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.
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.
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.
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.
Not necessarily. Anything measured by weight will still be subject to this issue.
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.
The above context was that rounding to 5 cents might be illegal due to laws regarding SNAP debit prices being different than cash prices.
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"
IMO, rounding for cash purchases only sounds worse than keeping the pennies.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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/...
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.
$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...
So I don't think it's just "evil retailer tricks".
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.
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 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 other states that have done mid cycle gerrymandering just forced it on their population.
The secret service probably won't cause a Waco out of it, but I'm sure they'll do something dumb.
That's not an "issue". That's the way things that actually happen, happen.
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.
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?
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"
Please don't strawman this, there is ample evidence for rounding pennies on everyday transactions.
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.
It's a degree scale: you can choose any number you want.
(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.)
Not in all cases. The IRS does not use cents when you file your tax return, they say round to the nearest dollar.
Has that changed and it has to be dollars now?
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.
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.
With bitcoin, it's moot.
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.
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.
On one hand, the difference between 2¢ and 8¢ looks completely inconsequential now. OTOH it's a four-fold difference.
Profit for the US government. Fixed by plastic bills.
Every $ printed but never redeemed is a significant profit (assuming other costs are low like printing).
Especially yummy when countries just want to hoard the currency - same as selling stamps that are never used:
estimate the stock of U.S. currency circulating in Argentina ... U.S. currency inflows during 1988-1992 totaled $20.8 billion
Redeemed? Redeemed for what? Its not like they're still trading dollars for gold at any kind of fixed rate.
I would love to see an analysis of the benefits of crime to the government accounts.
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.
No, each number I enter into my tax form is rounded to the dollar. Not just the total, every input value.
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.
Which is much less than they're paying the CC companies on card sales.
There's 12000+ distinct sales tax regimes in the US
https://sovos.com/content-library/sut/state-by-state-guide-t...
Companies serve billions of web pages per second. We can't handle 12,000 tax calculations?
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).
It's frustrating how much needless friction gets put into the system.
(No snark - serious question, as I'm not from the US, and would love to see the legislation and justification which required that...)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.)
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).
Nice concept.
That must be nice.
I'm skeptical that preventing theft is the reason for these prices rather than the psychological trick of looking cheaper.
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.
Seriously, nobody cares.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Also even if a business rounded up every transaction, the expected benefit is 2 cents per transaction vs fair rounding, not 4 cents.
I would expect many businesses to implement ceil()-flavored rounding.
"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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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 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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
48? Are some states particularly dysfunctional? Or are you excluding commonwealths?
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.
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.
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.
it'll come out in the wash. there are much bigger things to worry about.
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.
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 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.
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.
Yeah, because stores don’t have an incentive to raise prices usually…
All because of that darn penny-rounding.
But yeah, this isn’t a real issue regardless.
> 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 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.
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.
Wine glasses have also gotten bigger over the years.
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.
100 dollars = 10 decadollars
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.
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.
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.
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.
Even cheaper, tastes better, and takes only slightly longer to make.
Maybe make it be a $3.33 coin?
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
Dimes are small and cheap to make though, so they'll probably stick around.
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)
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/...
Coins aren’t disposable. Why does it matter if the production cost is higher than the face value?
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.
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.
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
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.
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).
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.
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.
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?
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?)
I'd say just drop the second decimal place and have dimes and half-dollar coins.
I've read there's enough pennies in bank vaults to last for years.
I wouldn’t mind having larger coin denominations though. Dollar and five dollar coins would be very convenient.
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.
The US currency system sure. But pennies, specifically?
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.
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.
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.
[citation needed]
But it's here to stay, nothing we can do about it.
Please see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CnoDKqlcR4Y
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
A friend from Australia came to visit and after a day driving around New York State said “it feels half finished”
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.
> 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.
"Congratulations customer, we have a special coupon today for $0.03 off your purchase. Here's your change :)"
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.
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?
I guess you could calculate all of your prices such that, once sales tax is added, they round to a 5 cent value.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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?
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 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.
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.
In fact they have introduced a bill to do just that, that has not passed yet, which means they have not done that.
Can you show me the statute requiring the treasury department to coin pennies?
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.
https://afb.org/blindness-and-low-vision/using-technology/ac...
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...
Because Canada is just part of the U.S.
(flame away)
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.
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.
In what ways do you find northern midwest US states (Minnesota, Wisconsin, etc.) substantially less "friendly" than Canada?
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.
> “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.
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.
The NHL is a better example of this, I think.
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.
Yes. This system is more resistant to wear and tear.
In Canada the bills are embossed with braille by the mint. There may be other accommodations too, but I haven't looked it up.
That solves half the problem, but you still don't know whether you're getting correct change.
Anyone who didn't find the feature useful could ignore it.
Braille on money also doesn't help dyslexic quadrplegics with dysesthesia... Checkmate.
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.
Just like you don't need to know Japanese to count the exact amount of yen 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.
Australian notes vary in size for this reason.
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?
This has never been my experience. What is the challenge?
I keep them in order, with €5s in the front.
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.
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.
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)
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".
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...
So for instance 1.69 in cash would be 1.70 but if you pay with your phone it stays at 1.69
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.
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.
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...
Again: Canada actually did this many years ago. The effect you predict did not appear.
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.
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.
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.
If I’m buying online with a digital transaction you can charge whatever cents are necessary.
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.
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.
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.
Which helps partially sighted people and is a good visual check.
Last time I was in the UK I also found it funny how large the 2p coin is compared to its value.
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
The amount of wallets with zipper is a country is not worth considering when discussing what coins should be minted.
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.
It's not even controversial. If you Google it you'll find that it's even a deliberate anti counterfit technology.
>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.”
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.
This is what everyone forgets. If you can't provide exact change, then you can refuse service.
http://www.nederlandsemunten.nl/Artikelen_over_munten/De_cen...
> 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?
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.
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.
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?
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.
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
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.
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 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.
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.
Obviously, and I don't think anyone said otherwise.
They're selling a liquid, so even if it were all priced in whole cents you'd have to deal with fractional cents.
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.
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.
It may not be convenient but any realistic solution has to recognize the hard facts that shape the nature of problem.
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...
They just have to pay it.
https://www.avalara.com/blog/en/north-america/2019/07/retail...
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.
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.
* Arizona: 10.725% Hawaii: 4.712% Minnesota: 7.875% etc. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sales_taxes_in_the_United_Stat...
Of course, retailers don't want tax-inclusive posted prices, but... ::shrug::
Tax on a 0.99 item isn't coming out to an exact penny multiple.
So stores are already dealing with this situation
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.
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?
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.
stop minting and stop accepting is commonly separated to allow adjustment. so likely a later president will just add the second phaseout step.
I get that the U.S. is a much lower trust culture, but is it really necessary? The rounding is only for cash transactions.
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.
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.
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.
we could just go back to writing checks while we're at it.
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.
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.
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.
> 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 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.
Tapping (NFC) or dipping (EMV) are safer and faster for everyone.
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.
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).
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.
Most people I know just pocket everything and put on a box at home for undetermined time.
I also keep the obvious fakes.
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.
(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.)
Even they've gotten the hint and simply leave a tray of pennies next to it so people can actually use it.
It’s just for fun, sounds like a nice gesture.
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.
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
Isn't that the old joke about the economist?
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?
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.
Edit: why disagree? Can't the write it off as a loss, uncollected account, or promotional? Maybe even goodwill
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)
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 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.
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.
Anyone have data on what percentage of the population visits convenience stores 500+ times per year? Sounds pretty inconvenient.
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.
A more reasonable assumption that half of transactions require rounding down cuts that in half, I suppose.
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.
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.
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...
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.
Was that the purpose of the mint? That would imply that the relative value of silver vs. copper was static.
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.
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-...
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.
A major score was finding a dime or quarter on the street. When the Whatchamacallit first came out they were 25 cents!
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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...
Yeah, really bewildering, happiness inflated by inflation.
Everything makes sense now...
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.
I feel like pennies fall out of circulation at a very high rate compared to other denominations.
20 years later, I think some more zeroes are available to be removed :)
So 1,200,000 Tiyins to the USD.
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.
But then as an Australian it also seems very weird to even have pennies in circulation. We ditched ours in the 80s.
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?
Many stores now do not accept cash of any kind.
Rounding to whole numbers feels more natural to people than rounding to 5¢. But ultimately it's the same thing.
It does work better if there's a bit of planning though.
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.
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.
If there are no pennies you round to the nearest 5 cents. If there were no coins, you would round to the nearest dollar.
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.
Personally, I think stores should just start setting prices to avoid the need for pennies, but that would be too easy, I guess.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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 is a mess but also not easy to unwind or patch over.
The money illusion fools many people into believing they've gained (ie real estate) when in reality, they've lost purchasing power.
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.
It worked out just fine.
Everyone move on.
Let that sink in…
It's a good start. Now let's do metric.
* 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.
Since the law is still on the books its still legal tender, and production may restart at any moment.
[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.
People do not reuse pennies. They are lost and forgotten about much of the time.
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.
most people throw them in a change jar and forget about them.
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.
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?
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?
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.
It strikes me as uniquely American (perhaps uniquely Trumpian) to just stop making them and let whatever happens happen with no detailed planning.
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.
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.
Prices should never have been set to this dumb #.99 pattern anyway. It's one of the most annoying things.
> 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?
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.
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.
At least he's still on fives.
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.)
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 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.
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.
Americans also use coin purses or rubber coin pouches, but I mostly only see older generations using them.
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.
Very good point and I think I'm convinced.
It’s because retailers wont accept them - they think they’re counterfeit because no one uses them. A catch-22 situation, really.
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.
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.
"Alright. Your total is $25.13. You're paying with $100? No, no, it's fine; I just hope you like fives and ones."
Gotta do something to make the $2 bill popular though, no idea how.
> (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.
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.
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.
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
People have been talking about getting rid of the penny for decades.
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.
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.
Cash costs retailers money too. Safely transporting it to the bank, et cetera. For many, cash is more expensive than credit cards.
Yes, and now they won't have to incur that cost for pennies.
> 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.
> 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]
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
It is a wise trick, and exactly the job of government -- to prevent the public from getting tricked by businesses.
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.
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.