
|
| The above context was that rounding to 5 cents might be
| illegal due to laws regarding SNAP debit prices being
| different than cash prices.
| CrazyStat wrote:
| Round it for SNAP debit cards too.
| varenc wrote:
| Yea but I guess my thinking is that all totals would just
| be rounded to the nearest 5 cents, like how they're
| currently rounded to the nearest 1 cent. So would be the
| same price whether debit or cash. We already round
| percentage based taxes to nearest cent, even though it's
| feasible you could charge someone fractional cents on a
| debit card.
|
| Really state laws just should be amended to include
| something like "costs must be the same or as close as
| possible using the currently available denominations of
| currency"
| mkhalil wrote:
| That's why it should be rounded for everything. No
| pennies should probably mean that any final transaction
| totals are rounded to the nearest nickel. Whether they
| pay with cash, credit, debit, snap, gift card, etc...
|
| IMO, rounding for cash purchases only sounds worse than
| keeping the pennies.
| soerxpso wrote:
| Good luck getting Congress to do anything at all, ever.
| Best we can offer you is one big partisan pork bill every
| two years, no matter who's in charge and no matter what
| voters actually want. Maybe if one senator (foolishly)
| decided to make penny rounding his pet issue, and worked
| his ass off at it, he could get half of it wrapped into
| the bi-annual pork bill.
| rtkwe wrote:
| More annoying especially during the SNAP gap due to the
| shutdown the law forbids differential pricing in general so
| shops couldn't offer lower prices for EBT/SNAP customers as
| a way to help their neighbors.
| philistine wrote:
| I don't want to be glib, but hey what the hey. This is how
| you can see that the United States is in decline; it can no
| longer discontinue a coin through legislation.
| dmix wrote:
| Congress seems like the most dysfunctional branch of
| government going on a couple decades now.
|
| They poll worse than the most unpopular presidents
| hamandcheese wrote:
| > They poll worse than the most unpopular presidents
|
| I would expect this to be the case generally since
| congress is at all times 99.5% people who you have no say
| in electing/recalling.
| abustamam wrote:
| I happen to live in one of the few districts in CA that
| has a republican representative. I was looking forward to
| voting him out but then CA got gerrymandered and now
| we'll likely have a Democrat representative next term.
|
| I didn't like our republican representative but it seems
| kinda shitty that the folks who did like him and voted
| for him suddenly didn't get a say in who their
| representative ought to be. I mean, sure they probably
| voted No on 50 but most of the yes votes came from
| outside of our district.
|
| Edit: I strongly hate gerrymandering but I also
| acknowledge the need for the democrats to play dirty
| because the Republicans are, and "being the better
| person" doesn't seem to be a viable political strategy
| anymore.
| kasey_junk wrote:
| The voters did get a say in California which at least had
| the process require a referendum.
|
| The other states that have done mid cycle gerrymandering
| just forced it on their population.
| abustamam wrote:
| Yeah, that's true, never thought of it that way. The way
| CA did it is certainly better, but I think it's still
| solving the wrong problem though -- political power
| should not be able to be swayed by politicians moving
| borders around, with or without a vote. Redistricting is
| important because every district should have equal
| population, but they should be drawn by independent
| committees (and in many states they are, just for "some
| reason" a bunch of states decided to do it with a
| partisan spin).
| kmeisthax wrote:
| The last time America discontinued a coin legislatively
| was the half cent about 150 years ago. That's a pretty
| long decline.
| philistine wrote:
| The US needed to discontinue the penny since at least the
| early 2010s; before you could argue it wasn't worth it.
| That's 25 years.
| Ferret7446 wrote:
| Generally in accounting, insignificant amounts are...
| insignificant (like how tax calculations are rounded to the
| dollar).
|
| Please don't strawman this, there is ample evidence for
| rounding pennies on everyday transactions.
| SkyPuncher wrote:
| Charges take into account severity of the crime and intent.
| Nobody is going to get criminal charges for rounding
| pennies on cash transactions.
| potato3732842 wrote:
| Sure, on paper. In reality bored fedcops trying to
| justify their budgets is how you get plenty of
| unjustifiable suffering.
|
| The secret service probably won't cause a Waco out of it,
| but I'm sure they'll do something dumb.
| DrewADesign wrote:
| Ok-- Walmart decides to do something the government
| doesn't like re:tariffs or whatnot. They can either plead
| fealty and retract their decision or the C-Suite can
| defend themselves against conspiracy to commit a zillion
| misdemeanors an hour...
| conductr wrote:
| Tons of laws go unenforced
| chipsrafferty wrote:
| Ok so just round it down then
| BobbyTables2 wrote:
| Get rid of SNAP.
|
| Problem solved.
|
| (/s)
| koliber wrote:
| Always round up (or down) to the nearest nickel regardless
| of whether someone pays card, cash, or SNAP. In effect,
| this would set the gross price as a multiple of 5 cents.
| jacobgkau wrote:
| > Basically, if something is $1.01 or $1.02, you round down.
| If it's $1.03 or $1.04, you round up.
|
| So everything's going to be $1.03 or $1.04. Not sure why you
| think retailers (or any sellers) would ever, ever, ever let
| this play into customers' advantage.
|
| But apparently pointing out that obvious truth makes me a
| "moron," because you can think of some clever ways to get
| around it that retailers surely won't work around.
| bigfishrunning wrote:
| but then you buy 2 things, and it's $2.06. round down! or
| you buy 4 and it's $4.12. round down!
|
| it'll come out in the wash. there are much bigger things to
| worry about.
| jacobgkau wrote:
| You attempt that at my store. To help ensure my business
| is sustainable in these hard times (/s), I'm imposing a
| "multi-item order" fee at my store. Now what?
| chokolad wrote:
| What's stopping you from doing it now ?
| jacobgkau wrote:
| There's not as much incentive to right now, because I
| don't have an excuse to round up prices, and customers
| don't have a case for rounding down prices. This
| discussion's about the possible effects of rounding, not
| about whether businesses are in control of their prices.
| dpark wrote:
| > There's not as much incentive to right now
|
| Yeah, because stores don't have an incentive to raise
| prices usually...
| niij wrote:
| If you seriously think that's realistic I guess I don't
| know what to tell you.
| jacobgkau wrote:
| Pizza chains have delivery fees that aren't paid to
| delivery drivers. Restaurants have service fees for
| cooking food and convenience fees for placing orders
| (even if paying, in cash, when you pick up), on top of
| the sticker price of the food itself, which used to just
| be the price.
|
| Some people in this thread have talked about stores
| having signs saying they'll round change up to the dollar
| if you pay in cash, and advising to pay by card if you
| want exact change. I've personally seen businesses have
| signs on their cash registers that say "our cash register
| is easily hacked, we strongly recommend paying by cash
| instead instead of card" (I'm assuming so they can cheat
| on their taxes).
|
| Businesses will do anything they can get away with to
| make more money, and they can usually get away with tiny
| fees like this. It's only a few cents, right? Except for
| them, it adds up.
| dpark wrote:
| This is nonsense. No store is going to charge a multi
| item fee so that they can try to scrape an extra penny
| off their customers. As someone else's already pointed
| out, they could just do this _today_ if they believe
| their customers will accept it. Did you forget that
| stores can just raise prices?
|
| Your premise that stores will find a way to force
| rounding up is nonsense. It's nonsense because stores
| aren't actually going to do it, but also because we're
| talking about * _pennies*_. Oh, no. The store ripped me
| off for 2 cents. How will I survive?
| jacobgkau wrote:
| > As someone else's already pointed out, they could just
| do this _today_ if they believe their customers will
| accept it. Did you forget that stores can just raise
| prices?
|
| As I already pointed out, customers would be more likely
| to accept it if there's an excuse for it (pennies are
| being phased out) than just randomly. The discussion's
| about what rounding may cause, not about what stores have
| the legal ability to do.
|
| > It's nonsense because stores aren't actually going to
| do it, but also because we're talking about _pennies_.
| Oh, no. The store ripped me off for 2 cents. How will I
| survive?
|
| So this argument is just "you may be right, but I don't
| care." That's not an argument, imo.
| dpark wrote:
| No one is going to buy "multi transaction fee" because of
| pennies being phased out. This makes no sense.
|
| You have constructed a whole chain of absurd claims that
| have no basis Did you forget that right now, today,
| stores willingly take a cent _off_ virtually every price
| so they can do the x.99 thing?
|
| > So this argument is just "you may be right, but I don't
| care." That's not an argument, imo.
|
| No. I can simultaneously believe that you are wrong and
| also that the fundamental concern is absurd.
| zahlman wrote:
| The experience of other countries that have actually
| implemented this (see: Canada) demonstrates that this is
| not actually a problem.
| tempestn wrote:
| Now people stop shopping at your store.
| jacobgkau wrote:
| If the store is e.g. Walmart, then their scale's already
| large enough that I don't think this is going to put them
| under. And if every store's doing it, then there'll be
| nowhere to turn to.
| Jblx2 wrote:
| Won't someone think of the children?
| jacobgkau wrote:
| That's an entirely off-topic comment that has nothing to
| do with anything I said and adds nothing to the
| discussion.
| inkcapmushroom wrote:
| What if the stores detain you and force you to work in
| their perfume department to pay off the million-dollar
| multi-item fee they just thought up? What if they also do
| a bunch of allergen testing on you to figure out what
| you're allergic to and then make you exclusively sell
| perfumes containing those allergens?
|
| All because of that darn penny-rounding.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| Now your customers go and shop at a store that isn't
| cartoonishly customer-hostile. Now what?
| smeej wrote:
| If you buy two things at $1.03 or $1.04, it's $2.06 or
| $2.07 and rounds down to $2.05 more often than it's $2.08
| and rounds up to $2.10. That's not "some clever ways."
| That's so basic it's absurd. They don't know how many
| things you're going to buy. They don't know how many things
| anyone is going to buy. There's no way to game the entire
| system for every combination of things people might buy.
|
| Never mind this: When was the last time you bought
| something in person, in cash, and bought only one thing?
| Just think it through for a second.
| jacobgkau wrote:
| > Never mind this: When was the last time you bought
| something in person, in cash, and bought only one thing?
| Just think it through for a second.
|
| "In cash" is entirely separate from the rounding debate
| and is just the "people use cards, anyway" argument. It's
| not relevant to this discussion. This discussion is
| _about_ cash. I do buy single items at stores sometimes.
|
| > If you buy two things at $1.03 or $1.04, it's $2.06 or
| $2.07 and rounds down to $2.05 more often than it's $2.08
| and rounds up to $2.10.
|
| Where's the law preventing stores from imposing an
| accounting fee for multi-item purchases, conveniently
| totaling a few cents?
| ivanbakel wrote:
| > Where's the law preventing stores from imposing an
| accounting fee for multi-item purchases, conveniently
| totaling a few cents?
|
| Where's the law preventing someone from doing this right
| now? I don't think this cynicism is justified.
|
| Similarly, if places are willing to price stuff at $1.03
| for the few extra cents they'll collect some of the time,
| then they can just raise prices on 99c items _right now_
| to $1 to collect the extra cent, which they don't do
| because such prices have a psychological effect on the
| consumer that outweighs the small gain.
| jacobgkau wrote:
| > Where's the law preventing someone from doing this
| right now? I don't think this cynicism is justified.
|
| You don't think businesses take advantage of situations
| for more profit?
|
| Take this year's tariffs as an example. As you may've
| heard, UPS is charging customs brokerage fees of dozens
| or hundreds of dollars on top of the actual tariff
| payment; identical shipments sent via FedEx or DHL are
| only charged a few dollars for the service of customs
| brokerage, so we know UPS's actual costs for providing
| that service aren't that high. They saw a situation where
| consumers would be confused about prices and took
| advantage of it to make a lot more money by simply
| charging a lot more than they need to.
|
| "But where's the law saying they couldn't have just
| raised their prices by hundreds of dollars without
| tariffs? Where's the law?!" There wasn't one, they
| could've raised their prices for international shipments
| before the tariffs happened. But consumers would have
| noticed a lot more and accepted it a lot less. They took
| advantage of the situation because the situation allowed
| them to get away with it.
|
| > Similarly, if places are willing to price stuff at
| $1.03 for the few extra cents they'll collect some of the
| time, then they can just raise prices on 99c items right
| now to $1 to collect the extra cent, which they don't do
| because such prices have a psychological effect on the
| consumer that outweighs the small gain.
|
| I'm not sure what you're arguing here. You admitted the
| $0.99 number has a psychological effect that outweighs
| the $0.01 gain of charging the extra cent. That would be
| the reason they don't do that. It's not super relevant to
| the discussion of whether rounding can/will be gamed.
| munk-a wrote:
| > UPS is charging customs brokerage fees of dozens or
| hundreds of dollars on top of the actual tariff payment
|
| To reinforce this point... UPS just does this all the
| time. I had to have a number of personal effects[1]
| shipped up from the US to Canada that I requested self-
| declaration forms for them and never received them - UPS
| decided to brokerage the shipment themselves. We then
| spent the next three months fighting a six hundred dollar
| charge[2] that should have never existed.
|
| UPS is going to defraud customers on brokerage fees
| regardless of the scenario - it's just what UPS does.
| You've got bigger problems to worry about - the impact of
| dropping the penny will be unnoticeable in the sea of
| general corruption and fraud.
|
| 1. Items that you own in one country and are shipping to
| Canada for personal possession are exempt from most
| normal tariffs.
|
| 2. To really add icing to outrage - this was more than
| double the original shipping price and, considering we
| delivered an itemization with the shipment for customs
| UPS _could_ calculate their BS fee upfront and show the
| actual cost to the customer but they don 't because the
| US doesn't force them to.
| ivanbakel wrote:
| >You don't think businesses take advantage of situations
| for more profit?
|
| That's not the point. Businesses are obviously happy to
| raise prices under the confusion of other changes, but I
| find it very hard to believe "accounting fees" are a
| plausible way to do so. People know that the register
| machine can do the calculations easily - it already does
| so. And there is a good reason for businesses _not_ to
| introduce such fees, because they are directly visible to
| the consumer who is going to complain and shop elsewhere.
|
| The UPS example is apples to oranges. Tariffs are poorly
| understood, and consumers rarely shop around for shipping
| - they tend to take the service given by the merchant.
| The agency people will show on 2 random cents on every
| shop is way higher.
|
| >It's not super relevant to the discussion of whether
| rounding can/will be gamed.
|
| It's very relevant. How are consumers going to react to a
| price like $1.03? Especially since that's almost
| certainly something that would previously have been
| priced at $1.
| echelon wrote:
| If there is no rounding down, it could amount to more.
|
| Hypothetically if you incur 10,000 transactions per year
| with the max rounding up of $0.04 per transaction, you're
| out $400.
|
| This doesn't make a huge impact to individuals, but it
| absolutely will to large volume businesses.
| tempestn wrote:
| But there would be rounding down, so how is this
| relevant?
| jacobgkau wrote:
| What's even to say anything will be rounded down? If
| Walmart says "we're going to round anything from $0.01 to
| $0.04 up to $0.05," do you think the free market would
| put them out of business out of principle, or would they
| get away with it? I think they'd get away with it.
| echelon wrote:
| Nobody has to round down. There's no government rule.
|
| I would expect many businesses to implement
| ceil()-flavored rounding.
| dpark wrote:
| You're arguing about nonsense scenarios. Hypothetically
| every business could also tack a "convenience fee" of $20
| on every purchase like TicketMaster and make 200k off
| this imaginary customer.
|
| Also even if a business rounded up every transaction, the
| expected benefit is 2 cents per transaction vs fair
| rounding, not 4 cents.
| hn_acc1 wrote:
| For large volume businesses, $400 / year is what we
| usually call.. a rounding error.
| echelon wrote:
| A large volume business isn't doing 10k transactions.
| missinglugnut wrote:
| The percentage change is the same for everyone. If a
| consumer pays 10.05 instead of 10.03, they pay 0.2% more.
|
| If a store games prices to charge 0.2% more on a million
| transactions it's still 0.2% for them. Except the
| rounding on multi-item purchases isnt predictable so it
| would probably take a miracle of data engineering and
| behavioral science to hit 0.1% benefit on average.
|
| Meanwhile stores are using 30% off coupons and buy on get
| one free to get people in the door, whilst hiding double
| digit price increases.
|
| Worrying about the two pennies is stupid on either side
| of the transaction. Don't listen to the professional
| complainers.
| dpark wrote:
| Your hypothetical 4 cents per transaction is inflated but
| it's still only 4 cents per transaction. Credit card fees
| dwarf that even for very large volume business.
|
| No CEO is rubbing their hands together salivating over
| the idea of 4 cents per transaction. This likely won't
| even show up on an earnings report because it's literally
| going to be rounded away.
| stonemetal12 wrote:
| > They don't know how many things anyone is going to buy.
|
| They have historical data, so they know on average people
| buy 5 things, and they will have data on what impact on
| purchasing behavior the changes have. Most likely they
| will tune for increased volume as people spend more to
| avoid losing a couple of cents.
| dpark wrote:
| > Most likely they will tune for increased volume as
| people spend more to avoid losing a couple of cents.
|
| Why would they ever tune for that? "Uh oh, turns out
| customers are intentionally spending more money!"
|
| I don't understand how this same train of thought comes
| up every time eliminating pennies is raised. This whole
| train of thought collapses if you consider the scope
| we're talking about (literally a couple of cents max per
| transaction) and how stores actually behave today. Stores
| are happy to drop a couple of pennies to make prices look
| better. But in this hypothetical world stores are going
| to calculate the optimal prices to round in a way that
| rips off customers for a couple of cents. This makes no
| sense. They give up a penny on nearly every item today
| for the sake of "pretty" prices.
|
| Edit: Oh, I see you're arguing that they would tune to
| encourage spending up to "save" the couple of cents,
| rather than _re_ tuning in response to the hypothetical
| increased spending. No doubt they would like to do this.
| I doubt they actually would because this is not trivial
| and it would require ruining the pretty prices.
| mtmail wrote:
| Sales tax gets applied first.
| jacobgkau wrote:
| Sales tax rates aren't secret. Stores can set their
| prices with it in mind. Consumers are far less likely to
| have sales tax rates memorized and to go through the
| trouble of checking how things'll work out from the
| sticker price before they get to the register.
| loloquwowndueo wrote:
| In practice most items are x.99 anyway.
| nothrabannosir wrote:
| Are we pretending that nobody has ever tried phasing out
| smaller denomination currency, and that we don't have a
| vast body of actual case studies to draw from? Why are we
| running thought experiments at all?
| jacobgkau wrote:
| As others have pointed out, governments sometimes issue
| actual guidance on how it's supposed to work when they
| phase out currency. It's not always "just stop making
| them and see how the market deals with it."
| water9 wrote:
| It makes no sense to spend more money to mint the actual
| money, then the money is worth OK. You might not like it,
| but something has to be done because to continue in a
| slow and methodical process 1) forgets that the
| government is the same entity that runs the DMV 2) people
| love to throw out criticisms of solutions that aren't
| perfect not realizing that it's still better than the
| status quo. To do nothing is costing money or in the case
| of Ukraine it's costing lives. 3) I bet you $100 You
| don't like Trump.
| jacobgkau wrote:
| > 3) I bet you $100 You don't like Trump.
|
| I actually like Trump (or at least his presidency) a lot
| more than I think most Hacker News browsers do. I like
| Trump's presidency more than most of my co-workers and
| many of my friends do. My arguments in this thread are
| entirely my own, not the product of some political
| allegiance.
| hn_acc1 wrote:
| 1) DMV is state-run, not federal govt. 2) Why can't we at
| least spend 5 minutes studying how it went in Canada, and
| learn that govt guidance was helpful to the transition,
| so do that too? 3) Sure. And even more because, even when
| he DOES pick up on a good idea (I support elimination of
| the penny), he does so in a haphazard / slipshod way that
| the end result is often worse than if nothing had been
| done.
| xienze wrote:
| > It's not always "just stop making them and see how the
| market deals with it."
|
| On the other hand, we've been delaying this inevitable
| and necessary action for decades over hand-wringing about
| the implications of rounding up or down by a maximum of
| two damn cents per transactions _for decades_. If we did
| it "the right way" I'm sure it would take years and years
| and cost millions of dollars to "study the effects" of
| eliminating the penny. Just do it already. Even with the
| best plan in the world people are going to whine about
| rounding.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| Americans like to pretend that history and the experience
| of the rest of the world doesn't exist and that things
| that large numbers of other countries have done
| successfully (and which even the US has done in the past,
| in this case, as the half-penny, after all, was phase out
| a long time ago) are impossible to do successfully.
| jandrewrogers wrote:
| Sales taxes as they are known in the US were largely
| introduced in the 20th century. The half-penny was phased
| out in the mid-19th century.
|
| The legal structure of sales taxes in the US present some
| unique challenges that simply don't exist as problems
| that needed to be solved in other countries. These
| problems can't be legislated away because the authority
| to do so is highly decentralized. Pretending that these
| problems don't exist because they don't exist elsewhere
| is not helpful.
|
| This is very much a case of the Mencken quote that for
| every complex problem there is a solution that is simple,
| obvious, and wrong.
| pyth0 wrote:
| Can you explain further? Canada has sales tax and
| successfully phased out the penny.
| dpark wrote:
| No! The US is totally different from Canada. We cannot
| learn from anyone else's success because we are a unique
| snowflake.
| jandrewrogers wrote:
| Sales taxes in the US are truly and insanely
| decentralized.
|
| The US has thousands of independent sales tax authorities
| with their own laws and regulations about how sales tax
| must be computed and displayed. These jurisdictions
| overlap, the sales tax you pay may be the aggregate of
| multiple different sales tax authorities between which
| there is no coordination.
|
| Rounding to the nearest 5c or whatever creates a
| situation where in many locales it would be impossible to
| comply with sales tax and pricing laws because different
| tax authorities requiring mutually exclusive ways of
| making this change.
|
| This creates an obvious need to change the law. This is
| not trivial because they are often written into statute
| or constrained by constitutional processes. It requires
| thousands of jurisdictions to all change their laws at
| the same time in the same way, which is effectively
| impossible. Even if it weren't the process would require
| several years. In many locales it requires a democratic
| vote -- what if the voters vote against it? Courts aren't
| going to let the government ignore these requirements
| because it would be inconvenient.
|
| It really is a "herding cats" problem. There are many
| other things in the US that effectively can't be changed
| because there is no central authority to overcome
| coordination problems by fiat. Even at the level of all
| 50 States, resolving these kinds of coordination problems
| typically takes several decades.
| dpark wrote:
| > effectively impossible
|
| Let's assume you are correct. It is impossible to ever
| make this change for reasons X, Y, and Z.
|
| What happens when stores just can't get pennies anymore?
| Does the sky fall?
| jandrewrogers wrote:
| There are many examples of these types of jurisdictional
| conflicts in the US due to the strong decentralization of
| authority. These situations almost always rely on non-
| enforcement, which works until it doesn't and then you
| find yourself in court. Enforcement sporadically happens,
| or more commonly happens, someone with a personal axe to
| grind demands enforcement happen.
|
| I'm all for eliminating the penny and rounding to the
| nearest 5 cents or whatever. But I am not so callous as
| to ignore the reality that doing this _de facto_ forces
| many businesses to break the law because compliance is
| impossible for reasons completely outside their control.
|
| Maybe you're cool with breaking some eggs to make an
| omelette but I find it pretty gross and immoral to
| dictate change without satisfying the preconditions that
| allow it to occur legally for everyone involved.
| dpark wrote:
| > I find it pretty gross and immoral to dictate change
| without satisfying the preconditions that allow it to
| occur legally for everyone involved.
|
| Your claims include that this is effectively impossible
| and that changes of this type take decades to roll out in
| the US.
|
| If we take your claims as accurate then the only way to
| ever make a change like this is to "break some eggs". The
| alternative would be for us collectively to stop
| pretending that effective governance is a unreasonable
| expectation.
| jltsiren wrote:
| Coordination problems become easier when there is a
| pressing need to solve them.
|
| If pennies are phased out, companies need to figure out
| how to do business without pennies. If they can't find a
| legal way to continue business, they will tell the
| relevant legislators that the laws should be changed. If
| the legislators don't see a reason to change the laws,
| the companies will probably stop doing business in that
| jurisdiction. If the legislators still don't see a reason
| to change the laws, then the outcome is probably what the
| local residents wanted.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > the US has thousands of independent sales tax
| authorities
|
| The US _does not_ have thousands of _independent_ sales
| tax authorities; administrative subdivisions of states
| are not independent, or even sovereign in the sense that
| states (which are also not independent) are, and can be
| dictated to by the state they are in, if the state decide
| there is a need, such as an urgent common problem that
| requires a coordinated solution.
|
| > It really is a "herding cats" problem.
|
| It's not, though. It's a "convincing cats to find shelter
| when it rains" problem, that you are trying to make
| harder by inventing the nonexistent need to also gather
| them in a herd. They aren't in a herd with the penny as
| the smallest coin, and they don't need to be in a herd if
| that changes to a nickel.
|
| > Even at the level of all 50 States, resolving these
| kinds of coordination problems typically takes several
| decades.
|
| There is no need for a coordinated solution between all
| 50 states, just as there is no coordinated policy on
| sales tax _now_ between all 50 states. All that is
| necessary is that there is a solution in every place
| where the current tax policy would be problematic without
| the penny. There is no need for the policy to be the
| _same_ in every jurisdiction with sales tax, just as the
| status quo policy is not the same in every jurisdiction
| with a sales tax.
| dpark wrote:
| > Pretending that these problems don't exist because they
| don't exist elsewhere is not helpful.
|
| Pretend that's everything in the US is globally unique to
| us also is not helpful. "No one else has sales tax like
| us" is likely not true but also not super relevant. Tax
| collecting agencies in 50 states and however many
| territories could issue guidance tomorrow for how to deal
| with this and it would have the force of law until/unless
| legislatures see fit to define different rules.
|
| > for every complex problem there is a solution that is
| simple, obvious, and wrong.
|
| Sure, but for every simple problem there is a small army
| of people online pretending it's insurmountable.
| jandrewrogers wrote:
| The tax authorities cannot unilaterally change the law
| with "guidance".
|
| It is explicitly written into statute in many cases,
| requiring legislative action across thousands of
| independent tax authorities. Complicating it more is that
| in some cases a change must satisfy constitutional
| requirements which are even harder to change.
|
| Everything is easy if you pretend that you can change
| things by authoritarian fiat instead of abiding by
| existing statutory and constitutional restrictions. The
| courts would never allow it.
| dpark wrote:
| > The tax authorities cannot unilaterally change the law
| with "guidance".
|
| The standard model for regulation is generally that the
| law empowers some agency to clear up any ambiguities.
|
| Doubtful that any state has legislation on how to handle
| taxation if pennies are unavailable so a state tax body
| issuing reasonable guidance is a very believable outcome.
|
| > It is explicitly written into statute in many cases,
| requiring legislative action across thousands of
| independent tax authorities. Complicating it more is that
| in some cases a change must satisfy constitutional
| requirements which are even harder to change.
|
| Show me the legislation that says "taxes must be
| collected to the penny based on the posted price without
| rounding".
|
| What are these "thousands of independent tax authorities"
| anyway? Are you under the impression that every city and
| county needs to agree change the tax law? State law
| trumps local laws. Washington State doesn't need Seattle
| to agree with laws specifying new rounding rules.
|
| > Everything is easy if you pretend that you can change
| things by authoritarian fiat instead of abiding by
| existing statutory and constitutional restrictions. The
| courts would never allow it.
|
| Have you not been around for the last 10 months?
|
| But also the courts tend to be fairly reasonable. Faced
| with conflicting requirements they generally don't say
| "fuck it you're all going to jail" but direct
| legislatures to fix the issue. No way we end up in a
| situation where pennies are unavailable and the courts
| tell stores that they have to shut down or stop accepting
| cash entirely because there isn't a legislatively
| specified way to round transactions to the nickel.
|
| Unless I'm missing something, existing pennies are also
| not being removed from circulation, so none of this seems
| to be a major issue yet. Legislatures could do their jobs
| and clear this up quickly of they choose to.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > The tax authorities cannot unilaterally change the law
| with "guidance".
|
| Because the law generally allows but does not mandate
| enforcement against every violation, and because guidance
| provided by enforcement authorities can be used as a
| defense in enforcement actions, so long as the guidance
| provides what is in effect a structured _exception_ to
| the law, but does not forbid anything not forbidden by
| the law, yes, they pretty much can in practice, even
| without explicit authority. And it is actually very
| common when external facts (including federal law) change
| faster than state /local process can keep up for
| enforcement agencies to use discretionary forbearance
| framed around specific guidance as a band-aid until
| adaptation of the underlying rules is in place.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| >The legal structure of sales taxes in the US present
| some unique challenges
|
| _Nothing_ about sales tax in the US is unique at all. It
| is not special. It is not hard. It is not a complex
| problem. It is basically a lookup, and computerized POS
| systems have managed it just fine since the dawn of
| computerized POS systems.
|
| In fact, when those sales taxes were first implemented,
| there was problems relating to how to manage sales that
| resulted in fractions of a cent worth of sales tax to
| account for. Several states created sales tax tokens
| worth fractions of a cent and had to insist that it
| didn't technically count as money because states can't
| mint money legally.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sales_tax_token
|
| Nobody went to jail. It was a minor nuisance for
| consumers and was quickly replaced with law changes to
| just have explicit rules for the edge case, _which is the
| entire reason we have legislatures_. If you don 't want
| retailers to respond to this change in a certain way,
| have your legislatures say that.
|
| >This is very much a case of the Mencken quote that for
| every complex problem there is a solution that is simple,
| obvious, and wrong.
|
| Just stop already. The US is not special. The US
| regularly insists it cannot do the same things everyone
| else does and it is just wrong. We literally have
| textbooks full of examples _from our own country_. _We
| 've already phased out coinage before_.
|
| The UK went from it's absurd money system to reasonable
| and decimalized money within living memory! 15 February
| 1971. Sweden had a day where they switched from left hand
| roads to right hand roads!
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dagen_H Most of Europe
| switched to Euros in living memory as well!
|
| Stop insisting reasonable societal problems are too hard
| to solve, _because that 's the only actual reason they
| are hard to solve_
|
| >These problems can't be legislated away because the
| authority to do so is highly decentralized.
|
| It isn't at all. It's in the Federal government, and it's
| in your local state government, and it's in your local-er
| governments, and that is _just like a lot of other
| countries_. A couple layers isn 't "very decentralized".
|
| It is only in the past 50 or so years that a singular
| political party has insisted that the same political
| party that did all sorts of speedy and useful lawmaking
| for a hundred years suddenly cannot adapt quickly.
| Meanwhile, 48 state governments continue to function
| mostly fine, with few problems adapting to local specific
| problems in a timely manner. If your state cannot adapt
| to this quickly and easily and without serious issues,
| consider electing different people.
| quesera wrote:
| > _Meanwhile, 48 state governments_
|
| 48? Are some states particularly dysfunctional? Or are
| you excluding commonwealths?
| mrguyorama wrote:
| I strongly believe that both Texas and California are
| poorly run and the problem is political but not partisan
| in nature. I like to leave them out, because both states
| are the ire of so many people and the brunt of so many
| arguments
|
| And all of those arguments utterly leave out the other 48
| states which vary quite a bit in who runs them and who
| mostly has power and yet do a pretty good job. There are
| plenty of conservative states in the US that do a good
| job of running the government and even representing their
| people and do not take part in stupid shit for partisan
| political points and even have rather varied ways of
| doing things. There are plenty of states run by liberals
| that are doing very well and are perfectly able to solve
| numerous problems legislatively following standard
| legislature procedure and have no problem even
| compromising across the aisle and listening to varied
| needs.
|
| When people use Texas or California in their arguments as
| shorthand to say "D/R can't run a government", they are
| lying and are too stupid to look around and pay attention
| to the 48 examples of mostly functional government by
| both parties with tons of experimentation and programs to
| pick and choose from.
|
| That is, IMO one of the core issues with why our Federal
| government struggles so bad. People are failing to look
| around and notice that 1) Government can function just
| fine actually 2) We have tons of examples of it 3)
| Government functioning well doesn't have to be partisan
| 4) government can easily meet the needs of its people and
| improve hard problems if you allow them and if you pay
| attention to it.
|
| It's very relevant to the current thread which is full of
| people who seem to think this is the first time the US
| has ever made any change, especially one about removing a
| coin from circulation, or people who think having a
| layered sales tax regime is "complicated" despite being
| solved long ago by every single commodity POS company, or
| that POS software needs updates to change it's behavior.
|
| Just a lot of people who don't even know the first thing
| about what they do not know making fairly loud
| proclamations about things they didn't even realized have
| been solved forever are insurmountable problems.
|
| Like.... We are _humans_. We essentially invented math
| for inventory and tax reasons. We created a system of
| tamper evident and resistant debt assets _out of carved
| bone and wood sticks_
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tally_stick
|
| _we split the fucking atom_
|
| We can fucking remove the penny from circulation.
| jandrewrogers wrote:
| Somehow, in all of this, you didn't address any relevant
| point.
|
| Some sales taxes are conditional at the point-of-sale,
| there is no single tax-included price. The US has never
| retired coinage in the sales tax era, an assumption built
| into many tax codes. There is no central authority for
| sales tax or price display nor standardized rules. The
| rules of multiple authorities apply to single
| jurisdictions. Changing the sales tax structures that
| exist are subject to any of statutory changes, voter
| approval, and constitutional changes, none of which will
| happen just because it would be convenient for you or
| anyone else.
|
| Any argument that doesn't address these issues rather
| than simply dismissing them isn't a serious argument.
| dpark wrote:
| > Some sales taxes are conditional at the point-of-sale
|
| What does this mean, and why is it relevant to anything?
| I feel like you're trying very hard to insist that taxes
| are impossible to calculate.
|
| > there is no single tax-included price
|
| There's no single pre-tax price either. All of this taken
| together makes it trivial to tune the post-tax price to
| round to the nearest nickel even if your tax authority
| hypothetically insists rounding is forbidden. The POS
| system says you owe 31.67 based on the ticket price and
| the applicable tax, rounds to a target of 31.65, and then
| applies a 2 cent discount _pretax_ to your purchase to
| make this work out.
|
| Hell, gas stations have proven prices can be in
| fractional cents so you could even calculate and apply a
| fractional discount if you find an edge case where you
| can't discount whole cents and still round to the nearest
| nickel.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > The rules of multiple authorities apply to single
| jurisdictions.
|
| There is no federal sales tax rule, so there is at most
| one soveriegn authority whose rules apply to any
| jurisdiction as to computation and collection of sales
| tax, any other authority is a _dependent_ one, whose
| policies can be (and probably are already) constrained by
| the sovereign 's own rules governing sales tax, which can
| be the level at which solutions are imposed, if
| necessary. "Thousands of independent authorities" is not
| a reality.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| >These problems can't be legislated away
|
| Yes, they can.
|
| > because the authority to do so is highly decentralized.
|
| So are the problems. And the places where the problems
| are localized to are the ones with the power to legislate
| them away. An _abrupt_ elimination of the penny, such as
| them being immediately banned for use or withdrawn from
| circulation, would present a problem, sure, but stopping
| minting them while leaving them in circulation provides a
| combination of time to find a solution and urgency to
| implement it; and the problems aren 't difficult to
| solve, there are lots of _easy_ solutions (there 's no
| fundamental difference in the challenges of the quantum
| of cash being $0.05 that are different from it being
| $0.01, there's just a few options in how to handle the
| transition) and all that is necessary is for each
| jurisdiction to pick one.
| jandrewrogers wrote:
| The urgency is quite irrelevant. In many locales you will
| still have to ask voters for permission and/or have a
| constitutional referendum in addition to having the local
| legislature acquiesce. All of those parties can do
| whatever they want and a large percentage of them don't
| understand and DGAF. This dynamic plays out over and over
| for countless issues, this is no different.
|
| In the meantime, tax authorities will require compliance
| as the law demands without any regard for another tax
| authority requiring something different.
|
| I'd be perfectly happy for pennies to disappear but I am
| not ignorant of the realpolitik that makes implementation
| nearly impossible. Wishful thinking won't make it so.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > The urgency is quite irrelevant.
|
| I have no idea how you get that idea.
|
| > In many locales you will still have to ask voters for
| permission and/or have a constitutional referendum in
| addition to having the local legislature acquiesce.
|
| Yeah, and with a sense of urgency, those things can be
| _and routinely are_ done quickly. Assuming that this
| argument is in good faith, yYou seem to have a concept of
| American government derived entirely from a loose
| knowledge of bits of abstract theory with no connection
| at all to the reality of practice.
|
| > All of those parties can do whatever they want and a
| large percentage of them don't understand and DGAF.
|
| Yeah, a broad non-ideological consensus that retail will
| be legally impossible due to easily communicated,
| widely=publicized changes in the external conditions
| without a tweak to sales tax law will easily overcome
| both the don't know and don't give a fuck of the vast
| majority of people engaged enough to be involved in the
| decision-making process at any level, including voting.
| Things are hard to solve when lots of people have
| existing strong preferences for particular solutions and
| those preferences are in fundamental conflict, but this
| isn't that kind of thing.
|
| > I'd be perfectly happy for pennies to disappear but I
| am not ignorant of the realpolitik that makes
| implementation nearly impossible.
|
| Not only do you seem to be ignorant of the political
| realities, you are also apparently ignorant of the
| meaning of "realpolitik", which _really_ doesn't apply
| here.
|
| The penny is going away, there'll be some isolated local
| cases where the timing of effective dates of
| legislative/administrative fixes to rules written in the
| assumption that pennies would be widely available vs. the
| availability of actual pennies will cause some minor
| inconveniences, and in a decade will look back on
| apocalyptic claims of near-impossibility the same way we
| look back at people protecting civilizations-ending
| consequences from the Y2KK bug. Well, unless we're all
| dead or living in a nightmarish dystopia for reasons
| unrelated to the elimination of the penny.
| wat10000 wrote:
| Sales taxes already result in rounding, which the store
| could try to take advantage of. They never do. They set
| prices to end in 99 because it's psychologically more
| attractive. That will most likely continue. If they're
| required to price in multiples of 5, we'll see prices
| ending in 95.
| dpark wrote:
| Unlikely that stores would be required to price in 5 cent
| increments. That would presumably require legislative
| action and would fly in the face of gas stations today
| pricing with fractional cents.
|
| But yeah, this isn't a real issue regardless.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > So everything's going to be $1.03 or $1.04.
|
| Rounding would apply on the total transaction, not
| individual items (because otherwise the individual posted
| item prices would just be false.) So, if there is an abuse
| route with round-half-down, it is that optimizing _buyers_
| would structure purchase to always total $x.01 or $x.02,
| possibly splitting planned purchases into multiple
| purchases to achieve that.
|
| But even that isn't realistically a significant issue.
| Jblx2 wrote:
| What percentage of people live in a jurisdiction without a
| sales tax? In my local area, sales tax is 8.8%. And if you
| take the bridge across the river, tax is 8.9%. So there is
| already rounding involved, $1.03 becomes $1.12167. Unless
| of course you bill also includes a mix of taxable and non-
| taxable items like food, etc..
| mikkupikku wrote:
| Media is just doing media things, ignore them. Nobody I know
| has even mentioned the penny thing, let alone expressed a
| strong opinion about it. From my perspective I have seen zero
| evidence of the American public caring one iota.
| quantified wrote:
| When the US attempted to transition to the metric system, gas
| stations raised their prices per unit volume and the American
| consumer was convinced that the metric system was bad. I have
| family that think metric is bad because some fringe people
| thought there should be 10 hours in a day and 100 minutes in
| an hour, also something like 10 months a year, and the whole
| thing is bad because some awkward ideas were floated.
|
| Here, it's a question of resolution, with a proven history
| that transitions screw the consumer, though maybe it won't be
| so. We're ok with arbitrary hundredths of a dollar, why were
| we not at thousandths? The American half cent disappeared a
| long time ago. You still need to include the cents in a tax
| bill that runs into the millions of dollars.
|
| It's just an awkward stage in inflation. Eventually a US
| dollar will be worth what a Zimbabwean dollar was, and we
| won't have $100 bills anymore.
| ekelsen wrote:
| During the French Revolution, they tried to make a right
| angle have 100 degrees and even recomputed all new trig
| tables for this new standard. It obviously did not catch on
| :)
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gradian
| rurp wrote:
| The Indiana pi bill mandated certain mathematical values
| be changed to the wrong value.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indiana_pi_bill
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| "The bill, written by a physician and an amateur
| mathematician, never became law."
| onraglanroad wrote:
| There's no reason you can't have 400 degrees in a circle
| and therefore 100 for a right angle.
|
| It's a degree scale: you can choose any number you want.
| ekelsen wrote:
| Of course that's true, that doesn't mean you should.
| taftster wrote:
| But I can't subdivide 400 in to as many ways as 360.
| Think about the pie industry. They could be put out of
| business!!
| hathawsh wrote:
| I usually want to cut pies into 14 pieces. Some might
| want 11 or 13. (17 is just too many.) I demand that we
| implement a system where a circle is 2 * 3 * 4 * 5 * 7 *
| 3 * 11 * 13 = 360360 degrees, so that we can cut pies
| evenly at anywhere from 2 to 15 slices. If my baker cuts
| a slice at 25739 degrees, I want a refund! (I'll keep the
| pie, because the pie is obviously useless.)
|
| (720720 might be OK too so we can cut 16 pieces, but
| honestly, if you're cutting 16 pieces, you're not going
| to measure. You're just going to divide pieces in half
| until you have 16. 360360 is the future.)
| DrewADesign wrote:
| Indeed, gradiens are a scale where a circle is divided
| into 400 equal parts. Really fucked me up a few times
| when I got a new calculator and wasn't paying attention
| to what the little "grad" meant.
| potato3732842 wrote:
| Whenever I'm late to a meeting I blame it on the french
| revolutionary calendar.
| ProjectArcturis wrote:
| Lousy Smarch weather
| lexszero_ wrote:
| Some pocket calculators from not too long ago supported
| this unit for some reason, along with radians and
| degrees. That's the third option on "DRG" button.
| burningChrome wrote:
| >> and we won't have $100 bills anymore.
|
| Heard some pundits on the radio talking about the
| elimination of the penny and one of them who worked at the
| Secret Service as an analyst talked about why the US paper
| money only goes to $100 bills. He said it was to reduce
| criminals and illicit activity and criminals having to
| store it.
|
| He related the story of Pablo Escobar's brother or cousin
| who was the accountant for the cartel. He said they were
| losing billions of dollars every year because of various
| kinds of attrition like rats chewing up the money, it
| getting too wet and disintegrating. They were losing so
| much because they had to store it and that wasn't always
| the best because they had so much of it on hand which
| seemed to lend credence to his story.
|
| So if you were to get rid of the $100 bills that would
| further erode the ability of criminals to store so much of
| it.
| drdec wrote:
| I'm pretty sure the OP was talking about a far future
| where a $100 bill is worth less than the current penny
| tempestn wrote:
| Though I think the parent means, eventually in the
| (hopefully) distant future, we'll get rid of the $100
| bill because it will be worth too _little_.
| quantified wrote:
| Exactly. Like with the Zimbabwe dollars being printed in
| billion-dollar denominations, $100 is irrelevant then
| emodendroket wrote:
| The 500-euro bill is being phased out for similar
| reasons. Though it's worth noting a 100-dollar bill was
| worth more than twice what it is today when Pablo Escobar
| died.
| sunaookami wrote:
| And many stores do not accept 200 Euro bills due to the
| same reason.
| emodendroket wrote:
| I would assume the stores not wanting to accept them is
| actually due to concerns about counterfeiting.
| 542458 wrote:
| I'm not really sure about "He said it was to reduce [...]
| criminals having to store it". Storage shouldn't be a
| huge problem - IIRC you can pack about a hundred million
| onto a standard pallet. Even for Escobar, who is THE
| outlier here, and assuming he's holding 100% of it in
| cash, that's about 300 pallets which easily fits into a
| normal warehouse. If you've got that much money it
| shouldn't be impossible to keep a warehouse like that
| clean and dry.
|
| Now, "illicit activity" more broadly speaking checks out
| to me. The EU stopped printing the 500 euro note because
| it was primarily used for illegal transactions and money
| laundering.
| quantified wrote:
| When the $1000 bill was retired, a loaf of bread cost a
| couple cents. There was indeed a push to purge them
| during the drug scares of the late 20th century. A
| suitcase of $1000 bills is far sexier than one of $100
| bills. It really was porting them.
|
| With bitcoin, it's moot.
|
| A $100 is basically a tank of gas and a sandwich in CA.
| nine_k wrote:
| In 1934 the dollar was worth approximately 24x more than
| in 2025. A cheap loaf of bread is about $2 here in NYC,
| so it would be about 8C/ at the time.
|
| On one hand, the difference between 2C/ and 8C/ looks
| completely inconsequential now. OTOH it's a four-fold
| difference.
| djtango wrote:
| It makes sense when you think of coins in terms of the
| commodities they were pegged to - a sliver of copper and
| nickel to pay for a loaf of bread.
| thewebguyd wrote:
| > A $100 is basically a tank of gas and a sandwich in CA.
|
| I was just lamenting with my wife the other day about how
| "$100 is the new 20 bucks"
|
| When I was a kid, mowing someone's yard for $20 was a
| really good payout. Kids my neighborhood last year were
| doing it for $70 lol.
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| $70!? How big are these lawns? Hell, I'd mow lawns for
| $70 each.
|
| I wouldn't pay more than $5 for someone to mow my lawn,
| but then again, it's tiny at like 20x15 feet. I spend
| more time getting the mower out and putting it back away
| than actually mowing. Probably gonna replace it with just
| a bunch of wildflowers next spring.
| djtango wrote:
| Wage inflation and lawn shrinkflation
| conductr wrote:
| Your neighbors who pay a service with similar sized lawn
| are mostly paying them to drive to their house. The
| neighborhood kids can undercut them without that time
| inefficiency. But they only need to slightly undercut
| them, so they get a good payout (for them)
| robocat wrote:
| > rats chewing up the money
|
| Profit for the US government. Fixed by plastic bills.
|
| Every $ printed but never redeemed is a significant
| profit (assuming other costs are low like printing).
|
| Especially yummy when countries just want to hoard the
| currency - same as selling stamps that are never used:
| estimate the stock of U.S. currency circulating in
| Argentina ... U.S. currency inflows during 1988-1992
| totaled $20.8 billion
|
| https://www.federalreserve.gov/pubs/ifdp/1993/460/ifdp460
| .pd...
| vel0city wrote:
| > Every $ printed but never redeemed is a significant
| profit
|
| Redeemed? Redeemed for what? Its not like they're still
| trading dollars for gold at any kind of fixed rate.
| robocat wrote:
| Nitpicking over words isn't profitable either, and if
| you're trying to appear sophisticated you've missed the
| mark with me.
|
| I would love to see an analysis of the benefits of crime
| to the government accounts.
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| I interpret "redeemed" as meaning "spent on a good or
| service".
|
| Since the government can just print money, it can spend
| whatever it wants, but doing so creates inflation because
| of the higher money supply.
|
| Dollars that disappear (ie, they get eaten by rats) push
| that inflation back down by removing money from the
| supply.
| ghaff wrote:
| The other thing about hundred is I tend to carry one or
| two when I travel internationally but I'd never count of
| using one in a lot of places in the US.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| > You still need to include the cents in a tax bill that
| runs into the millions of dollars
|
| Not in all cases. The IRS does not use cents when you file
| your tax return, they say round to the nearest dollar.
| dpark wrote:
| It used to be that they gave you the choice. You could
| round or you could use pennies but you had to be
| consistent throughout the return, because even the IRS
| doesn't care if you manage to scrape out 49 cents.
|
| Has that changed and it has to be dollars now?
| ghaff wrote:
| I think my accountant still gives me a choice of what to
| do and certainly I still get forms with cents on them.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| It is still a choice, though I cannot remember the last
| time we used cents on ours or any other returns (my wife
| works for an accounting firm so they handle a fair number
| of returns). Just has to be consistent, either you round
| or you do not.
| pxx wrote:
| Nobody wants 10 months in a year. What we want is 13 28-day
| months a year plus one or two intercalary days. But
| organized religion gets in the way.
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| Which organised religion is demanding a 10 month year?
| conductr wrote:
| Since we're talking about US monetary policies, I'm going
| to assume the same religion that thinks the world is only
| a few thousand years old and dinosaurs are a hoax.
| djtango wrote:
| We can revisit our notion of the passage of time when we
| achieve extra planetary life
| conductr wrote:
| > You still need to include the cents in a tax bill that
| runs into the millions of dollars.
|
| No, each number I enter into my tax form is rounded to the
| dollar. Not just the total, every input value.
| BrenBarn wrote:
| > It's called "having a society".
|
| That must be nice.
| kube-system wrote:
| There are already stores in the US that are rounding their
| transactions because of the penny shortage that is already
| happening. Many are just simply rounding all transactions
| down to the nearest $0.05.
| verelo wrote:
| Growing up in Australia 1 cent pieces were gone before i knew
| what money was. Coming to Canada in 2009 on a trip, i was
| shocked to see them. They were annoying and instantly drove
| me crazy, but i felt bad throwing them out. I threw them out
| anyway, helping reduce inflation
| pwg wrote:
| > Likely, it's just more of the media, talking heads, and
| youtube personalities trying to turn a nothing into
| something, story.
|
| It's not. Some US states have laws on the books that make it
| illegal for retailers to round up. The turmoil is that if the
| retailer can only round down to the nearest five cents, then
| they stand to lose from one to four cents per cash sale for
| any sale that is not a multiple of five cents. Add those one
| to four cent losses up over a large enough number of
| transactions and the retailer stands to lose a considerable
| sum over the course of a year. And many retail shops already
| operate with thin margins anyway, so the loss from "always
| round down" could erase whatever thin margins some shops
| already operate under.
| IncreasePosts wrote:
| They can add a "total not divisible by 5" fee, ranging from
| 1 to 4 cents
| gus_massa wrote:
| The other direction avoids a lot of stupid complains.
| Nobody will complain if the shop gives them a $0.04 gift.
| chaboud wrote:
| The shop will. It can be a lot of money in aggregate. It
| also creates really pathological purchasing incentives,
| where spreading out large purchases over several small
| purchases can yield significant savings for the
| purchaser.
|
| There's one exceedingly simple answer:
|
| Keep the penny (possibly a new one that is cheaper to
| make).
|
| We're basically breaking into jail on this one, creating
| more problems than we're solving.
| gus_massa wrote:
| Hi from Argentina! Here we unofficially deprecated the
| AR$10, AR$20 and AR$50 bill, so the smallest one is the
| AR$100 bill (~US$0.07). Every price include taxes.
|
| What are they selling? Candies one by one? Inside the
| candy store everything is rounded to a multiple of
| AR$100. A single candy is AR$100. You many get an offer
| of 3 candies for AR$200, or 2 small candies for AR$100,
| or other fancy candies in packages of 13 for AR$1000.
| Everything else is more expensive, like AR$700 or more,
| but all multiples of AR$100.
|
| The photocopy shop near my home has a copy for AR$120.
| They usually sell many copies, so a 20% is relevant. They
| have a stash of AR$20, but it's probably the only shop
| nearby. I also collect the AR$20 just to pay the
| photocopies, just to be nice to avoid finishing their
| stash and also because I don't know what to do with the
| AR$20.
|
| I guess a single apple is probably a problem. It cost
| like AR$400-AR$500 depending on the weight. Someone very
| smart can learn to choose and apple with the exact weight
| to get a AR$499 apple and pay AR$400 :) Luckily inflation
| changes the price so it's difficult to learn. Also AR$499
| will be illegaly rounded to AR$500. And most people will
| buy more than 1 apple, let's say that the total is
| AR$10,000 and AR$100 is only a 1% that is lower than the
| spoilage of rotten fruit.
| philipallstar wrote:
| If it means shops stop charging $4.99 and start charging
| $5.00, I will be ecstatic.
| bluGill wrote:
| Problem is it isn't just the $5.99 rounds to $6.00 it is
| tax. If the end cost is $6.36 will the state be happy
| with that one penny less? For any state 1 penny per
| transaction is millions of dollars per year! (note that I
| had to change your price from 4.99 to 5.99 - 5.00 times
| any tax rate is an even multiple of 5 and so cannot make
| the point).
| wasabi991011 wrote:
| In Canada, the rounding is done after tax, and only
| affects what the cash-paying customer or vendor receives.
| The sales tax amount is not affected.
| philipallstar wrote:
| It seems crazy to even advertise the pre-tax price.
| bluGill wrote:
| The tax is applies after the total is added up so there
| is no other choice When I was a kid a value meal at
| McDonalds was $3.18 after tax, but two of them was $6.37
| - that extra penny over all the meals McDonalds sells in
| a state adds up to a lot of money and they were not going
| to let that go.
| rtkwe wrote:
| If your shop can be wiped out by losing that little on each
| transaction it wasn't long for the world anyways... Retail
| margins are thin by industry preference but they're not 1-4
| cents per transaction thin.
| bjourne wrote:
| Er... So just adjust prices to whole multiples of 5 cents?
| Helps math-challenged cashiers too...
| jcranmer wrote:
| Prices in the US are not tax-inclusive, so the effect of
| sales tax ruins that plan.
| dmoy wrote:
| And sales tax varies a loooooot, and change constantly
|
| There's 12000+ distinct sales tax regimes in the US
|
| https://sovos.com/content-library/sut/state-by-state-
| guide-t...
| ryandrake wrote:
| Individual stores generally only have to deal with one.
| Set the prices at the store, and make them tax-inclusive
| while you're at it. This isn't rocket science.
|
| Companies serve billions of web pages per second. We
| can't handle 12,000 tax calculations?
| jandrewrogers wrote:
| If only it were that simple. Some sales taxes are
| conditional at the point-of-sale. Different customers may
| pay a different tax rate. This creates a situation where
| the display price will be incorrect part of the time and
| may not round to 5c or whatever the legal quantum is.
| pwg wrote:
| > make them tax-inclusive while you're at it.
|
| Often not a choice the retailer has. Local laws often
| require the shelf price be "not tax-inclusive".
|
| Reasons why vary, one common one is that in some
| instances different customers pay different rates (or
| none at all).
| kelnos wrote:
| I wonder if this could encourage retailers to start
| advertising tax-inclusive prices. That way there's no
| rounding in the customer transaction (if they set all
| their tax-inclusive pricing at multiples of 5 cents), and
| then the sales tax would just be calculated in aggregate,
| and paid electronically with no rounding.
| flymasterv wrote:
| That's illegal in a lot of places.
| degamad wrote:
| Advertising the tax-included price is illegal? Where?
|
| (No snark - serious question, as I'm not from the US, and
| would love to see the legislation and justification which
| required that...)
| ghaff wrote:
| I have seen at some small coffee shops and the like but
| it's rare.
| thinmalk wrote:
| We had a coffee shop that tried to do it. Listed prices
| included taxes, and the total prices were in nice whole
| numbers (IE, $2 for a cup of coffee, $5 for a latter, $8
| for a sandwich, etc.). But regulators stopped them and
| they had to go back to listing the prices without the
| sales tax.
|
| It's frustrating how much needless friction gets put into
| the system.
| throw20251101 wrote:
| Is the tax unknown at the time of setting the price? If
| that's the problem, set the final price at price + tax,
| deduce tax, display that. What's the matter?
| evilkorn wrote:
| I doubt that most people in the US know the local sales
| tax. Let alone any change that may occur due to laws
| changing or traveling. I'd like to see the out the door
| price listed but that throws the 99 cent game off
| retailers like. Also I don't shop very often but Aldi US
| is the only place I've seen the eink price displays, the
| rest still have paper.
| vel0city wrote:
| If its a wide region ad (can even be just across a metro
| area) showcasing a price then yes, they wouldn't know the
| price at a given store because the tax rates can change
| in less than a kilometer.
|
| If there's a TV ad for a medium pizza for $10 at a chain
| they can't possibly know the tax rates for whatever
| actual store I'm going to go order from.
|
| And the listing on a website won't know until I actually
| put in my shipping information.
| 1718627440 wrote:
| So they just make the price with tax a multiple of 5 cent
| and still show the price without.
| bux93 wrote:
| Taxes are rounded to cents already, so this is obviously
| not an issue.
| bjourne wrote:
| So you're telling me that when I buy stuff for 12.34 that
| is not the amount I have to pay, but some bigger amount
| that I have no way to calculate precisely unless I know
| exactly which sales tax rules are applicable for my
| purchase? It's baffling how backasswards the US is.
| theandrewbailey wrote:
| American taxes are Conway's law, but for politics.
| coryrc wrote:
| > then they stand to lose from one to four cents per cash
| sale for any sale that is not a multiple of five cents
|
| Which is much less than they're paying the CC companies on
| card sales.
| hinkley wrote:
| I think people underestimate how many stores used to set
| prices to avoid pennies. When I was a kid it was frequent.
| Goose the price so cost + tax rounded to the nearest nickel.
| But now everything is 23.99 or sometimes 23.95, and they use
| the pennies place to denote clearance items. Like 19.94 or
| 3.98.
| pge wrote:
| There's a reason for this. Prices that force cashiers to
| make change force them to run the transaction through the
| cash register so it is recorded, and the amount in the
| register can be checked at the end of a day or shift to
| detect theft. If prices are round numbers, such as $1, the
| cashier can pocket the payment.
| why_at wrote:
| I don't get it. Why couldn't a cashier pocket $1.99?
| flymasterv wrote:
| Because they were handed $2 and have to get the change
| out of the register.
| why_at wrote:
| Ok, but if the cashier is stealing they could just have
| change in their pocket?
|
| I'm skeptical that preventing theft is the reason for
| these prices rather than the psychological trick of
| looking cheaper.
| hinkley wrote:
| Now that you mention it, there's quite a lot of overlap
| between family owned and this pricing to my recollection.
| If your wife is stealing from the till that's very
| different from some high school guy you hired.
| gblargg wrote:
| Things have always been rounded (tax). There's just a change
| in what multiple it's rounded to.
| Thrymr wrote:
| And in inflation-adjusted terms, rounding to the nearest
| nickel now is about as significant as rounding to the
| nearest penny was in 1978.
| harikb wrote:
| Watch 'Pop' (Malcome McDowell) in Son of a Critch :) . I
| don't remember the episode/season.... where he goes on and on
| about some $1 bill that will be decommissioned and goes to
| the bank to get some...
| HWR_14 wrote:
| I'd be amazed if prices weren't engineered so they rounded up
| far more often than down.
| wasabi991011 wrote:
| Is that even remotely possible?
|
| You'd have to ensure a positive expectation value over not
| only every item, but every combination of items a consumer
| could by. You could focus only on the most likely possible
| orders (assuming you have the data, I don't know how many
| stores actually track combination of items bought), but
| it's not obvious to me that there's a tractable top n most
| likely orders that gives a reasonable enough estimate of
| expectation value.
|
| On top of that, you would be interfering with whatever
| system you already have that sets the cents of each item
| (whether marketing with 99C/, or % discounts, or a system
| that tracks that 97C/ means lowest sale, etc).
| babypuncher wrote:
| And the reality is that with most price tags ending in .99,
| retailers will actually round _down_ to .95 to preserve the
| psychological benefit of not crossing a dollar barrier.
| nightshift1 wrote:
| we should have converted everything to integers.
| dennis_jeeves2 wrote:
| This infact is the original concept of the penny.
| ourmandave wrote:
| Have you never seen the documentary _Office Space_ where
| penny rounding goes terribly wrong?!
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NnPBSy5FsOc
| OJFord wrote:
| But it's simple to fix: keep all values representable. So get
| rid of 2c if you have them, or 5, but keep the 1.
|
| Since we got rid of the half penny in the UK there simply
| isn't half penny pricing. (I do remember 2-for-a-penny sweets
| though, but they'd probably be at least 5p each now anyway.)
| conductr wrote:
| Of course you're absolutely right and the whole thing just
| illustrates how dysfunctional the US is. I mean, this edict
| originated in a tweet or whatever it's called now. Even after
| months, nobody could be bothered to think about how to
| properly execute it that solves the various concerns. We
| really can't solve the simplest of problems any longer our
| politicians just cause noise with no signal and just actively
| undermine everything they touch. Not even talking
| specifically about the person you might think I am, this is a
| systemic issue.
| julianlam wrote:
| Canadian here. Honestly, the hardest part about Canada
| dropping the penny is that sometimes you'll go someplace cool
| and see one of those penny rolling machines, and... um...
| there are no more pennies.
|
| But they usually have a little bowl of bronze slugs (or old
| pennies) just for the machines now.
| stevage wrote:
| Kind of emblematic of the issue of Americans not looking to
| other countries to see what works and what doesn't.
| epolanski wrote:
| +1
|
| We getting rid in Europe of 1 and 2 cents which are more
| valuables than pennies and nobody gives two damns.
|
| Even roundings in Italy, by law, now are 5 cent based:
| meaning you can't have a bill that ends with 5 cents it has
| to get rounded to the nearest multiple of ten cents.
|
| Seriously, nobody cares.
| benchly wrote:
| I've thought on this as someone who travels between the US
| and Canada a lot, and the scene about the embezzlement scheme
| from _Office Space_ often comes to mind (the "Pennies for
| everyone" tray: https://getyarn.io/yarn-
| clip/ea64c5fd-3c6d-46f9-b729-beef7b0...)
|
| For me, it's not about the pennies I'm losing. You're right,
| I don't care about them and the end of their minting doesn't
| mean much to me at all. No, it's about _who_ is getting the
| pennies I 'm losing. Let's say Nestle, a company I loath, has
| a box of instant noodles for $0.99 USD. Our hypothetical
| noodles are very popular, so everyone in the US tends to buy
| them.
|
| Suddenly, pennies go away. Nestle thinks "hmm, so our
| customers were already paying $0.99, might as well just bump
| the price up to $1.00, nobody will care." And they'd be
| correct. As a typical consumer, I'd pay $1.00 for something
| that I was just paying $0.99 for because the difference is
| negligible to me.
|
| But if everyone in the US buys them for lunch, that's not a
| negligible difference to Nestle. That's nearly $3,500,000 USD
| in extra revenue that week. If the consumer behavior remains
| consistent, that's an extra $182,000,000 USD per year. Maybe
| that seems like small potatoes compared to what Nestle
| grosses annually on a global scale, but even the richest of
| companies can do A LOT with that much extra cash.
|
| But of course, that is an extreme and overly simplified
| example. However, it illustrates the idea that while the
| individual will not really feel the change, the collectives
| or corporations will.
|
| I'm not an economics expert by any stretch of the
| imagination, but one thing I'm fairly sure about is when
| something like this type of change happens, the corporations
| are unchallenged at finding ways to exploit it, which usually
| translates to more money going up to them and less coming
| back down to the individual.
| nayuki wrote:
| > box of instant noodles for $0.99 USD
|
| If you as a consumer care about rounding, then just buy
| three of them: 3x $0.99 = $2.97, which rounds down to $2.95
| USD, netting you a $0.02 bonus (the maximum possible).
|
| The rounding is done at the end of the transaction, not per
| item. I speak from experience in Canada - it is indeed
| possible to execute this transaction in real life. And
| basic food items have no sales tax, so the price you see on
| the shelf is the price that you pay at checkout. It is 100%
| realistic to go into a food store, grab 3 items at $0.99
| CAD each, and pay $2.95 CAD in cash.
|
| Because you as a consumer has control over the transaction,
| I find any arguments against rounding to be ridiculous.
| sumtechguy wrote:
| Also to add we are already rounding. When you do taxes it
| does not come out to a full penny. There is a fraction of a
| penny (hi there office space and superman 3). That fraction
| is already rounded. Also many transactions are with credit
| cards. Those can just keep going the way they are and no
| rounding needed.
| dennis_jeeves2 wrote:
| > Of course, there was also central guidance and, well,
| everyone just followed it. It's called "having a society".
|
| Nice concept.
| toast0 wrote:
| Nickles are likely to go shortly after. You can do everything
| you can with nickles with dimes and quarters, nickles have
| worse economics than pennies, and have had their minting
| suppressed below the market needs for years. Once pennies leave
| circulation, the problems with nickles will become urgent and
| they'll quickly leave.
|
| Dimes are small and cheap to make though, so they'll probably
| stick around.
| axiolite wrote:
| It's impractical to eliminate the nickel and penny, while
| keeping the quarter and dime. The most practical way forward
| is to keep only the dime, but people will be quite upset
| about the loss of the quarter.
| toast0 wrote:
| It might be a little bit cumbersome, but I don't think it's
| impractical.
|
| With only quarters and dimes it's difficult to pay $0.05 or
| $0.15, but it's possible. If I owe you $0.05, I must give
| you a quarter and you give me two dimes. Or I give you a
| $20, you give me $19 in paper money, three quarters and two
| dimes. If I owe you $0.15, I must give you a quarter and
| you give me one dime. If I owe you $0.95, I can't give you
| $1 and get change, I'd need to give you $1.25 and get three
| dimes back. Or give you $2, get three quarters and three
| dimes. Owing $19.95 or $19.85 would be most inconvenient,
| since many people seem to live life with only $20 bills in
| their wallet and there would be a lot of extra change
| required.
|
| But, if we stopped minting pennies because they cost too
| much (3.7 cents), it's hard to imagine we're going to keep
| producing nickels when they cost 13.8 cents to mint. Dimes
| are much cheaper than nickels (5.8 cents), and quarters
| aren't too bad relative to face value (14.7 cents). Article
| with values [1], which I rounded to millidollars. I'd bet
| people would rather keep dimes than quarters, but rounding
| everything to quarters is a big step. I certainly would
| prefer quarters --- it's been a long time since arcade
| machines took dimes, and I only have quarter mechs (most of
| my games are on free play, and I can reuse the quarters I
| need forever, or add a credit button, but still).
|
| [1] https://www.nbcphiladelphia.com/news/national-
| international/...
| mulmen wrote:
| > But, if we stopped minting pennies because they cost
| too much (3.7 cents), it's hard to imagine we're going to
| keep producing nickels when they cost 13.8 cents to mint.
| Dimes are much cheaper than nickels (5.8 cents), and
| quarters aren't too bad relative to face value (14.7
| cents).
|
| Coins aren't disposable. Why does it matter if the
| production cost is higher than the face value?
| axiolite wrote:
| > Why does it matter if the production cost is higher
| than the face value?
|
| You can buy pennies or nickels in bulk, melt them down,
| and turn a tidy profit. That's literally a "money
| printing glitch"
|
| Every penny or nickel that gets lost in the gutter,
| stored in a coin collection, used as a washer or shim,
| turned into jewelery, or sets around in jars unused,
| represents a financial loss to the Treasury.
|
| It's called seigniorage and melt value. Also see
| Gresham's law (hoarding).
| mulmen wrote:
| No, you can't. According to [1] the scrap value of a
| penny is $0.0084771. The cost of _production_ is $0.037.
| The relevant question is if a penny creates more than
| $0.037 of economic value before it is lost or destroyed.
|
| [1]: http://coinapps.com/base-metal/coin/calculator/
| axiolite wrote:
| Okay, metal prices are low at the moment, but post-1982
| pennies did have a melt value of approx 2c not long ago.
| And it shows nickels are still currently worth more than
| 5c.
| mulmen wrote:
| Sure, if the coins are worth more as scrap that's a
| problem. So why isn't that the justification?
| toast0 wrote:
| Look, the Mint has one job, to make money. If it's losing
| money, it doesn't make cents. :P
|
| But, while coins are durable, the Mint has been making
| billions of pennies every year since the 1950s, and yet
| retailers have trouble sourcing enough pennies to make
| change. They do tend not to be recirculated, even if
| they're not disposable.
| mulmen wrote:
| > Look, the Mint has one job, to make money. If it's
| losing money, it doesn't make cents. :P
|
| I realize this is a joke but again, my objection is that
| this is the actual reason given.
|
| > But, while coins are durable, the Mint has been making
| billions of pennies every year since the 1950s, and yet
| retailers have trouble sourcing enough pennies to make
| change. They do tend not to be recirculated, even if
| they're not disposable.
|
| These are all better reasons than the one we were given.
| axiolite wrote:
| > These are all better reasons than the one we were
| given.
|
| Explaining that it costs 4c to make a 1c coin is a pretty
| clear and solid justification. People know that producing
| a physical unit of currency should cost considerably less
| than its face value, and if not, it's a huge problem.
|
| Complaining that one news article, which is just
| reporting a current event, doesn't give you an in-depth
| background analysis and context, is absurd. If you care
| about a topic enough to want that level of in-depth, you
| can go look for it elsewhere.
|
| CNN pointed me this NYT article: https://archive.is/Ek38I
| mulmen wrote:
| > Explaining that it costs 4c to make a 1c coin is a
| pretty clear and solid justification.
|
| It's really not though, for the reasons I described
| already.
|
| > Complaining that one news article, which is just
| reporting a current event, doesn't give you an in-depth
| background analysis and context, is absurd.
|
| Well then it's good that I didn't do that.
|
| > If you care about a topic enough to want that level of
| in-depth, you can go look for it elsewhere.
|
| Like the HN comment section?
|
| Trump himself said:
|
| > For far too long the United States has minted pennies
| which literally cost us more than 2 cents. This is so
| wasteful!
|
| That certainly _sounds_ like the reason is production
| cost and not any of the compelling reasons you have
| provided.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| The last time we got rid of a coin, money was worth
| something like 40x less. I don't want to exchange 8 dimes.
| Keep the quarters and just the quarters.
| frankus wrote:
| Rounding to a nickel has the advantage that's it's both
| simple (1, 2, 6, and 7 round down; 3, 4, 8, and 9 round up)
| and fair (there's no systematic bias in favor of the buyer or
| seller).
|
| Dimes need to deal with how to round numbers ending in 5,
| making them unfair, or (with a more elaborate system of
| looking at both digits) complicated.
|
| Quarters (being an odd value) are fair, but kind of a
| nightmare to memorize all of the values that round up or down
| (1-12, 26-37, 51-62, and 76-87 round down; 13-24, 38-49,
| 63-74, and 88-99 round up; and I'm not even sure I don't have
| an error in those numbers).
|
| Also it's awkward if a higher-valued coin (e.g. quarters)
| isn't divisible by the least valuable coin (e.g. a dime)
| TheJoeMan wrote:
| Quick, someone file a trademark for "Take a Quarter, Leave a
| Quarter"
| zer00eyz wrote:
| > It's a complete waste of money and time continuing to mint
| such low-value currency. It can't be used for just about
| anything.
|
| The problem: the dollar is almost global in its usage. The
| penny may not be important to the US, but it dam well is every
| where else where dollars are still in use frequently, along
| side, or in place of the local/native currency.
|
| Getting rid of the penny will have implications, getting rid of
| more coins would endanger the use of the dollar globally.
|
| There is still a large portion of the world where 100 dollar
| bill and a Rolex will get you home safely.
| diogocp wrote:
| Approximately nobody uses US coins outside the US. Even in
| countries where the dollar is widely accepted, trying to use
| coins will get you weird looks at best.
| Night_Thastus wrote:
| In what part of the world do they use US _pennies_?
|
| The US _currency system_ sure. But _pennies_ , specifically?
| zahlman wrote:
| Before Canada stopped using its penny, it was common to
| find American pennies in circulation.
|
| It's still fairly common to find American nickels, quarters
| and dimes in circulation. (Probably mostly dimes if I had
| to guess.) They're generally accepted at par because nobody
| is even really looking at them and if they did it wouldn't
| really represent being, well, short-changed.
| whycome wrote:
| I've found that self-checkouts in Canada are a great way
| to get rid of piles of change. You can pretty much dump
| it in. Curiously, it will reject all the US coins and
| spit them back out.
| bloak wrote:
| Same in Britain (except that the rejection of US coins is
| ... less curious). The funny thing is that sometimes they
| have these strange machines nearby that I have never seen
| anyone using[1] but which claim to be able to convert
| coins for you while taking a cut.
|
| It's true that not all the self-checkouts accept cash but
| if you go when it's not too busy you can easily find one
| that does.
|
| [1] OK, I've occasionally "used" one myself but not for
| putting coins into it. I just like to cheer myself up by
| reading the hilarious list of objects that I shouldn't
| insert into it.
| zahlman wrote:
| > Curiously, it will reject all the US coins and spit
| them back out.
|
| I haven't found them to be noticeably less accepting of
| American coins than Canadian ones. (Small sample size;
| American coins in change definitely are _less_ common
| than they used to be, although it does happen.)
|
| Especially dimes. Man do they just not want to take any
| kind of ten-cent piece sometimes.
| dpark wrote:
| > The penny may not be important to the US, but it dam well
| is every where else where dollars are still in use frequently
|
| [citation needed]
| tiagod wrote:
| As far as I am aware, USD is used for larger amounts in such
| countries. Smaller purchases are made in the local currency.
| zdragnar wrote:
| There are also plenty of places where flashing a 100 dollar
| bill and a Rolex will ensure you don't get home at all.
| Symbiote wrote:
| Countries like Ecuador that use US dollars mint their own
| coins for local circulation.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecuadorian_centavo_coins
| wat10000 wrote:
| It's a little silly. The smallest denomination the US has ever
| had was a half cent. In terms of relative purchasing power, it
| was more valuable than a dime is today. The country didn't
| collapse.
| firefax wrote:
| >I'd say screw it, get rid of nickles and dimes as well.
| Quarters can stay, for now.
|
| Let's do it like Japan does, only one type of currency. And
| that currency will be the penny. One dollar note? No buddy...
| that's a _one hundred cent_ note now.
|
| We may or may not continue to mint one dollar coins (previously
| one cent coins), but everything will make... cents.
|
| (I guess this style of humor is better delivered verbally?)
| toast0 wrote:
| JPY has the benefit that people probably don't try to use
| floating point numbers for currency. (ignoring the central
| joke of your comment)
| extraduder_ire wrote:
| The sen still exists. There's even a few 50 sen coins still
| floating around.
| mathgradthrow wrote:
| Nothing avoids rounding.
| Babkock wrote:
| Some people are poor. Did you know that? Some people live in
| poverty. I'm sure that is a big surprise to you. Some Americans
| still have to spend nickels and dimes. Crazy, right? Some
| people don't have infinite Bitcoin from mommy and daddy.
| BenjiWiebe wrote:
| I'm in favor of keeping dimes.
|
| However, to put it into perspective, a dime is only 50
| seconds of labor at Kansas' minimum wage ($7.25/hr).
|
| It's hard to find a situation where a dime truly makes much
| difference. And remember the rounding. You won't always lose
| 10c just because dimes don't exist.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| Some people are poor. What about it?
|
| Removing a coin doesn't change the average price people pay
| for things.
|
| Think about doing it the other way. Would bringing back the
| half penny help poor people?
| mulmen wrote:
| I'd like to see an estimation of how often coinage is actually
| used. I play a lot of pinball so I handle quarters frequently
| but I can't really think of what I do with the smaller
| denominations except collect them in a jar.
|
| I wouldn't mind having larger coin denominations though. Dollar
| and five dollar coins would be very convenient.
| RobotToaster wrote:
| Why is everyone talking about rounding?
|
| I've read there's enough pennies in bank vaults to last for
| years.
| ayaros wrote:
| While minting this currency the government continues to nickel
| and dime the American people.
| dec0dedab0de wrote:
| i want them to make coins for all the current bills, and expand
| bills to higher amounts. Cash has not kept up with inflation.
| mattmaroon wrote:
| Governments should simply put a cap on credit card merchant
| fees of half a percent or something like that, which I'm pretty
| sure is what they do in other countries. Problem solved.
| Night_Thastus wrote:
| Good luck getting anything like that to pass here though!
| waynecochran wrote:
| Also, we can store 1/4 exactly in binary, but not 1/100, 1/20,
| or 1/10. So that solves another problem.
| jrussino wrote:
| > Quarters can stay, for now.
|
| I'd say just drop the second decimal place and have dimes and
| half-dollar coins.
| thescriptkiddie wrote:
| also bring back the 50-cent piece, eliminate the redundant
| dollar bill, and replace the 2 dollar bill with a new 2 dollar
| coin
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| So lets just adopt low overhead (read cheap) wireless QR-based
| payments like China has? Is there really a good reason to do
| cash anymore? We don't have to choose between expensive credit
| cards and cash, there are other solutions out there that are
| taking over the rest of the world.
| EasyMark wrote:
| The big reason is less government traceability and
| surveillance. People like cash, we don't need everything to
| be digital and easily controlled. The fact that China does it
| doesn't really give me a lot of confidence that it's
| necessarily an awesome idea.
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| It's not just China though, it's almost every country going
| through a cashless transition at this point, so if it is
| awesome idea in Chad and Laos as well as Sweden and
| Australia, what does it mean elsewhere? Are we the only
| country that is rich enough to avoid a transition? The
| biggest issue in the states is that given a choice, the
| cash holdout businesses become increasing larger targets
| for theft (eg marijuana dispensaries in the Seattle area)
| as other businesses opt out.
| epistasis wrote:
| Your proposal lacks common cents! (Which I fully agree with)
|
| I'd like to get a dollar coin that is distinctive enough to not
| be confused with the quarter. Last time I got change for cash,
| the cashier mistook a dollar coin for a quarter when giving me
| coins.
| EasyMark wrote:
| I don't want people using cards more, as I don't want a
| cashless society. Government knows enough about it, why make it
| easier? I'm find with getting rid of pennies and nickles
| though, we can do that.
| k2enemy wrote:
| It is a misconception that credit card rewards are a transfer
| of wealth from poor to rich:
| https://www.complexsystemspodcast.com/episodes/credit-card-r...
| nixpulvis wrote:
| Get rid of the nickel, dime, and quarter. Increase the 1/2
| dollar and dollar coins, and add new 2, and 5 dollar coins.
| jacquesm wrote:
| So why would you drive to increase that choke hold?
|
| Cash is _the_ way for small retailers to allow people who have
| very little money to stay away from the lure of easy credit. If
| you force them to use cards they will lose track of their
| spending completely and that will surely not help.
| sschueller wrote:
| Quarters don't make sense to me. We don't have $25 notes either
| why should be have 25c coins?
| bloak wrote:
| I don't know the history of it but I noticed that the
| currency of the Netherlands, before they switched to the
| euro, consistently used quarters:
|
| Coins: 0.05, 0.10, 0.25, 1, 2.5, 5 Bank notes: 10, 25, 50,
| 100, 250
|
| OK, there seems to be a gap there, but no coin or bank note
| is worth 2 * 10^X.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_guilder
|
| Is there another currency that consistently prefers 2.5 *
| 10^X to 2 * 10^X?
| ProllyInfamous wrote:
| Make a dollar coin, the size of a current-half-dollar.
|
| Make a half-dollar coin, the size of the current quarter.
|
| Make a quarter, the size of the current dime.
|
| Get rid of all other coins. Also remove the $1.00 bill.
|
| Start using $2.00 bills (as smallest cash) and stock ATMs with
| $50 and $10 bills.
|
| Create a new $1000.00 note.
|
| ----
|
| [not actually] fun fact: removal of the penny results in _more
| nickels being minted_ , which will actually result in a net-
| cost for removing penny from circulation.
| grishka wrote:
| Russia eliminated all kopeck coins years ago and anyone hardly
| noticed. Seemingly the only place you could still see any is a
| bank. Retailers usually round down to whole rubles if you're
| paying in cash.
| paxys wrote:
| Too early to say "ever", considering there has been no act of
| congress on this matter and the penny continues to be legal
| tender. The decision to stop minting it is a (legally debatable)
| executive order, and the next president or even the current one
| can change their mind about it tomorrow.
| aDyslecticCrow wrote:
| lets hope not. This is long overdue and should pose relatively
| little issue compared to most other recent questionable
| executive orders.
|
| stop minting and stop accepting is commonly separated to allow
| adjustment. so likely a later president will just add the
| second phaseout step.
| dawnerd wrote:
| I agree it's time to follow Canada and the rest of the world
| but it needs to be done through congress, not executive
| orders. It needs to have a proper framework for migration and
| laws for how payments are rounded.
| Waterluvian wrote:
| I don't believe we actually have a law that dictates how to
| round in Canada. There's just a government recommendation.
|
| I get that the U.S. is a much lower trust culture, but is
| it really necessary? The rounding is only for cash
| transactions.
| aDyslecticCrow wrote:
| I think stores will adjust their prices pretty quick if
| they cannot even aquire pennies to give as change. So no
| law should be needed.
|
| you may need to stipulate a grace period during which
| stores are still obligated to take pennies, to slowly
| shake them out of circulation without every American
| needing to visit a bank for cashing in. But its also
| possible that isn't needed either.
|
| In the 2nd half of the phaseout you may need a proper
| marketing campaign to remind people to cashe in before
| expiration. (common when other countries update their
| physical currency). But that is probably the job of a
| different sitting president anyway so whatever.
|
| Heck, is this actual something that congress have say
| over? It wouldn't surprise me if this was actually up to
| the federal reserve to decide, and they seem on board.
| Jblx2 wrote:
| Why would pennies need to expire? Why wouldn't stores
| still accept them, even if they are in short supply?
| Surely stores would still accept $2 bills and $1 coins
| (which are "rare") even if they don't like it?
| asdfman123 wrote:
| I say we eliminate both pennies and (significantly more
| importantly) executive orders
| CSMastermind wrote:
| > (significantly more importantly) executive orders
|
| How would that work?
|
| The president is the executive of the federal government and
| needs to issue directives to employees telling them how to do
| their jobs.
|
| This is like saying we should get rid of CEOs sending emails.
| chiph wrote:
| Like many people, I throw my change into a jar when I get home.
| One time I only kept pennies and used an old apple cider jug.
| Turns out that a gallon of pennies is worth almost $55 [0]. And
| that carrying a heavy glass jug filled with pennies to the
| Coinstar machine is very anxiety inducing.
|
| Speaking of which - the Coinstar machines near me will give you
| several options for redemption. Some of which have been Amazon
| and Home Depot e-gift codes that have no redemption fee.
|
| [0] A potential worthless interview question...
| randomtoast wrote:
| You probably could have made $150 if you had melted the coins
| and sold the copper instead.
| arantius wrote:
| A penny is less than 3% copper (since 1982).
| deafpolygon wrote:
| we don't have "pennies" in the EU anymore
| estimator7292 wrote:
| I'm now seeing signs in stores begging people for exact change
| due to a "penny shortage"
|
| Seriously? You can't give up 4 cents per transaction to round to
| a nickel? Fuck, round it up for all I care, 5 cents is worth
| approximately nothing today.
| dbcooper wrote:
| Nick Mullen should be the guest of honor at this event.
| dlivingston wrote:
| Ha, didn't expect to see a comment about Mullen on HN. Saw him
| live in Boston a few months ago. Very cool to see the C-Town
| boys blowing up in popularity.
| fortran77 wrote:
| Apropos: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F8R5QCPUqaI
| mmmBacon wrote:
| I'm old enough to remember being able to scrounge around the
| house for pennies and heading down to Gracie's corner store so I
| could buy some Swedish fish. They were 1 cent each. Gracie
| counted them out and put them in a small paper bag for you.
|
| A major score was finding a dime or quarter on the street. When
| the Whatchamacallit first came out they were 25 cents!
| lenerdenator wrote:
| There's something about getting rid of Honest Abe on coinage that
| seems... sadly appropriate for the current climate.
|
| At least he's still on fives.
| ezfe wrote:
| Step one: make all items cost an even five cents after tax. step
| two: when making price adjustments like discount, round the
| effect to the nearest five cents. Step three: charge everyone
| this amount
| m463 wrote:
| But if 99 cent stuff costs a dollar, sales will plummet.
| ezfe wrote:
| If they are worried about that then they can make them 95C/
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| It's been useless baggage for decades. The even saner approach
| would be to fade-out an order of magnitude of currency every
| century. The math checks out.
| TheJoeMan wrote:
| Do any other countries have/had "penny squish" souvenir machines?
| You put in 2 quarters + a penny, and it stamps a design onto the
| penny. My favorite souvenir, small, cheap, can keep in a booklet,
| and many landmarks have the machines. There are a few machines
| that take a $1 bill and use a fresh penny blank internally.
| WorkingDead wrote:
| Our money is being depreciated at a rate of 3% per year and up to
| 25%-30% during the last inflationary cycle and is now to the
| point where coins are nearly useless. At the current trajectory,
| the one dollar note will also be obsolete in our lifetime.
| codyb wrote:
| As much as there's a lot of reasonable arguments for ending the
| minting of the penny, the method in which this president waves
| his hands and fundamentally changes things such as our White
| House, our currency, our trade policies, our universities leaves
| me with a bad taste in my mouth and it's hard to support even
| sensible decisions this authoritarian regime makes.
| halapro wrote:
| The fact that you'd need to even mint them in 2025 is mind
| boggling. Why isn't there a law that stops minting coins that
| cost more than their values? You'd think they would have figured
| this out by now?
| gwbas1c wrote:
| IMO:
|
| 1: The price posted should be the price you pay. (Include all
| taxes, fees, gratuities, ect.)
|
| 2: The price posted should be a multiple of $0.05, $0.10, or
| $0.25
|
| Problem solved.
| shevy-java wrote:
| Hmm. I actually still like coins and paper money. However had in
| the EU, I don't like the 1 and 2 eurocent at all. These are just
| pointless really. I'd like a 5 euro coin and a 2 euro paper
| instead.
| cachius wrote:
| This is just what the head of the bavarian mint Reinhard Riffel
| said recently:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HlwvnQnJAtg&t=840s
|
| Quote in German:
|
| Aus unserer Sicht, das uberrascht viele, wenn ich das sag,
| wurde es Sinn machen, die 1 und 2 Cent Munzen abzuschaffen und
| durch eine 5 EUR Munze zu ersetzen. Lastig empfinden die
| meisten Menschen eigentlich nur diese braunen Munzen, weil die
| einfach keine Kaufkraft haben. Die liegen im Portemonnaie, aber
| man kann dafur nichts kaufen. Man kann bestenfalls die als
| Ruckgeld nutzen. 1 und 2 EUR Munzen werden europaweit dieses
| Jahr [2025] so viele gemacht wie noch nie. Warum ist das so?
| Weil sie eine Kaufkraft haben, weil die verwendet werden und
| weil die nicht als lastig empfunden werden. Munzen sind fur den
| Steuerzahler massiv gunstiger. Ne 5 oder 10 EUR Banknote in der
| Herstellung oder in der Beschaffung fur den Bund kostet in etwa
| so viel wie eine 2 EUR Munze, aber die 2 EUR Munze halt 20
| Jahre und die 5 EUR Banknote halt 3 Monate. [...] Gerade die 5
| und 10 EUR Banknoten sind extrem in Zirkulation; drei maximal
| sechs Monate, da sind die durch. Kann man sich ausrechnen, wie
| viel der Staat sparen wurde, wenn man jetzt eine 5 EUR Munze
| einfuhren wurde und die 5 EUR Banknote ersetzt.
|
| Translation to English:
|
| From our point of view, which surprises many when I say this,
| it would make sense to abolish the 1 and 2 cent coins and
| replace them with a 5 euro coin. Most people actually only find
| these brown coins annoying because they simply have no
| purchasing power. They lie in your wallet, but you can't buy
| anything with them. At best, they can be used as change. This
| year [2025], more 1 and 2 euro coins will be produced across
| Europe than ever before. Why is that? Because they have
| purchasing power, because they are used, and because they are
| not considered a nuisance. Coins are much cheaper for
| taxpayers. A EUR5 or EUR10 banknote costs about as much to
| produce or procure for the federal government as a EUR2 coin,
| but the EUR2 coin lasts 20 years and the EUR5 banknote lasts 3
| months. [...] The EUR5 and EUR10 banknotes in particular are in
| extremely high circulation; they last three to six months at
| most. You can calculate how much the state would save if it
| introduced a EUR5 coin now to replace the EUR5 banknote.
| zahlman wrote:
| The last ever _American_ penny (as the article text clarifies).
| Don 't any other countries with a "dollar" use the same name for
| their 1-cent pieces?
|
| > The penny costs nearly four cents to mint, more than the coin's
| worth.
|
| Wow. I think it was only something like 1.5c (in the local
| market) when Canada gave up on them.
| axiolite wrote:
| penny-rounding "imposes a tax of $3.27 million Canadian dollars
| from consumers to grocery stores on a yearly basis in aggregate
|
| https://economics.ubc.ca/news/penny-rounding-profitable-for-...
|
| eliminating the penny would require producing more nickels to
| "fill the gap in small-value transactions." But nickels suffer
| from a similar "seigniorage" problem: the 2024 U.S. Mint report
| said the five-cent coins have a unit cost of 13.78 cents each.
|
| https://time.com/7215870/trump-us-penny-mint-costs-one-cent-...
| whimsicalism wrote:
| i think ~5 cents per capita is a fine price to pay to never
| have to think about pennies again
| kevincox wrote:
| Especially since the lower cost means that we would save more
| than that 5 cents in taxes. (Well money is fungible so not
| really, but that money would be spent for some other
| government service.)
| wasabi991011 wrote:
| Cool research, thanks for being one of the few to bring
| substantial arguments to this discussion.
|
| For your first point, I would like to add the next sentence for
| context: "That means that a typical grocery store would receive
| an additional estimated $157 in revenue just from rounding." I
| feel like this is negligible.
|
| Also, for the nickel, the seigniorage ratio is 2.something,
| isn't that lower than the penny? I think there's a decent
| chance that removing the penny would still be a net benefit for
| the mint.
| more_corn wrote:
| I'd give you my 2c on the matter but now with the scarcity of a
| penny I'm not sure how to calculate the value.
| permo-w wrote:
| "Last-ever" seems premature to me. I don't think the odds that
| there's a redomination or Trump decides he likes pennies are that
| low
| thordenmark wrote:
| Can't retailers just price everything to the nearest $.05 to
| begin with so there is nothing to round? I guess tax percentages
| screw that up. Nevermind.
| clarkmoody wrote:
| Can we stop changing our clocks twice a year as well?
| water9 wrote:
| When will they create a $200 bill or bring back the 500? I feel
| like the 50s is the new 20.
| jrmg wrote:
| In other countries that have eliminated pennies, was it done with
| more planning and advice from the government?
|
| It strikes me as uniquely American (perhaps uniquely Trumpian) to
| just stop making them and let whatever happens happen with no
| detailed planning.
| sequoia wrote:
| Gas prices are frequently in fractions of a penny. This never
| matters because they round. Yep, rounding, in the real world, and
| the nation has not imploded. As pointed out by others Canada does
| this already and it's no issue.
| gblargg wrote:
| And whenever tax is added it's usually a fraction of a penny as
| well. Rounding has been with us for a long time.
| mulmen wrote:
| The argument that we should stop minting them because they cost
| more to produce than their face value falls flat for me.
|
| A penny is not a single use item. The cost of production must be
| depreciated across the thousands of transactions in which it is
| used and then compared to the economic benefit of its existence.
|
| It may be true that the economic benefit of a penny is less than
| the production cost but I don't see anyone making that case.
|
| What will it actually cost the US economy to stop minting these
| coins?
|
| How long will they remain in circulation until they are no longer
| accepted for payment?
| foxglacier wrote:
| > the final coins pressed will be auctioned off and that the
| actual last pennies put into circulation from the US Mint were
| struck in June.
|
| Seems like this is a stunt to extract a bit of money from
| collectors. I kind of wonder if collectors really value
| coins/stamps/etc. that were specially made to target the
| collector market and didn't even exist in the natural world.
| Feels icky.
| reboot81 wrote:
| My country quit using our (then) lowest denomination coin 32
| years ago. Also worth 1/100 of a USD.
| bentt wrote:
| So what you're telling me is that pennies are the new bitcoin.
| Fixed supply.
| gblargg wrote:
| Except they're backed by something of value (worth even more
| than a penny).
| geophile wrote:
| This is a very minor but pleasant surprise. An action like this
| is beyond what I thought the US government (my government, sadly)
| was capable of. It is kind of puzzling to me that this issue,
| like every other one, didn't get politicized, with right wing
| talking heads bemoaning progress of any sort, appealing to the
| good old days, when America was great, the days that MAGAs want
| to return to.
|
| It's a good start. Now let's do metric.
| chuckreynolds wrote:
| Good. BYE. lol.
| I_dream_of_Geni wrote:
| The mighty penny is dead. Long live the penny!!
| joshe wrote:
| I, for one, favor having a .1 cent piece, a third the size of a
| penny about the size of a shirt button.
|
| Because San Francisco sales tax is 8.63 and something the costs 1
| dollar is really 1.083. And I would like 91.7 bach cents when I
| give 2 dollars.
| kazinator wrote:
| That seems weird. I mean, if you decide to abolish the penny, you
| just do it cold turkey. You don't set a date in the future and
| the continue making them, so that the last penny is accompanied
| by fanfare.
|
| > _Trump announced via social media in February that he
| instructed the Mint to stop making the once-popular coin, citing
| the cost of production._
|
| So between February and today, they just ignored the order?
|
| What justified the pennies produced between February and
| November? Those pennies were necessary, and still cost-effective,
| but going forward, the penny as such is no longer necessary?
| retrocog wrote:
| Debasement through inflation steals from workers, pensioners, and
| savers. On the other hand, its great for big business and big
| government.
|
| The money illusion fools many people into believing they've
| gained (ie real estate) when in reality, they've lost purchasing
| power.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Money_illusion
| jedberg wrote:
| "What are we going to do about the rounding problem?!"
|
| INCLUDE TAX IN THE PRICE, then you won't have a rounding problem!
|
| The common argument against that is "but there are so many tax
| jurisdictions"
|
| One, Europe has a bunch too and has solved this, and two, it
| would only apply to in person cash transactions. You should be
| able to figure out the tax rules for the one specific place the
| transaction is taking place.
| rkomorn wrote:
| Call me cynical but I don't at all believe the issue is tax
| jurisdictions or anything related to complexity.
|
| It's that it's easier to show a price of $0.99 and have the
| consumer pay $1.08 (for example) than either show a price of
| $1.08 and have the consumer pay it, or show a price of $0.99
| and have the consumer pay $0.99 and "lose" 7 cents (because
| your price was $0.92 before taxes).
|
| Pre-tax price is lower and sells better than post-tax price.
| jedberg wrote:
| That wouldn't apply if everyone included tax in their prices.
| In this case, the item would just be $1.10.
|
| If the business _really_ thinks they will lose money by
| pricing over a dollar, then yes, they would have to take that
| hit. But they are already taking that hit if the "real
| value" is $1.02 for example.
|
| It's just a price/demand curve. They would simply have to
| optimize it differently.
| rkomorn wrote:
| There's a reason everything is priced at some variety of
| .99, 99.99, 999.99, etc: it sells better than 1.08, 108,
| 1080, etc.
|
| My point is getting the consumer to eat the sales tax on
| top is just a wise trick by US businesses, and nothing to
| do with complexity.
| jedberg wrote:
| That's been debunked. Every consumer just auto-rounds in
| their head. Companies keep doing it because of tradition
| more than anything else.
|
| It is a wise trick, and exactly the job of government --
| to prevent the public from getting tricked by businesses.
| rkomorn wrote:
| > That's been debunked. Every consumer just auto-rounds
| in their head.
|
| Has it?
|
| I'm searching around and not coming up with much that
| says that's the case.
|
| On the other hand, here are some recent-ish links that
| suggest it still works:
|
| - https://www.rd.com/article/why-prices-end-in-99/
|
| - https://capitaloneshopping.com/research/pricing-
| psychology-s...
|
| This one suggests it depends on the consumer, with
| "highly numerate" consumers being less likely to think
| the price is lower (but presumably also less common in
| the customer pool):
|
| - https://business.missouri.edu/about/news/99-ending-
| prices-ar...
|
| Edit: searching for "charm pricing" specifically suggests
| it does work, but I suppose maybe there's some bias on
| the context in which people use that term.
| rendall wrote:
| Ikr? It's like everyone thinks _" It is simply not possible to
| set a price on an item so that its total price is a nice round
| number after tax is applied! One would need to... invent a
| special kind of math to do that!"_
|
| It's like the whole country is unwilling to calculate 1.065x=$2
| or whatever.
|
| And... why not include tax in the display price? I never did
| get a good explanation for that.
| rendall wrote:
| We should mint milills. Really lean into useless currency.
|
| https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Mill_(currency)
| WalterBright wrote:
| I remember going to the drugstore and buying two pieces of candy
| for a penny each. I added a third for sales tax. The cashier
| handed back the penny because the tax didn't kick in until 10
| cents.
| WalterBright wrote:
| I have a couple glass jars full of pennies. I think I'll just
| give them to the thrift store.
| tonyhart7 wrote:
| so its an NFT now???
| axus wrote:
| Penny-wise and pound-foolish.
| paulddraper wrote:
| > The penny costs nearly four cents to mint, more than the coin's
| worth.
|
| To be clear, coins and bills are used far more than once.
|
| I would even go so far as to say they are re-used hundreds of
| times.
| donatj wrote:
| I've got a ridiculous question, but hear me out.
|
| Pennies have more zinc in them than they are worth, right?
|
| Did the penny have any sort of stabling force against
| inflation... a sort of "Zinc Standard" as it were?
|
| Civil libertarians are always talking about how moving away from
| gold coins, and later moving away from the gold standard that
| backed the non-gold coins is the root of inflation.
|
| If gold can have such an effect, why not zinc?
| connicpu wrote:
| You can't legally melt down US coins for their metals
| donatj wrote:
| Even so, it has intrinsic value. A gold coin wouldn't become
| worthless just because the government stopped you from
| melting it. Same goes for a zinc coin.
| I_dream_of_Geni wrote:
| The mighty penny is dead. Long live the penny!!
| kragen wrote:
| Copper pennies weigh 3.11 grams. Copper is currently US$10987 per
| tonne https://www.metal.com/en/prices/LME_CA_3M so a copper penny
| is worth 3.4C/. This is a surprisingly low number to me; I would
| have expected it to be closer to 10C/ or 20C/, since presumably
| it was about 1C/ of copper when it was still copper.
|
| By comparison, a silver dime (90% silver, 10% copper) is 2.268
| grams, and silver is US$1486.77/kg
| https://www.metal.com/en/prices/201102250392, so the dime
| contains about US$3.03 worth of silver. From the point of view of
| an 18th- or 19th-century person, for whom the purpose of the mint
| was to certify the value of the precious metal in the coin by
| stamping it, the dollar has lost 29/30 (97%) of its value since
| minting of silver coins ended.
| darknavi wrote:
| Pennies are not 100% copper any more. Mostly zinc.
| kragen wrote:
| I know. The non-copper pennies also don't weigh 3.11 grams.
| Dimes aren't silver anymore either.
| anamexis wrote:
| > From the point of view of an 18th- or 19th-century person,
| for whom the purpose of the mint was to certify the value of
| the precious metal in the coin by stamping it
|
| Was that the purpose of the mint? That would imply that the
| relative value of silver vs. copper was static.
| kragen wrote:
| It was, yes. The varying relative values of metals was in
| fact a huge problem for mints for many centuries. The problem
| was sometimes resolved by refusing to mint any but the
| priciest metal, and at other times by the values of different
| coins such as shillings and sovereigns varying relative to
| one another.
| anamexis wrote:
| Ok, but the US mint in the 18th and 19th centuries?
| kragen wrote:
| Yes, this was one of the major political controversies
| around the US mint in the 19th century and even the early
| 20th century: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_silver
| anamexis wrote:
| Fascinating. Thank you.
| pfdietz wrote:
| A penny contains about .6 cents worth of zinc, so this was going
| to happen sooner or later.
| nickpinkston wrote:
| If only Trump could get the daylight savings and the metrics
| system updates done too.
| randyrand wrote:
| I'm not sure why the article says this is so hard for retailers
| to figure out. _They already round_.
|
| When they apply 7% sales tax to a $1.99 purchase, what do they
| charge you? $2.1293? Obviously not.
|
| Just do whatever they already do.
| jeremyjh wrote:
| The article mentions several practical and legal issues, and
| your comment does not address any of them.
|
| Also, "whatever they do" currently is rounding to two decimal
| places - that doesn't help us here. I'm not saying the software
| changes required are challenging, but I'm sure there are lots
| of POS systems that are not properly maintained anymore that
| will cause issues for a lot of smaller merchants.
| xboxnolifes wrote:
| The problem is that the rounding you are asking them to do is
| illegal in a few states.
| techblueberry wrote:
| I think we should issue a new dollar that's 10x the value of the
| current dollar, and / 10 the value of everything. I mean it
| wouldn't make a substantive difference, but psychologically, I
| think it would feel better if the mean value of the house in the
| US was 52k instead of 522k, and I could start carrying cash again
| and have 100 bucks not go by in like 2 fast food orders.
| tvb12 wrote:
| Would it feel better to see your bank account and pay checks
| shrink by 90%?
| techblueberry wrote:
| Yes, my brain like to think about weird things, and this for
| some reason is one of those weird things I like to think
| about, maybe it's just me, but my brain kinda likes small big
| numbers over big big numbers. Maybe because mentally it's
| like a giant fraction reduction across the entire economy.
| janalsncm wrote:
| Rounding seems to be a non issue to me. We already round: a 5%
| tax on something that costs $5.99 is technically $0.2995 which
| will be rounded to $0.30.
|
| If there are no pennies you round to the nearest 5 cents. If
| there were no coins, you would round to the nearest dollar.
| jxramos wrote:
| What would it take to shift the balance of inflation to restore
| the purchasing power of the penny? Just out of curiosity how does
| a government and a people and their economy go the other
| direction?
| alright2565 wrote:
| Deflation is an economic disaster. The Great Depression, for
| example, was related to deflation.
| jxramos wrote:
| I don't know one way or another but what specifically are the
| pain points of deflation and how do those compare to the
| never ending inflation? I've lived under inflation all my
| life, it's a slow creeping nearly sub threshold insidious
| process that erodes the value of money. Buy what is life like
| under deflation, is there pain but ultimate correction to a
| sane state? It feels like there is no correction to
| inflation.
| jonstewart wrote:
| 10 for 1 split on USD.
| jameslk wrote:
| Salami slicing stimulus package
| tomcam wrote:
| I am uneasy about it for no logical reason. I have an emotional
| attachment to pennies because as a not rich kid in the 60s, even
| finding a penny brightened my day. Back then they sold "penny
| candy", for example a roll of Smarties, and it was actually a
| penny. There were maybe half a dozen options. You absolutely
| could bring a buck in and get hundred pieces of candy, modulo the
| 6% sales tax in SoCal.
|
| Middle school in the mid 70s: a penny rolls around the corner and
| I pick it up. A school bully and his friends taunted me at
| length. They'd launched it hoping I'd do exactly what I did. I
| just thought to myself, one day I'll be a fucking millionaire and
| you'll still be a squib. That came true. I am damaged enough to
| be smug about it to this day.
|
| The next year that same kid and his friends beat me up, giving me
| a TBI, a permanent hole in my memory, and what apparently was a
| new personality. Twenty years later he was found dead in a
| dumpster. When I heard about it I did not weep for him. That is
| of course my defect. I am not proud of my perpetual grievance.
|
| I saved spare change in jars until my 50s, and every once in a
| while took them to the bank and bought something cool, or just
| took them out and played with them with my kids.
|
| So for me pennies are some kind of odd little vestige of control
| over my life. Completely inane, I get it. They're annoying af and
| too expensive to manufacture. Everything's electronic anyway
| these days. I'll miss them though.
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| It's absolutely bonkers how long it took the US to get rid of the
| penny.
| shmerl wrote:
| _> Some merchants plan to round prices to the nearest nickel,
| often a penny or two more_
|
| Prices should never have been set to this dumb #.99 pattern
| anyway. It's one of the most annoying things.
| abstractspoon wrote:
| A classic example of - the less important something is, the more
| people will have an opinion
| J_McQuade wrote:
| Absolute bullshit title. The USA has stopped making one-cent
| coins, and they don't even call them pennies in any meaningful
| way.
|
| The "last-ever" penny will not be minted until that final coin
| has been minted by:
|
| The United Kingdom
|
| Gibraltar
|
| Man
|
| St Helena & Ascension Island
|
| Guernsey
|
| The Falklands
|
| and probably a good few of others I've forgotten. Like Jersey.
| arlattimore wrote:
| In 1990, Australia stopped minting 1c and 2c coins & rounding to
| 5c.
|
| It worked out just fine.
|
| Everyone move on.
| tppiotrowski wrote:
| I remember thinking there's a small arbitrage opportunity in
| countries that don't have pennies and nickels. In NZ I believe
| stores round to the nearest decimal (.02, .01 => .00 and .03, .04
| => .05). They lose on some sales but gain on others. However,
| they don't round if you use a CC.
|
| Here's one for the FIRE folks: if it rounds up, use a CC and if
| it rounds down use cash. Use all those pennies you save using
| your CC to retire 3 minutes early.
| cjwilliams wrote:
| Dimes and 50 cents only please
| paulmooreparks wrote:
| What I've seen in places that eliminated .01 coins is that the
| .05 coin begins to be the one that everyone hates. I remember
| walking around Amsterdam several years ago with pockets full of
| .05 coins, and the same thing happens now in Singapore. They tend
| to get dumped into self-checkout machines in grocery stores.
| everdev wrote:
| If they're stopping production of the penny because it costs more
| to mint each one than each is worth, that's a stupid reason. Why
| does everything have to be about making money? Can't we just have
| useful things without worrying about how profitable they are?
| mwcz wrote:
| We do lots of things that are unprofitable, and we should
| probably do more than we do. But they should be things that
| bring non-monetary value into the world. Pennies do not bring
| non-monetary value into the world.
| didip wrote:
| We should stop printing physical money and just start making
| payments digitally everywhere.
| stevage wrote:
| It's so strange to start with "stop minting pennies" but not
| "stop pennies being legal tender".
|
| But then as an Australian it also seems very weird to even have
| pennies in circulation. We ditched ours in the 80s.
| varenc wrote:
| It'd certainly make less sense to stop them being legal tender
| if you're still minting them.
|
| Also in Australia, while no store would accept the old pennies,
| I had thought they were still legal tender in the sense that
| banks would still accept them and allow you to deposit the old
| pennies?
| stevage wrote:
| Yes. I'm not sure if legal tender is the correct term but
| yes.
|
| Many stores now do not accept cash of any kind.
| nixpulvis wrote:
| I mean, it makes numbers weird if you can't have less than a
| nickel. Tax could be designed to ensure prices are in
| increments of 5C/. And interest rates, etc.
|
| Rounding to whole numbers feels more natural to people than
| rounding to 5C/. But ultimately it's the same thing.
| stevage wrote:
| The way you're framing this sounds like no other country has
| ever gone through the process of removing their 1 and 2 cent
| coins. Many have. It's fine. None of this is a problem.
|
| It does work better if there's a bit of planning though.
| nixpulvis wrote:
| I wasn't trying to frame it that way. I have never had to
| deal with this personally, so that's just how I see it.
|
| It's not a big deal, and people have been ignoring it for
| years with gas. It's just going to be more obvious in some
| cases now for us in the US. I'll be curious to read the
| psychology behind how things are priced in response to
| this. Will $9.99 fade in favor of $9.95 more.
|
| All and all, the upsides of stopping wasting resources on
| pennies outweighs all the minuscule downsides, but it's
| still curious.
| stevage wrote:
| It would definitely work better with an actual withdrawal
| from currency. It's weird to have individual businesses
| having to decide when and how to handle the slow
| disappearance of coins.
|
| But then, there's a lot weird about American currency to
| me. Like I have heard that repeated attempts to introduce
| a $1 coin "didn't catch on". In Australia it was pretty
| simple - they took away all the $1 notes, they made a
| gazillion $1 coins. It wasn't optional. There wasn't any
| question of "catching on", it was just...this is what we
| do now.
| OwlGoesHoot wrote:
| Finally, something I can get behind
| nixpulvis wrote:
| I'm surprised nobody has mentioned Banker's Rounding in here:
| https://stackoverflow.com/questions/45223778/is-bankers-roun...
| ycombigrator wrote:
| *American
| BobbyTables2 wrote:
| Even the IRS doesn't mind rounding to the nearest dollar.
|
| Let that sink in...
| martin82 wrote:
| This sounds it will be a milestone recorded in the history books
| in the chapter of the accelerating downfall of the US empire into
| hyperinflation...
| jedimastert wrote:
| The US is not even close to the first modern country to move
| away from single cent coins, and there are many examples of
| others that don't have "hyperinflation", for example the
| Netherlands, Italy, and Canada.
|
| People have been talking about getting rid of the penny for
| decades.
| opentokix wrote:
| Oh no! What will DIY-people use now to make the ugliest floors
| known to man?
| listic wrote:
| Sometimes, they return.
|
| Recently, I read a post by an online musician friend that someone
| made a tip of 5 rubles with a banknote in Armenia - too low a sum
| to bother exchanging it in a foreign country. I was perplexed [1]
| because I don't recall ever [2] seeing such banknote - the lowest
| I remember seeing was 10 - and found that yes, it was introduced
| in 1998, discontinued and withdrawn from circulation in 2001 due
| to inflation and apparently reintroduced (maybe briefly?) in
| December 2022/January 2023.
|
| I don't know why.
|
| [1] https://www.perplexity.ai/search/in-post-soviet-russia-
| when-...
|
| [2] I am Russian; born in 1977 and left the country in December,
| 2022.
| mikhailfranco wrote:
| The lowest value coin still in use is the Uzbek Tiyin (0.01 UZS).
|
| So 1,200,000 Tiyins to the USD.
| amelius wrote:
| At this point I'm surprised our president doesn't force the
| exclusive use of cryptocurrencies.
| syngrog66 wrote:
| We do NOT know it _will_ be the last-ever penny minted.
|
| Untruths like that grind my gears. Especially in the US of 2025
| where we are awash in a sea of lies, stressful incitement and
| hype (all by intent, by bad actors.)
| nektro wrote:
| in a certain timeline this would be our warning inflation is
| getting out of hand...
| balderdash wrote:
| Why can't we do a reverse split of our currency? Print new
| dollars and change and on some date new dollar is the effective
| currency and you can trade in 10 old dollars for one new dollar?
| kedikedi wrote:
| Turkey did it some years ago (2005). Removed six zeroes and
| named it something like "new lira". Then named it back to
| "lira" after most of the old money is out of circulation.
|
| 20 years later, I think some more zeroes are available to be
| removed :)
| fred_is_fred wrote:
| What would the net outcome of this be besides smaller
| denominations having more value?
| sota_pop wrote:
| Dangit, now I'll have to start buying fuses for my electrical
| panel.
| FarmerPotato wrote:
| Removing pennies from retail is a software job at least as time-
| consuming as: Y2K or converting to Euro (yes, as a US programmer,
| it gave me a lot of work and missed holidays.)
|
| For one, think of all the POS systems stuck on old firmware.
| These are the details.
|
| Sure a lot of "easy" solutions come to mind.
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