So is this one of those things where Americans do the common sense thing and agree?
Or is this the another classic case of a few very loud and emotional Americans screaming with passion and zero logic?
Or is it one of those situations where everything seems to go smoothly. And then you figure out that they didn’t add the correct rounding regulations, so you’ll be paying a little extra on every single transaction the store puts at .96?
Kill the nickel and dime while we’re at it.
frankly they might aswell cut the 5 cent piece too while theyre at it.
Make a 20¢ piece instead of the quarter and everything can go to the nearest 10¢. Then eventually we can get rid of the dime too and everything can go to the nearest 20¢.
This is the forward thinking we need right now.
Just scrap anything less than $1. Then make coins $1 $5 $10 $20 that look and feel similar to the penny, nickel, dime, & quarter but are really replacing these paper bills.
Why would you want coins instead of paper bills?
We want the fantasy-trope coin-pouch hanging from our belts! We’ll tors down bags of coins! It’ll be great!
Homie just wants to have his pants constantly jingling.
Good, we should have done this 20 years ago.
Death to nickels!
The problem is you can’t get rid of nickles without getting rid of either quarters or dimes too. Without nickles you would have a denomination (25c) that has no way to be made by lower coins (10c dimes can’t equal 25c). So you either need to get rid of every coin, every coin except the quarter, or nuke the quarter and nickle concurrently and only use dimes, forcing prices to be multiples of 10.
Replace the quarter with a 20¢ piece. Then you can keep getting rid of the lowest coin.
Why do you need to be able to make every denomination from every other one?
That isn’t the specific problem. The problem is that you need a way to make up the difference between them. Example: If someone pays $1.00 for something that costs $0.35, how do you make change without a .05 denomination?
It’s the same issue with the penny, you round up or round down.
If you have no penny, when taxes on your item make the total equal to $5.03, you pay $5.05. if the total is $5.02 you pay $5.00.
Turn the dime into 12.5 cents.
Bring back the bit!
The more I think about it, the more I like it:
- Eliminate the Penny, Nickel, and Dime
- Bring back Old West nomenclature
- IT’S AMERICAN AS FUCK!
- Will drive the metric nerds absolutely batshit. “Of course we have an eighth* of a dollar, why would we use decimal?!”
* I think just the spelling of eighth will spin eurotrash into a tizzy
Suppose you want to buy something that costs a quarter, and what you have is 3 dimes. If there isnt a 5 cent coin, this creates a situation where you have enough money, but making exact change isnt possible, which while not impossible to deal with is bothersome. If we moved to only dimes and no quarters or nickels, it would never make sense to make a price end in 5 cents, so any price would be a multiple of 10 cents and change can always be made. Alternatively, if you get rid of dimes and nickels but keep quarters, then it doesnt make sense to charge a price ending in something other than .00, .25, .50, or .75, and so you can always make change for those prices with the coins one would have.
Literally none of this matters anyways if pennies are going, because making prices end in certain amounts won’t work as nice in practice as it does here for the simple reason that US prices almost never include taxes.
I mean, presumably fractions of a dollar still exist as a concept even if the coins don’t, so if you’re selling something that someone might buy in cash, one could just set the sticker price so that the final price plus tax ends up as a round number, essentially including tax when deciding on price and then taking it out again when making the labels, if one wanted to do that.
Just use dimes and half dollars
Unfortunately half dollars are comically large
Why’s it a bad idea to get rid of coins at this point anyway. What can you still buy that is a fraction of a dollar that actually matters? Anything that cheap can just be sold in multiples that amount to even dollar amounts.
Getting rid of coins and rounding to nearest dollar sounds great to me but I don’t know what the drawbacks are.
There’s still some edge cases floating around. Some laundromats, parking meters, using a shopping cart at Aldi, older vending machines, bottle deposits, probably a few more but that’s off the top of my head.
Agreed, why just the penny, eliminate the whole decimal place.
Chad Kroeger and his fans have been through enough. LEAVE HIM ALONE! LEAVE CHAD ALONE!
Chad walks into a committee meeting to explain why we should end the production of our copper familiar. “LOOK AT THIS PENNY GRAPH, every time I do it makes me laugh”
I’ve got a great business idea: I’ll collect a few million dollars worth of nickels and sell them back to the government for 10 cents each. That’s about a 28% discount to the manufacturing cost, and I’ll double my money. Win-win!
I assume you’re alluding to this - https://youtu.be/58SrtQNt4YE
Indeed.
Just have a $1 coin that can snap into 10 pieces like a chocolate bar. And a $100 note that tears into 10 pieces like a book if stamps.
Canada got rid of the penny 12 years ago. Hardly raised an eyebrow.
Probably cause Canadians aren’t weird about their currency.
All Canadian bills keep getting redesigned.
one time they made the 10$ bill vertical and no one gave a shit
I want the next one to be rotated, but still in portrait. Giant black bars on the sides, and the print is tiny. Like full screening a badly edited video.
And they put a black woman on it. Ooooooo scary!
I love the vertical $10 bill.
half of them are still circulating in the U.S.
I love your polymer notes. Makes our greenbacks look like antiques.
Guarantee Walmart starts pricing things at $xx.96 and milking $0.04 on every transaction.
If they do it they way we did in Canada, that would round down to 95¢ and you’d get a nickel back
That would be great, but… Murica and all that. If they can fuck us without lube, they will.
Cool. Do the dollar bill next. Go buck and doublebuck coin like Canadia did.
If I can’t buy a gallon of milk or gasoline with it, it should be a coin.
I heard a rumour that if everyone just gather around politicians and keep throwing pennies at them, the corruption in the government will be gone.
I mean like… dump an entire box of pennies from a skyscraper onto a politican down below FOR SCIENCE 😏
So what happens when someone pays cash at the supermarket? Who rounds up?
I saw an interview with an economist years ago where he said that if we just followed the accepted rules of rounding (1-4 rounds to 0, 5-10 rounds to 10) then it would work out about the same. In reality I’m sure companies would just pocket the extra money
They already do with sales tax. ( If the tax works out to a fraction of a cent, almost every register or POS system will round up…it’s a tiny amount per transaction, but it does happen and adds up over daily, weekly and monthly transactions)
Yes we all saw office space
Yes we all saw office space
The ol Superman III
I write POS software, and have written tax calculations that cover about 30 states, and several CA provinces.
While we do have to round (always up) when calculating sales tax, there’s no way for the business to figure out how much that rounding would be, since it’s just added to the tax collected.
And in all states that I’ve worked with, a business has to pay what they collected (even if they over collect), and can’t just calculate a percentage of total sales (since many states have tax tables, rounding rules, or 3-4 decimal tax rates, and not a flat percentage tax).
So it’s actually the government that gets the benefit of the rounding.
Didn’t know that was the case, thanks for correcting me.
I write POS software
I don’t know if you’re in any position to suggest decisions, but your software is often run on subpar hardware. Going to touchscreens doubled our call time, it was because of the half second or so of loading between touches. It couldn’t be used naturally because of the delay.
I write POS software
Don’t be so hard on yourself!
We follow normal rounding rules in Canada. 1, 2 round down to 0. 3, 4 round up to 5. 6, 7 round down to 5. 8, 9 round up to 10.
Can you game the system? Yes!
As a business, make sure all your prices (plus tax) come to a price ending in 3, 4, 8, or 9. When consumers buy a single item you’ll get the rounding up (edit: if they pay cash) and make sweet, sweet profit. But if they buy more than one item, you’re SOL on controlling the rounding.
As a consumer, you have way more control. First, pay with cash whenever the price will round down and you can probably “profit” 5 or so dollars a year. (Assuming you pay with cash on or two times a day, saving 1 to 2 cents each time.) Pay with credit or debit each time the price
willwould round up.Second, you can get real fancy. You can learn tax rules in depth so you know what items will or won’t be taxed and at what rate (we have federal and provincial taxes but they don’t apply to everything and they don’t follow the same rules on what is taxed.) But, you can use this info to always know what the final bill will be and always buy combinations of items that end in 2 or 7 (or 1 and 6 if you’re lazy) and always pay cash. You can profit like $20 a year or something doing this.
In reality? No one gives a shit until that one rare time you’re paying with cash and it rounds down. It’s your lucky day and you do the Six Flags Man dance. It’s like finding a penny and picking it up.
Pay with credit or debit each time the price will round up.
I don’t think it matters with credit or debit. The exact amount is paid.
Yes, that’s why you pay with credit/debit. To avoid the round up.
I changed “will” to “would” to hopefully make it more clear.
That’s what OP it’s implying.
There’s still a fuck ton of pennies in circulation and on the ground, unless they consider them no longer legal tender we’ll have plenty.
However, if we end up following how Brazil does it, in my experience, it depends on the person/vendor and the amount. If you buy something that’s like R$3,99 you’ll usually get give them R$4 and that’s it. I’ve also had it where I’ll pay for something that’s say R$4,89, give them R$5 and get 15 or 25 centavos back. Could also depend on what’s in the drawer at that time.
Corporations will 100% pocket the difference at first, but once it becomes a normal thing to do the rounding I’ll wager it’ll fall to the Brazilian method, especially with local businesses or vendors.
Better late than never. While the momentum is here, get rid of the nickel too.
Oddly reminiscent of the Roman empire.
I guess this is a good thing, but I can imagine some companies taking advantage of this
They should keep pennies and put Trump’s face on them so I can throw them in the trash
I literally throw them in the trash. I don’t see many of them because my cash transactions tend to be decimaless.
Canada did this thirteen years ago.
