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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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"
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.
> 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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
Additionally, having baked-in taxes à 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
> (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.
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.
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.
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 $4.99. That's all there is to it.
So do whatever they do with mils but for the penny too. They don’t nor have they ever minted a mil coin, so the procedure for this is already well established if this is correct.
Turns out the station charges you a round number of cents per gallon. Then there are federal taxes, which are, IIRC, 24.5 cents per gallon. And then there's state tax, which varies from state to state but seems to always be x.4 cents per gallon.
So I don't think it's just "evil retailer tricks".
Is the amount rounded before or after taxes? Must be after or you have to round again. So who eats or gains the rounding? The merchant or the tax collector?
Here in Argentina the law says they must be rounded down. Initially it was for 5 AR$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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
> 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?
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.
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…
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.
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"
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.
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.
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.
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 :)
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
$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.
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)
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.
Stores don’t accept 200 euro notes because most people haven’t seen one. I regularly get 500 euro notes, but I think I’ve only held a 200 euro note once in my life.
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.
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.
> 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.
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).
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
I think the issue is you’re confusing social media comments with broad, overall opinions.
I’d bet most Americans don’t even know they are getting rid of the penny. Or if they saw it on the news, they forgot about it a day later. It ranks pretty low on general concerns.
Social media commentary about the issue are a tiny minority - first people need to come across the topic, then they need to muster up the effort to actually comment. People who don’t care don’t comment.
I see this mistake with a lot of people. Issues they think are top of mind across people aren’t even known by the vast majority.
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.
If you as a consumer care about rounding, then just buy three of them: 3× $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.
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.)
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
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 99¢, or % discounts, or a system that tracks that 97¢ means lowest sale, etc).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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 retuning 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.
> 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?
> 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.
> 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.
> 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.
>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.
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?
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
>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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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 stickshttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tally_stick
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."
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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?
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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..
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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).
> 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?
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.
> 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.
> 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.
> 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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
>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?)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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).
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I wasn't aware the satellites also beamed down power, and that all ATMs were connected to satellites instead of cellular networks or wires.
It would also take quite a lot of refilling when everyone in a city needs to use the ATM.
We still need to be able to function during weeklong post-storm/flood power outages, which happen with quite some regularity. Here in New Zealand, the most recent weeklong outage in Southland was only last month, primarily due to 200kph winds.
Let us not sacrifice everything to the gods of convenience.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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 :)"
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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()?
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
As far as I can tell the relevant statute is 31 USC §5112, 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?
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
Exactly. I believe the treasury will continue minting commemorative pennies, which would even not make it "none" and give a stronger argument that "well yeah we are meeting the [numismatic] needs"
> 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.
> 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 × 2.75 inch (152.40 mm × 69.85 mm). I'm not sure how the article got this fact wrong.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
One thing about accessibility and usability, is that when you design something for the minority it tends to make things better for the majority. Take ramps for example, they not only server those in wheel chairs, but also families with strollers and elderly with walkers.
Does the Canadian solution of adding brail to the notes inconvenience you, or is that an acceptable way to make sure that people with disabilities can participate in cash transactions safely?
Does having different sized coins strike you as an inconvenience?
Why does a feature that can be used by anyone, regardless of disability, strike you as "inconvenient for almost everybody"?
What, exactly, is inconvenient about having notes be different sizes?
Different sized bills are harder to stack in a wallet. Braille is a much better way to handle the problem. No cost to the majority, while solving the problem for the minority.
It seems like having equivalent sized notes is just your personal preference, and that you are projecting that as an inconvenience onto "the majority". Based on the comments it seems like even people without disabilities mostly don't care, or actually think that it is a good feature.
For my side, even if I did agree with your preference, I am perfectly willing to deal with the incredible hardship of slightly different sized notes in my wallet in exchange for a society where disabled people need not fear being ripped off.
For (very fancy) cloth/paper bills like American ones, some counterfeiters wash the inks out of $1 bills to make $100 ones. Only possible if the $100s are the same or smaller size.
Quite the opposite. As a fully abled person I find it incredibly annoying to have to flip through US notes instead of just immediately picking out the right one by size and/or color.
Use a wallet with a divider, and sort your bills. Won't have to flip through until you carry several each of five or more denominations. If you regularly do, then use two dividers.
It seems like a roundabout way to reduce the impact of a symptom of a self inflicted problem.
It's clearly not a solution, and it seems like it's a suggestion that can only come from a place of "but we've always done it this way" without experiencing a world without the problem.
Even if 5s and 10s are the only ones mixed together, I still have to look for a number. In every other currency you just… immediately take the right one.
That's not even taking into account that wallets are getting smaller and smaller as people need to bring them less. So adding dividers would be like acquiring George Costanza's wallet.
Hell, if they're different size you can even feel the value of a loose note in your pocket.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> $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 1€ coins
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
The SNAP rules don't require equal treatment with people who pay with credit cards, debit cards, or checks, only with people who pay cash. Setting aside the politicized USDA public communications during the shutdown, here's the legally binding regulatory text:
"Coupons shall be accepted for eligible foods at the same prices and on the same terms and conditions applicable to cash purchases of the same foods at the same store except that tax shall not be charged on eligible foods purchased with coupons."
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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)
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?
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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
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?
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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::
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
... 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).
Tap (NFC, radio), dip (EMV, chip), or swipe (magnetic stripe).
The fake terminal concern that vlovich mentions above is real. Look up "credit card skimmers" (the same threat applies to debit cards and ATMs -- anything with a magstripe and keypad).
This is a big deal. It's happened to me three times in the last few years, twice within a week of each other (and likely from the same location).
There are some EMV skimmers in the wild too. They're called "shimmers" because the mechanism is very thin and inserted into the EMV dip slot. These need a separate mechanism to capture PIN input via keypad, so they remain a better choice (but keep reading).
NFC is the safest, and fastest. The cryptography between the card and reader is intact and not replayable etc. Apple Pay is equally good from a safety perspective, and better from many others. I don't know about Google Pay.
Other problems with using your debit card: credit card contracts offer better protections against fraud; and of course there is no immediate debit to your account, so you are never stuck fighting to recover already-stolen funds.
The entire point of EMV and NFC is increased card security. It's nice that they're also quicker, but that's quite secondary.
So, do as thou wilt, obviously. But your mudstickery may be putting you at additional risk. I don't estimate the time difference as meaningful for you or other customers.
You have still not explained why. You have only expanded the claim. What is different about how "the cryptography" etc. is implemented? Why would other physical interactions between the card and the reader not enable the same security? If it's possible, why doesn't it happen?
How pitiful are you to think "consumer rights" not only exist, but are worth "exercising"? What, do you have the right to spend money on marked-up garbage? The right to be sold to bigger "consumers"? You are just a "consumer" and not a citizen, apparently.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
>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?
> 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.
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.
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 - $Y. There's no material difference between counting what they actual collect as income vs what they should have collected minus the goodwill discount. Unless there's some specific tax justification (maybe accounting differences could justify remitting less sales tax overall and retaining more of the funds, etc)
Why wouldn't the write off be useful? I think your formual needs to add "+ ($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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 3.4¢. This is a surprisingly low number to me; I would have expected it to be closer to 10¢ or 20¢, since presumably it was about 1¢ 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.
> 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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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!
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.
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.
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?
> 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!”
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.
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.
Aus unserer Sicht, das überrascht viele, wenn ich das sag, würde es Sinn machen, die 1 und 2 Cent Münzen abzuschaffen und durch eine 5 € Münze zu ersetzen. Lästig empfinden die meisten Menschen eigentlich nur diese braunen Münzen, weil die einfach keine Kaufkraft haben. Die liegen im Portemonnaie, aber man kann dafür nichts kaufen. Man kann bestenfalls die als Rückgeld nutzen. 1 und 2 € Münzen 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 lästig empfunden werden. Münzen sind für den Steuerzahler massiv günstiger. Ne 5 oder 10 € Banknote in der Herstellung oder in der Beschaffung für den Bund kostet in etwa so viel wie eine 2 € Münze, aber die 2 € Münze hält 20 Jahre und die 5 € Banknote hält 3 Monate. [...] Gerade die 5 und 10 € Banknoten sind extrem in Zirkulation; drei maximal sechs Monate, da sind die durch. Kann man sich ausrechnen, wie viel der Staat sparen würde, wenn man jetzt eine 5 € Münze einführen würde und die 5 € 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 €5 or €10 banknote costs about as much to produce or procure for the federal government as a €2 coin, but the €2 coin lasts 20 years and the €5 banknote lasts 3 months. [...] The €5 and €10 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 €5 coin now to replace the €5 banknote.
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.
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
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
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.
> 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.
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).
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.
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?
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.
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.
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?
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 5¢. And interest rates, etc.
Rounding to whole numbers feels more natural to people than rounding to 5¢. But ultimately it's the same thing.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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 :)
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?
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.
There is no "sane state" that is eventually reached, it is always painful. For Japan, it took the financial innovation of negative interest rates to finally address it.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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):
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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?
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?
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?
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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).
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.
> 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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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]
> 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.)
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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"
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.
Round it for SNAP debit cards too.
> 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.
The easy thing for stores to do then seems to be apply the cash rounding to EBT and card transactions.
This seemed so obvious to me…
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
Additionally, having baked-in taxes à 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.
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.
Yes, let’s solve a tricky problem the hardest way possible.
Penalizing the poor further?
> 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.
Is gas sold as a whole penny amounts in those locations? Where I am it's always something and 9/10ths of a cent.
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.
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.
> (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.
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/...
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.
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...
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
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.
Has a Mil ever been minted?
It has not - and it's been more than 150 years since the last sub-cent denomination (the half penny) was minted.
Not by the US mint but they exist: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sales_tax_token
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".
Actually, I'd say by all means, allow them to price things $9.99̅ so we can all agree it's equal to $10 and be done with it.
of course 9.99...(repeating) is mathematically 10, so I have a hard time being against allowing that.
The amount is only rounded at the end of the transaction. Those fractions make a difference if you're buying more than a few gallons
Is the amount rounded before or after taxes? Must be after or you have to round again. So who eats or gains the rounding? The merchant or the tax collector?
Here in Argentina the law says they must be rounded down. Initially it was for 5 AR$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.
If the national government literally stops creating a certain precision of money, i expect the "exact change" requirement should be invalid.
You volunteering your business to be the the test legal case for that? Or are you stocking pennies?
“change will be provided via Venmo” sign at the entrance :)
Payers are allowed to complete transaction using a single method, you can't violate that right.
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.
Congress seems like the most dysfunctional branch of government going on a couple decades now.
They poll worse than the most unpopular presidents
> 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.
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.
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.
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).
The last time America discontinued a coin legislatively was the half cent about 150 years ago. That's a pretty long decline.
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.
So, round down debit cards too? This seems like a really easy problem to solve.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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?
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.
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.
Charges take into account severity of the crime and intent. Nobody is going to get criminal charges for rounding pennies on cash transactions.
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…
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.
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.
I fail to see the problem here. Just round the price for every type of transaction.
Ok so just round it down then
Can you not argue that the average is the same and thus the law isn’t violated?
No, because the law applies to individual transactions, not averages.
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"
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.
It's probably the case that the real risk is being suspended from SNAP for failing to comply with their rules.
Tons of laws go unenforced
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.
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.
Get rid of SNAP.
Problem solved.
(/s)
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.
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
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.
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.
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!!
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.)
Of course that's true, that doesn't mean you should.
The Indiana pi bill mandated certain mathematical values be changed to the wrong value.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indiana_pi_bill
“The bill, written by a physician and an amateur mathematician, never became law.”
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.
Whenever I'm late to a meeting I blame it on the french revolutionary calendar.
Lousy Smarch weather
> 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.
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?
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.
I think my accountant still gives me a choice of what to do and certainly I still get forms with cents on them.
>> 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
$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.
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)
Wage inflation and lawn shrinkflation
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 8¢ at the time.
On one hand, the difference between 2¢ and 8¢ looks completely inconsequential now. OTOH it's a four-fold difference.
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.
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.
And many stores do not accept 200 Euro bills due to the same reason.
Stores don’t accept 200 euro notes because most people haven’t seen one. I regularly get 500 euro notes, but I think I’ve only held a 200 euro note once in my life.
I would assume the stores not wanting to accept them is actually due to concerns about counterfeiting.
> 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:
https://www.federalreserve.gov/pubs/ifdp/1993/460/ifdp460.pd...> 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.
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.
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.
I'm pretty sure the OP was talking about a far future where a $100 bill is worth less than the current penny
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.
Exactly. Like with the Zimbabwe dollars being printed in billion-dollar denominations, $100 is irrelevant then
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.
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.
We can revisit our notion of the passage of time when we achieve extra planetary life
Which organised religion is demanding a 10 month year?
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.
> 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.
Kind of emblematic of the issue of Americans not looking to other countries to see what works and what doesn't.
> 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.
> 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.
If it means shops stop charging $4.99 and start charging $5.00, I will be ecstatic.
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).
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.
It seems crazy to even advertise the pre-tax price.
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.
As long as all the amounts when taxed add up to round numbers, you don't need pennies.
Er... So just adjust prices to whole multiples of 5 cents? Helps math-challenged cashiers too...
Prices in the US are not tax-inclusive, so the effect of sales tax ruins that plan.
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...
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?
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.
> 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).
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.
American taxes are Conway's law, but for politics.
Don't forget the county and sometimes city tax. That's why it's not possible to list the real price.
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.
That’s illegal in a lot of places.
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.
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...)
I have seen at some small coffee shops and the like but it’s rare.
Taxes are rounded to cents already, so this is obviously not an issue.
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?
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.
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.
So they just make the price with tax a multiple of 5 cent and still show the price without.
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.
They can add a "total not divisible by 5" fee, ranging from 1 to 4 cents
The other direction avoids a lot of stupid complains. Nobody will complain if the shop gives them a $0.04 gift.
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.
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.
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.
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.
This. A large chunk of the US population has been programmed that ALL CHANGE from when they were children in the 1950s is bad.
thats a strawman argument
> 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.
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.
Right. Most gas stations list prices ending in 9/10 of a cent.
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.
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.
I think the issue is you’re confusing social media comments with broad, overall opinions.
I’d bet most Americans don’t even know they are getting rid of the penny. Or if they saw it on the news, they forgot about it a day later. It ranks pretty low on general concerns.
Social media commentary about the issue are a tiny minority - first people need to come across the topic, then they need to muster up the effort to actually comment. People who don’t care don’t comment.
I see this mistake with a lot of people. Issues they think are top of mind across people aren’t even known by the vast majority.
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.
> box of instant noodles for $0.99 USD
If you as a consumer care about rounding, then just buy three of them: 3× $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.
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.)
Things have always been rounded (tax). There's just a change in what multiple it's rounded to.
And in inflation-adjusted terms, rounding to the nearest nickel now is about as significant as rounding to the nearest penny was in 1978.
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
I'd be amazed if prices weren't engineered so they rounded up far more often than down.
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 99¢, or % discounts, or a system that tracks that 97¢ means lowest sale, etc).
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.
> It's called "having a society".
That must be nice.
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.
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.
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.
I don't get it. Why couldn't a cashier pocket $1.99?
Because they were handed $2 and have to get the change out of the register.
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.
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...
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.
> Of course, there was also central guidance and, well, everyone just followed it. It's called "having a society".
Nice concept.
Have you never seen the documentary Office Space where penny rounding goes terribly wrong?!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NnPBSy5FsOc
Ha! There'll be no rounding down.
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.
we should have converted everything to integers.
This infact is the original concept of the penny.
+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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
For large volume businesses, $400 / year is what we usually call.. a rounding error.
A large volume business isn't doing 10k transactions.
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.
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.
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.
But there would be rounding down, so how is this relevant?
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.
Nobody has to round down. There's no government rule.
I would expect many businesses to implement ceil()-flavored rounding.
> 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.
> 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 retuning 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.
> 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?
> 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.
> 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.
> 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.
>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.
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?
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.
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.
>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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
Can you explain further? Canada has sales tax and successfully phased out the penny.
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.
> 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.
> 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?
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.
> 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.
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.
No! The US is totally different from Canada. We cannot learn from anyone else’s success because we are a unique snowflake.
>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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
> Meanwhile, 48 state governments
48? Are some states particularly dysfunctional? Or are you excluding commonwealths?
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.
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."
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
Now your customers go and shop at a store that isn't cartoonishly customer-hostile. Now what?
If you seriously think that's realistic I guess I don't know what to tell you.
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.
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?
> 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.
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.
The experience of other countries that have actually implemented this (see: Canada) demonstrates that this is not actually a problem.
What's stopping you from doing it now ?
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.
> There's not as much incentive to right now
Yeah, because stores don’t have an incentive to raise prices usually…
Now people stop shopping at your store.
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.
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.
Won't someone think of the children?
That's an entirely off-topic comment that has nothing to do with anything I said and adds nothing to the discussion.
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..
In practice most items are x.99 anyway.
Sales tax gets applied first.
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.
The half-penny was discontinued in 1857. Adjusted for inflation it was worth 37 cents in todays money when it was discontinued.
But add a $3.50 coin so that we can strongly incentivize coffee to stay below a certain price.
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_...]
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/coca... 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Just take a zero out of everything and change the name from dollar to something else!
*dllar*
dolla
There used to be a $10 coin called an eagle, may as well be violently American and call it eagles.
US Peso
Old trick. The last I checked about 10+ countries have done it.
Night City eurodollars?
Decadollars
100 dollars = 10 decadollars
USA Fun Ticket
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 €1 if you drink it standing at the bar.
They really have their priorities straight when it comes to food and drink prices.
So they charge more for an espresso if you want to drink it seated? Or take it away?
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.
My local just went from $3.50 to $4 this week :(
Gourmet high-end Keurig pods are like $0.50 each. Make your own coffee.
If you go through coffee regularly, it's actually quite a nice thing to invest in. There are a really amazing number of craft roasters throughout the country, and simply having a quality grinder is enough. And you don't need a crazy espresso setup to enjoy it. My setup consists of a motorized flat burr grinder, a 20$ 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
I want a cup of coffee not a science project.
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.
There's some really good hand grinders these days too, minimal effort and only takes a minute.
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.
I wonder if the gourmet high end plastic ends up in the brew.
It pairs wonderfully with all the plastic in your water.
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?
I usually don’t run high pressure boiling water through my plastic pipes.
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.
lol gourmet (coffee) and keurig pods don’t go together in the same sentence.
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.
You can solve this problem even better by drinking instant coffee. Bonus points for it making yuppies cringe.
Also for the memes…
It would be exceedingly funny is 75% of the value.
Maybe make it be a $3.33 coin?
It's worth about $2.70
$0.67 coin is on the way
$0.666. Half the population would think it's the mark of the beast, the other half rounds up to 6-7.
and the third half of the population thinks it's egregious that a repeating fraction has been truncated!
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.
CCP Grey has a nice video and discusses the precedent: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y5UT04p5f7U
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.
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.
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!
If the Pennies go away, you can no longer get things for pennies on the dollar.
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?
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.
It’s kind of like lots of imperial measurements where we use metric still have these in idioms.
"I would walk 500 kilometers" just doesn't sound as romantic.
What is a bit, a penny?
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.
THIS exactly and oops, I replied too quickly :)
Half a quarter.
Soon one can no longer add 2 cents to a discussion.
I guess my opinion rounds down to nothing now. I guess that fits my track record.
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.
Good luck getting anything like that to pass here though!
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.
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.
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)
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.
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/...
> 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?
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.
> 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.
> 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
> 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.
> 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).
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/
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.
Sure, if the coins are worth more as scrap that’s a problem. So why isn’t that the justification?
Stop minting the nickel and start minting the half dime again (this time in base metal instead of silver).
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.
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...
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.
Only if the increased revenue from rounding doesn't go into retailers pockets but rather is redistributed somehow. i.e. to reduce sales tax
i want them to make coins for all the current bills, and expand bills to higher amounts. Cash has not kept up with inflation.
> I'd say screw it, get rid of nickles and dimes as well. Quarters can stay, for now.
Counterpoint: Get rid of nickels and quarters. In the digital age, it's far more practical to round to the nearest $0.1 than $0.05.
Also, we can store 1/4 exactly in binary, but not 1/100, 1/20, or 1/10. So that solves another problem.
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.
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.
While minting this currency the government continues to nickel and dime the American people.
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.
>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?)
JPY has the benefit that people probably don't try to use floating point numbers for currency. (ignoring the central joke of your comment)
The sen still exists. There's even a few 50 sen coins still floating around.
Get rid of the nickel, dime, and quarter. Increase the 1/2 dollar and dollar coins, and add new 2, and 5 dollar coins.
also bring back the 50-cent piece, eliminate the redundant dollar bill, and replace the 2 dollar bill with a new 2 dollar coin
Quarters don't make sense to me. We don't have $25 notes either why should be have 25c coins?
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?
Quick, someone file a trademark for “Take a Quarter, Leave a Quarter”
Nothing avoids rounding.
> Quarters can stay, for now.
I'd say just drop the second decimal place and have dimes and half-dollar coins.
Why is everyone talking about rounding?
I've read there's enough pennies in bank vaults to last for years.
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.
And hell, put Bank of Zimbabwe on the bills.
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.
> 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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
> 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.
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.
Countries like Ecuador that use US dollars mint their own coins for local circulation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecuadorian_centavo_coins
As far as I am aware, USD is used for larger amounts in such countries. Smaller purchases are made in the local currency.
In what part of the world do they use US pennies?
The US currency system sure. But pennies, specifically?
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
There are also plenty of places where flashing a 100 dollar bill and a Rolex will ensure you don't get home at all.
> 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]
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).
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Electronics continue to fail in severe weather events, and cash keeps working, which is important when we're talking about food.
Does it? What about weather that stops the ATMs being refilled? Takes a lot of weather to bring down satellite internet...
I wasn't aware the satellites also beamed down power, and that all ATMs were connected to satellites instead of cellular networks or wires.
It would also take quite a lot of refilling when everyone in a city needs to use the ATM.
We still need to be able to function during weeklong post-storm/flood power outages, which happen with quite some regularity. Here in New Zealand, the most recent weeklong outage in Southland was only last month, primarily due to 200kph winds.
Let us not sacrifice everything to the gods of convenience.
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”
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.
Haha, right. I was using tap to pay at the petrol pump in Botswana in 2016.
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
Is that what cocaine smells like?
Cocaine and feces smells like freedom
You do know who would be the first person to rotate in, don't you.
It would obviously be someone as equally legendary as Washington or Jefferson; noted American Paul Bunyan. We can even call them Big Blue Bucks.
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.
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)
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.
"Dirty" also connotes physical appearance, you know.
If you can’t crumple it up and throw it at someone, it’s not real money.
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.
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 :)"
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
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()?
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?
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.
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.
> 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.
But less decent people can’t resist the dark pattern of using $x.99 prices everywhere.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
They could do what every other country does, and include the sales tax in the shelf label price.
Paying cash, you would pay $1.05.
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?
Ah I see. Yeah I agree then.
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.
I think this is wrong.
As far as I can tell the relevant statute is 31 USC §5112, 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
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
What exactly is the law?
Can you show me the statute requiring the treasury department to coin pennies?
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.
Exactly. I believe the treasury will continue minting commemorative pennies, which would even not make it "none" and give a stronger argument that "well yeah we are meeting the [numismatic] needs"
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American banknotes have numbers on them to easily distinguish the different values!
> 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...
> 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 × 2.75 inch (152.40 mm × 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/wiki/Canadian_currency_tactile_feat...
> 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)
> 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.
> 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.
> 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?
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
Switzerland has same colors for all of the various bills? As far as I can tell, that has never been true
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.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banknotes_of_the_Swiss_franc
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?
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.
> 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.
Not braille; see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45904000.
Braille does not help everyone. Most people with vision issues are not legally lind and do not know braille.
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.
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.
You need a week of low-key exposure to learn how each bill is marked.
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).
Hackernews is filled with you healthy 20 year olds who do not understand that many will by the age of 30 have reduced vision.
Society is not supposed to be engineered for young single healthy 20 year old males.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
All U.S. bills in common circulation (all denominations except $2) have been different colors for 20 years.
The ten dollar bill has a somewhat different color than the other currency, somewhat yellowish.
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.
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.
Being fully sighted, I still appreciate it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curb_cut_effect
Some currencies also have braille-like embossments so that if you're totally blind, you can still pick out the correct denominations.
Not everyone can see.
Australian notes vary in size for this reason.
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One thing about accessibility and usability, is that when you design something for the minority it tends to make things better for the majority. Take ramps for example, they not only server those in wheel chairs, but also families with strollers and elderly with walkers.
Crutches and canes can be easier on a ramp, too. Even people with fine balance but limits on movement of the hip, knee, or ankle can benefit.
The unbearable pain of having to handle bills of different sizes, there is not enough empathy in this world to truly pay hommage to your suffering.
Does the Canadian solution of adding brail to the notes inconvenience you, or is that an acceptable way to make sure that people with disabilities can participate in cash transactions safely?
Does having different sized coins strike you as an inconvenience?
Why does a feature that can be used by anyone, regardless of disability, strike you as "inconvenient for almost everybody"?
What, exactly, is inconvenient about having notes be different sizes?
Different sized bills are harder to stack in a wallet. Braille is a much better way to handle the problem. No cost to the majority, while solving the problem for the minority.
> Different sized bills are harder to stack in a wallet.
This has never been my experience. What is the challenge?
As long as the largest bills fit and the smallest bills don’t get lost I don’t understand how it’s so much harder.
I'm used to Euro notes, and having each denomination be a different colour and height in my wallet is very useful for pulling a specific one out.
I keep them in order, with €5s in the front.
It seems like having equivalent sized notes is just your personal preference, and that you are projecting that as an inconvenience onto "the majority". Based on the comments it seems like even people without disabilities mostly don't care, or actually think that it is a good feature.
For my side, even if I did agree with your preference, I am perfectly willing to deal with the incredible hardship of slightly different sized notes in my wallet in exchange for a society where disabled people need not fear being ripped off.
That’s a terribly myopic take
Unfortunate metaphor in context....
It's primarily done for security and secondarily a benefit making it easier (for everyone!) to identify denomination by feel
What security benefit is unlocked by varying the size of the bills?
For (very fancy) cloth/paper bills like American ones, some counterfeiters wash the inks out of $1 bills to make $100 ones. Only possible if the $100s are the same or smaller size.
https://www.nbcdfw.com/news/local/counterfeit-currency-warni...
I believe the US made washing much harder with other techniques because of this in recent years.
Quite the opposite. As a fully abled person I find it incredibly annoying to have to flip through US notes instead of just immediately picking out the right one by size and/or color.
Use a wallet with a divider, and sort your bills. Won't have to flip through until you carry several each of five or more denominations. If you regularly do, then use two dividers.
It seems like a roundabout way to reduce the impact of a symptom of a self inflicted problem.
It's clearly not a solution, and it seems like it's a suggestion that can only come from a place of "but we've always done it this way" without experiencing a world without the problem.
Even if 5s and 10s are the only ones mixed together, I still have to look for a number. In every other currency you just… immediately take the right one.
That's not even taking into account that wallets are getting smaller and smaller as people need to bring them less. So adding dividers would be like acquiring George Costanza's wallet.
Hell, if they're different size you can even feel the value of a loose note in your pocket.
[flagged]
I’m in a minority group.
Or put another way: "Deliberately griefing the experience of a small number of people just to make it marginally more convenient for everyone else."
And it would be even easier to distinguish them if they were different colors in addition to the printed numerals.
This is a joke right?
Having $1 bills is so much nicer than having $1 coins. I don't want more coins, thanks.
>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)
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.
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".
> 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/Polypropylene#Biaxially_orient...
All green notes are barely there anymore... the dollar bill itself. Even the five has some color now.
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.
Canadian banknotes being different physical dimensions from each other makes them distinguishable to the visually impaired too.
You may be thinking of Euro notes, but the Canadian ones do have a braille code on them.
Canadian Tire Company should be the ones designing the bills, however…
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
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.
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.
It doesn't cost anyone anything. They can just raise prices 3 cents or whatever.
It gets tricky because sales tax is added on top of the sticker price.
Then include the sales tax in the sticker price, like every other country does.
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.
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/S002243599...
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/23547242_Penny_Wise...
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S002243590...
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Forcing the simplification of all those taxes doesn't seem like it has a downside, to me.
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.
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.
My employer has a 55¢ vending machine with a dodgy bill validator.
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.
Bananas
That's because in Canada you actually prepared for the transition, instead of just proclaiming it in a tweet.
Same in UK but we also size each face value differently.
Which helps partially sighted people and is a good visual check.
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.
Even though I never use cash, I’m really not a fan of coins, so I wish we did have $1 bills.
We do have $1 bills. And coins!
Sorry I meant in Canada
> $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 1€ coins
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.
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.
Are they different sizes so the blind can easily use them?
The US has been moving to colored denominations for awhile now.
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.
> 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.
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.
US notes also stink.
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.
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.
As a Canadian with kids who recently bought Monopoly, I can you tell you that American money objectively feels much more like Monopoly money...
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.”
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.
> enforced the whole right to refuse service.
This is what everyone forgets. If you can't provide exact change, then you can refuse service.
It’s a self-service gas station. Refuse…yourself? You pumped the gas before paying.
If you pay with cash you’re going to be going to the cashier first anyway.
in the us, gas stations require you to pay before filling
I had this same idea and seem to recall even trying it, but it was mostly thwarted when they added minimum liquid delivery amounts.
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.
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...
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.nl/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?
If someone demands exact change is it allowed to give them more? What if you don't have the exact change?
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.
You could always refuse service, I guess.
For the SNAP law, could they just round down SNAP purchases in the same way to be compliant?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
So, that sounds like a yes, they could round up or down SNAP purchases just like cash purchases.
No, because they'd still be paying less/more than people paying with credit cards, debit cards, or checks.
Round them all. Why is this so difficult?
Retailers will reject ever rounding down because they lose money, and customers will reject ever rounding up because they lose money.
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.
The SNAP rules don't require equal treatment with people who pay with credit cards, debit cards, or checks, only with people who pay cash. Setting aside the politicized USDA public communications during the shutdown, here's the legally binding regulatory text:
https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-7/subtitle-B/chapter-II/s...
"Coupons shall be accepted for eligible foods at the same prices and on the same terms and conditions applicable to cash purchases of the same foods at the same store except that tax shall not be charged on eligible foods purchased with coupons."
They probably will, but that means a POS software update on a tight deadline.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
I think they should just change the prices to make it work out after tax. It’s not that hard.
It’s the same issue for sub-penny rounding which happens without issue. It’s the same principle.
just make the price a multiple of five cents
State and local taxes make this infeasible
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
> it’s just not going to happen without legislation mandating it.
Obviously, and I don't think anyone said otherwise.
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)
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.
> 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?
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
I've seen stores advertise "we pay your sales tax" like furniture outlets. Wouldn't this allow for legal priced items?
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
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?
> 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/1139772249337...
Retailers don't, like, have to add sales tax on top of listed prices.
They just have to pay it.
No, it's illegal in many, looks like most states:
https://www.avalara.com/blog/en/north-america/2019/07/retail...
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.
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.
Go run a local retail business in conflict with state law and regulations. Then tell me how irrelevant those laws are.
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.
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.
So what? You can collect taxes how you like, the tax burden still depends on the Elasticity.
Now is our chance to switch to European style "you pay the price it says on the shelf"!
That makes too much sense, which is why it won't happen. Though I'd be all for it.
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.
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.
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.
> 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_Stat...
No, you still round the number, that goes on the price tag and adjust the other.
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.
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::
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
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.
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.
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.
Oh no, a made up problem that's easily solved by changing the price slightly in any direction, whatever will we do.
You can price as a multiple of nickels and round the tax separately. It’s the same thing as with sub-penny rounding.
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?
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_Stat...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
I say we eliminate both pennies and (significantly more importantly) executive orders
> (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.
You know what I mean: executive orders in their current incarnation. Better congressional and judicial oversight, more limited scope of powers.
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.
> 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.
I’d regularly use quarters in vending machines, but not waste time during a retail transaction.
In most other countries, since prices are shown including all taxes you can often have the money ready while waiting in line etc.
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.
> but not waste time during a retail transaction.
we could just go back to writing checks while we're at it.
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.
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.
... How is this related to what I said?
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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).
Tap (NFC, radio), dip (EMV, chip), or swipe (magnetic stripe).
The fake terminal concern that vlovich mentions above is real. Look up "credit card skimmers" (the same threat applies to debit cards and ATMs -- anything with a magstripe and keypad).
This is a big deal. It's happened to me three times in the last few years, twice within a week of each other (and likely from the same location).
There are some EMV skimmers in the wild too. They're called "shimmers" because the mechanism is very thin and inserted into the EMV dip slot. These need a separate mechanism to capture PIN input via keypad, so they remain a better choice (but keep reading).
NFC is the safest, and fastest. The cryptography between the card and reader is intact and not replayable etc. Apple Pay is equally good from a safety perspective, and better from many others. I don't know about Google Pay.
Other problems with using your debit card: credit card contracts offer better protections against fraud; and of course there is no immediate debit to your account, so you are never stuck fighting to recover already-stolen funds.
The entire point of EMV and NFC is increased card security. It's nice that they're also quicker, but that's quite secondary.
So, do as thou wilt, obviously. But your mudstickery may be putting you at additional risk. I don't estimate the time difference as meaningful for you or other customers.
> NFC is the safest, and fastest.
You have still not explained why. You have only expanded the claim. What is different about how "the cryptography" etc. is implemented? Why would other physical interactions between the card and the reader not enable the same security? If it's possible, why doesn't it happen?
NFC can't be skimmed.
EMV can and sometimes is, and magstripe skimming happens all day every day.
> my consumer rights
How pitiful are you to think "consumer rights" not only exist, but are worth "exercising"? What, do you have the right to spend money on marked-up garbage? The right to be sold to bigger "consumers"? You are just a "consumer" and not a citizen, apparently.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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
It's amazing to me that there are people with this mindset. I enjoy the process.
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.
I legitimately don't understand why people object to this strongly enough to downvote it without comment.
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.)
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.
How did you arrive at this conclusion?
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.
I like this perspective :)
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.
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.
Yep. That's exactly what is was.
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.
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...
Yeah, in retrospect that would have been better.
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.
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
> not one person stopped to pick any up.
Isn't that the old joke about the economist?
I use quarters in parking meters sometimes.
>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?
> 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.
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.
Certianly the costs in employee time making change in pennies and stocking / transporting / changing pennies is way higher
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
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 - $Y. There's no material difference between counting what they actual collect as income vs what they should have collected minus the goodwill discount. Unless there's some specific tax justification (maybe accounting differences could justify remitting less sales tax overall and retaining more of the funds, etc)
Why wouldn't the write off be useful? I think your formual needs to add "+ ($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.
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.
Sure. But multiply by whatever number you want and it is still the same percentage of revenue.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
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.
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.
In many parts of Wisconsin the value of `x` could very easily be 100+, so I'd say this checks out.
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.
It's cheaper than the credit card fees, that's for sure.
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...
You probably could have made $150 if you had melted the coins and sold the copper instead.
A penny is less than 3% copper (since 1982).
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 3.4¢. This is a surprisingly low number to me; I would have expected it to be closer to 10¢ or 20¢, since presumably it was about 1¢ 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.
> 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.
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.
Ok, but the US mint in the 18th and 19th centuries?
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
Fascinating. Thank you.
Pennies are not 100% copper any more. Mostly zinc.
I know. The non-copper pennies also don't weigh 3.11 grams. Dimes aren't silver anymore either.
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.
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.
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.
And whenever tax is added it's usually a fraction of a penny as well. Rounding has been with us for a long time.
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-...
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.
i think ~5 cents per capita is a fine price to pay to never have to think about pennies again
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.)
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!
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.
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?
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.
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.
My comment is meant to be high level.
If you want a specific solution:
1. use a POS that supports rounding to the nearest 5 cents
2. ignore laws written assuming the penny is in production. they obviously need to be updated. judges are not idiots.
Ah - the "trust me bro" defense. How does that protect you from the legal costs of malicious prosecution? Even if you win it will cost you.
No it's the "penny is no longer in production" defense.
Look, if you own a business do whatever you want.
The problem is that the rounding you are asking them to do is illegal in a few states.
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.
So what you're telling me is that pennies are the new bitcoin. Fixed supply.
Except they're backed by something of value (worth even more than a penny).
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?
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...
> Finally... NYT from last year... Truly fascinating and bewildering
Yeah, really bewildering, happiness inflated by inflation.
> 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...
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.
The lowest value coin still in use is the Uzbek Tiyin (0.01 UZS).
So 1,200,000 Tiyins to the USD.
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.
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.
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 überrascht viele, wenn ich das sag, würde es Sinn machen, die 1 und 2 Cent Münzen abzuschaffen und durch eine 5 € Münze zu ersetzen. Lästig empfinden die meisten Menschen eigentlich nur diese braunen Münzen, weil die einfach keine Kaufkraft haben. Die liegen im Portemonnaie, aber man kann dafür nichts kaufen. Man kann bestenfalls die als Rückgeld nutzen. 1 und 2 € Münzen 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 lästig empfunden werden. Münzen sind für den Steuerzahler massiv günstiger. Ne 5 oder 10 € Banknote in der Herstellung oder in der Beschaffung für den Bund kostet in etwa so viel wie eine 2 € Münze, aber die 2 € Münze hält 20 Jahre und die 5 € Banknote hält 3 Monate. [...] Gerade die 5 und 10 € Banknoten sind extrem in Zirkulation; drei maximal sechs Monate, da sind die durch. Kann man sich ausrechnen, wie viel der Staat sparen würde, wenn man jetzt eine 5 € Münze einführen würde und die 5 € 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 €5 or €10 banknote costs about as much to produce or procure for the federal government as a €2 coin, but the €2 coin lasts 20 years and the €5 banknote lasts 3 months. [...] The €5 and €10 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 €5 coin now to replace the €5 banknote.
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.
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
But if 99 cent stuff costs a dollar, sales will plummet.
If they are worried about that then they can make them 95¢
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.
Would it feel better to see your bank account and pay checks shrink by 90%?
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
I'm surprised nobody has mentioned Banker's Rounding in here: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/45223778/is-bankers-roun...
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.
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.
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.
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...
That...actually seems economically sound, but it's also a strong argument for the idea that pennies are effectively worthless.
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.
I'm pretty sure they're considering doing this, but I don't know what all the pros and cons or complexities are.
> 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.
Selective attention or confirmation bias with a hint of cosmic irony?
[dead]
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/...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
This is what happens when you wish on a monkey's paw to get rid of pennies.
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.
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.
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".
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.
> 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.
It generally is, or at least per category of items. Different items can have different (or none) sales tax rates.
Good point. I forgot about sales tax. That also seems fixable by adjusting tax law, but adjusting law is always more hassle.
If your sales tax rate is 8.875%, what do you price a banana at to avoid change?
You price it including sales tax. Sticker price is final price.
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).
Then that discount can be deducted by the cash register when it's time to pay.
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.
$10
This problem is easily solved in countries that use VAT
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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?
Yes. I'm not sure if legal tender is the correct term but yes.
Many stores now do not accept cash of any kind.
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 5¢. And interest rates, etc.
Rounding to whole numbers feels more natural to people than rounding to 5¢. But ultimately it's the same thing.
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.
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.
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.
Oh no! What will DIY-people use now to make the ugliest floors known to man?
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?
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 :)
What would the net outcome of this be besides smaller denominations having more value?
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?
Deflation is an economic disaster. The Great Depression, for example, was related to deflation.
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.
In Japan it is known as The Lost Decades: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_Decades
There is no "sane state" that is eventually reached, it is always painful. For Japan, it took the financial innovation of negative interest rates to finally address it.
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.
> 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.
We should mint ₥ills. Really lean into useless currency.
https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Mill_(currency)
> 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.
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.
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.
Apropos: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F8R5QCPUqaI
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.
At this point I'm surprised our president doesn't force the exclusive use of cryptocurrencies.
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
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
My country quit using our (then) lowest denomination coin 32 years ago. Also worth 1/100 of a USD.
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.
I have a couple glass jars full of pennies. I think I'll just give them to the thrift store.
A classic example of - the less important something is, the more people will have an opinion
A penny contains about .6 cents worth of zinc, so this was going to happen sooner or later.
When will they create a $200 bill or bring back the 500? I feel like the 50s is the new 20.
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.
Did anyone ever make a simulator for pennies hitting the floor like in the top video?
In 1990, Australia stopped minting 1c and 2c coins & rounding to 5c.
It worked out just fine.
Everyone move on.
It's absolutely bonkers how long it took the US to get rid of the penny.
Time to start chopping nickels into pieces of five.
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.)
Even the IRS doesn’t mind rounding to the nearest dollar.
Let that sink in…
Oo, I'd like to get a roll of these. But I live in Norway.
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?
The mighty penny is dead. Long live the penny!!
Finally, something I can get behind
in a certain timeline this would be our warning inflation is getting out of hand...
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.
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.
You already know the answer.
That was before Trump v. United States (2024)
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.
I don’t understand why it costing more than face value to mint is such a bad thing
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
How long have you been on the internet? A day?
The president is now immune to obeying the law and can pardon all of his stooges.
These are the types of comments people start making when they've been mindkilled by politics.
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.
Salami slicing stimulus package
Dimes and 50 cents only please
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?
You can't legally melt down US coins for their metals
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.
Penny-wise and pound-foolish.
And the people rejoiced!
10 for 1 split on USD.
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.
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.
could get rid of dimes and nickels as well.
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.
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
we don’t have “pennies” in the EU anymore
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.
Nick Mullen should be the guest of honor at this event.
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.
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.
Finally, can we next stop making dollar bills and add a two dollar coin.
"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
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?
*American
Can we stop changing our clocks twice a year as well?
so its an NFT now???
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).
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.
> 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.
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?
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
There's a lot of physical infrastructure that works with quarters
Very good point and I think I'm convinced.
That only works if you completely reconfigure sales tax
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
So pieces of eight?
Pieces of thirty would let you split the booty 2-, 3-, or 5-way.
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.
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.
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.
Used to use dollar coins at toll booths all the time. That was before ez pass
At least nickels should go so we can always round by one digit.
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.
> 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.
It's a completely different color than a quarter.
That doesn't help if you're in dim lighting or have vision problems.
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
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.
That would explain why 1% of people don't use the $1 coin. It doesn't explain the other 99%.
99% of people have Darkvision? What is this, a D&D party?
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?
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.
Absolutely true. It's one of the several crazy design problems with US paper currency.
If your fingertips can sense the color of things in your pocket, I'd love to learn more.
Bring back the Eisenhower dollar!
If only Trump could get the daylight savings and the metrics system updates done too.
We should stop printing physical money and just start making payments digitally everywhere.
Dangit, now I’ll have to start buying fuses for my electrical panel.
Good. BYE. lol.
The mighty penny is dead. Long live the penny!!
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Crappy riff on Ass Pennies sketch
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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...
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.
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.
Gas stations price to the tenth of a penny per gallon. There is no 1/10 cent coin. Works fine.
That's because the law requires them to charge that extra 9/10. It's silly.
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.
This has not been an issue in Canada. There is sales tax, which basically randomizes the last digit.
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.
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
Any Republican president maybe. The Supreme Court and a Fox media circuit would never let the opposition ignore congress like this.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
They can reprice items to minimize rounding
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.
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]
> 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.)