The last-ever penny will be minted today in Philadelphia

I'd say screw it, get rid of nickles and dimes as well. Quarters can stay, for now.

It's a complete waste of money and time continuing to mint such low-value currency. It can't be used for just about anything.

Unfortunately, I do see the problem with part of this. For a handful of items where it does matter, it will force people to use cards more if they want to avoid rounding. And the card providers already have a choke-hold on retailers, and the whole thing is basically a scheme that funnels money from the poor to the wealthy via interest and fees on the consumer, interchange fees, and rewards programs.

But add a $3.50 coin so that we can strongly incentivize coffee to stay below a certain price.

Also for the memes…

The last time a coin was dropped was the half penny in the late 1850s, when I think it was worth about 25 cents today, so there is a precedent for what you are suggesting.

Only if the increased revenue from rounding doesn't go into retailers pockets but rather is redistributed somehow. i.e. to reduce sales tax

Just take a zero out of everything and change the name from dollar to something else!

It would be exceedingly funny is 75% of the value.

Maybe make it be a $3.33 coin?

$0.67 coin is on the way

A noticeable number of places around me in an urban area in the USA already now have signs up saying they won't make any coin change at all! Pay with a card, or exact change, or they'll round up to the dollar keep the difference.

Sometimes the sign says "due to the penny shortage" and has been up for a year or whatever, I dunno. But they aren't just not giving you pennies in your change, they are refusing any coins in your change. I am curious as to the motivation, I could guess but it's not obvious to me. They will still take coins as payment, just not give them as change.

$0.666. Half the population would think it's the mark of the beast, the other half rounds up to 6-7.

CCP Grey has a nice video and discusses the precedent: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y5UT04p5f7U

My local just went from $3.50 to $4 this week :(

and the third half of the population thinks it's egregious that a repeating fraction has been truncated!

*dllar*

You can either put payments into the register or the safe.

If it goes into the safe, it's nearly impossible to steal because there's a time lock preventing the cashier from accessing it. But you can't make change.

This means you have a optimization problem to have the minimum possible cash in the register to meet all change needs.

Eliminating denominations makes the optimization problem easier, if nothing else.

If the Pennies go away, you can no longer get things for pennies on the dollar.

It's worth about $2.70

The half-penny was discontinued in 1857. Adjusted for inflation it was worth 37 cents in todays money when it was discontinued.

And hell, put Bank of Zimbabwe on the bills.

US Peso

I know you're referencing more than pennies, but to speak to pennies, I find the current rounding noise in the US to be weird. Likely, it's just more of the media, talking heads, and youtube personalities trying to turn a nothing into something, story.

Back when we did it in Canada, I don't recall a single person I knew concerned about penny rounding. Everyone was sick of pennies. No one cared. Everyone was happy. And the math seems fair enough:

https://www.budget.canada.ca/2012/themes/theme2-info-eng.htm...

Basically, if something is $1.01 or $1.02, you round down. If it's $1.03 or $1.04, you round up. Rounding is to be applied after all taxes are paid, etc.

Of course, there was also central guidance and, well, everyone just followed it. It's called "having a society".

People blathering on about stores fixing the rounding are morons, there's no way to do so if you buy more than one item. No one gets ripped off with the above method. In the end, it just works out.

And really, who cares?! It's a penny.

Gourmet high-end Keurig pods are like $0.50 each. Make your own coffee.

Nickles are likely to go shortly after. You can do everything you can with nickles with dimes and quarters, nickles have worse economics than pennies, and have had their minting suppressed below the market needs for years. Once pennies leave circulation, the problems with nickles will become urgent and they'll quickly leave.

Dimes are small and cheap to make though, so they'll probably stick around.

The famous little jingle "shave and a haircut, two bits"

Most people today have no clue what a "bit" is.

I imagine the future will hold something similar for the penny in all the idioms and cultural phrases we have. What the hell is a penny?

I don't like inflation either. The fact that it's 'normal' or 'required for growth' to me sounds like economic bollocks and a lot of pretending that it doesn't cause issues in the long run.

But it's here to stay, nothing we can do about it.

Quick, someone file a trademark for “Take a Quarter, Leave a Quarter”

Night City eurodollars?

Rounding is such a weird boogeyman to me because people are like "the companies are just going to use it to get more money from the customers" but, they're doing that anyway. They don't need this excuse to raise prices they'll just do it anyway.

Same thing when people complain that raising minimum wage will increase prices, meanwhile prices have increased for 50 years completely separate from wages. They don't need the excuse to raise prices they're just gonna do it anyway.

If they want companies to not raise prices the only answer is regulation, but regulation is communism and therefore bad.

I'm so god damn tired.

I wonder if the gourmet high end plastic ends up in the brew.

As the article points out, there are laws that say people who pay via SNAP debit cards "cannot be charged more than others".

If cash payments are rounded down, but debit card payments aren't, they are in violation of state law.

The article also points out that rollback of pennies in Canada and other places were planned, addressing these kinds of issues. USA is doing it with no such planning.

If you go through coffee regularly, it's actually quite a nice thing to invest in. There are a really amazing number of craft roasters throughout the country, and simply having a quality grinder is enough. And you don't need a crazy espresso setup to enjoy it. My setup consists of a motorized flat burr grinder, a 20$ kettle from target, and a pour over funnel. The quality is so much higher than anything you can get from a pod that's been sitting around with pre ground coffee, and it only takes a couple minutes while you're waiting for Claude to rewrite your codebase in Rust or whatever it is "Hackers" do these days

> It's a complete waste of money and time continuing to mint such low-value currency. It can't be used for just about anything.

The problem: the dollar is almost global in its usage. The penny may not be important to the US, but it dam well is every where else where dollars are still in use frequently, along side, or in place of the local/native currency.

Getting rid of the penny will have implications, getting rid of more coins would endanger the use of the dollar globally.

There is still a large portion of the world where 100 dollar bill and a Rolex will get you home safely.

> Basically, if something is $1.01 or $1.02, you round down. If it's $1.03 or $1.04, you round up.

So everything's going to be $1.03 or $1.04. Not sure why you think retailers (or any sellers) would ever, ever, ever let this play into customers' advantage.

But apparently pointing out that obvious truth makes me a "moron," because you can think of some clever ways to get around it that retailers surely won't work around.

Decadollars

100 dollars = 10 decadollars

but then you buy 2 things, and it's $2.06. round down! or you buy 4 and it's $4.12. round down!

it'll come out in the wash. there are much bigger things to worry about.

Can you not argue that the average is the same and thus the law isn’t violated?

Media is just doing media things, ignore them. Nobody I know has even mentioned the penny thing, let alone expressed a strong opinion about it. From my perspective I have seen zero evidence of the American public caring one iota.

One of the things I admire most about Italy is how they have held the line on the price of an espresso.

It’s still just slightly over €1 if you drink it standing at the bar.

They really have their priorities straight when it comes to food and drink prices.

If you buy two things at $1.03 or $1.04, it's $2.06 or $2.07 and rounds down to $2.05 more often than it's $2.08 and rounds up to $2.10. That's not "some clever ways." That's so basic it's absurd. They don't know how many things you're going to buy. They don't know how many things anyone is going to buy. There's no way to game the entire system for every combination of things people might buy.

Never mind this: When was the last time you bought something in person, in cash, and bought only one thing? Just think it through for a second.

Sales tax gets applied first.

You attempt that at my store. To help ensure my business is sustainable in these hard times (/s), I'm imposing a "multi-item order" fee at my store. Now what?

If you want to save money get a Moka pot instead of that Keurig garbage.

Even cheaper, tastes better, and takes only slightly longer to make.

You can solve this problem even better by drinking instant coffee. Bonus points for it making yuppies cringe.

In practice most items are x.99 anyway.

When the US attempted to transition to the metric system, gas stations raised their prices per unit volume and the American consumer was convinced that the metric system was bad. I have family that think metric is bad because some fringe people thought there should be 10 hours in a day and 100 minutes in an hour, also something like 10 months a year, and the whole thing is bad because some awkward ideas were floated.

Here, it's a question of resolution, with a proven history that transitions screw the consumer, though maybe it won't be so. We're ok with arbitrary hundredths of a dollar, why were we not at thousandths? The American half cent disappeared a long time ago. You still need to include the cents in a tax bill that runs into the millions of dollars.

It's just an awkward stage in inflation. Eventually a US dollar will be worth what a Zimbabwean dollar was, and we won't have $100 bills anymore.

lol gourmet (coffee) and keurig pods don’t go together in the same sentence.

> Never mind this: When was the last time you bought something in person, in cash, and bought only one thing? Just think it through for a second.

"In cash" is entirely separate from the rounding debate and is just the "people use cards, anyway" argument. It's not relevant to this discussion. This discussion is about cash. I do buy single items at stores sometimes.

> If you buy two things at $1.03 or $1.04, it's $2.06 or $2.07 and rounds down to $2.05 more often than it's $2.08 and rounds up to $2.10.

Where's the law preventing stores from imposing an accounting fee for multi-item purchases, conveniently totaling a few cents?

I know this is supposed to be a joke but... businesses have pushed for this the other way around in the past, asking for a new coin to raise prices.

> The Coca-Cola Company sought ways to increase the five cent price, even approaching the U.S. Treasury Department in 1953 to ask that they mint a 7.5 cent coin. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fixed_price_of_Coca-Cola_from_...]

Soon one can no longer add 2 cents to a discussion.

Are we pretending that nobody has ever tried phasing out smaller denomination currency, and that we don’t have a vast body of actual case studies to draw from? Why are we running thought experiments at all?

What's stopping you from doing it now ?

Sales tax rates aren't secret. Stores can set their prices with it in mind. Consumers are far less likely to have sales tax rates memorized and to go through the trouble of checking how things'll work out from the sticker price before they get to the register.

Does the law say the average price must be the same, or does it say the price must be the same?

Reality: the supermarket does it the common sense way, and never gets sued, but if they do get sued, the outcome is "you must now refund 2 cents from every SNAP transaction you ever did"

As others have pointed out, governments sometimes issue actual guidance on how it's supposed to work when they phase out currency. It's not always "just stop making them and see how the market deals with it."

If you seriously think that's realistic I guess I don't know what to tell you.

There's not as much incentive to right now, because I don't have an excuse to round up prices, and customers don't have a case for rounding down prices. This discussion's about the possible effects of rounding, not about whether businesses are in control of their prices.

> It's called "having a society".

That must be nice.

Pizza chains have delivery fees that aren't paid to delivery drivers. Restaurants have service fees for cooking food and convenience fees for placing orders (even if paying, in cash, when you pick up), on top of the sticker price of the food itself, which used to just be the price.

Some people in this thread have talked about stores having signs saying they'll round change up to the dollar if you pay in cash, and advising to pay by card if you want exact change. I've personally seen businesses have signs on their cash registers that say "our cash register is easily hacked, we strongly recommend paying by cash instead instead of card" (I'm assuming so they can cheat on their taxes).

Businesses will do anything they can get away with to make more money, and they can usually get away with tiny fees like this. It's only a few cents, right? Except for them, it adds up.

This is nonsense. No store is going to charge a multi item fee so that they can try to scrape an extra penny off their customers. As someone else’s already pointed out, they could just do this today if they believe their customers will accept it. Did you forget that stores can just raise prices?

Your premise that stores will find a way to force rounding up is nonsense. It’s nonsense because stores aren’t actually going to do it, but also because we’re talking about *pennies*. Oh, no. The store ripped me off for 2 cents. How will I survive?

USA Fun Ticket

During the French Revolution, they tried to make a right angle have 100 degrees and even recomputed all new trig tables for this new standard. It obviously did not catch on :)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gradian

Approximately nobody uses US coins outside the US. Even in countries where the dollar is widely accepted, trying to use coins will get you weird looks at best.

In what part of the world do they use US pennies?

The US currency system sure. But pennies, specifically?

It pairs wonderfully with all the plastic in your water.

> There's not as much incentive to right now

Yeah, because stores don’t have an incentive to raise prices usually…

If there is no rounding down, it could amount to more.

Hypothetically if you incur 10,000 transactions per year with the max rounding up of $0.04 per transaction, you're out $400.

This doesn't make a huge impact to individuals, but it absolutely will to large volume businesses.

Very unlikely that would happen. The way similar issues have been dealt with in the past is that settlement is negotiated to something "reasonable" (at least arguably so) and administrable. Probably the settlement amount would just go to a fund that the state would then distribute according to its priorities.

> The penny may not be important to the US, but it dam well is every where else where dollars are still in use frequently

[citation needed]

> 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.

>> and we won't have $100 bills anymore.

Heard some pundits on the radio talking about the elimination of the penny and one of them who worked at the Secret Service as an analyst talked about why the US paper money only goes to $100 bills. He said it was to reduce criminals and illicit activity and criminals having to store it.

He related the story of Pablo Escobar's brother or cousin who was the accountant for the cartel. He said they were losing billions of dollars every year because of various kinds of attrition like rats chewing up the money, it getting too wet and disintegrating. They were losing so much because they had to store it and that wasn't always the best because they had so much of it on hand which seemed to lend credence to his story.

So if you were to get rid of the $100 bills that would further erode the ability of criminals to store so much of it.

So, round down debit cards too? This seems like a really easy problem to solve.

> As someone else’s already pointed out, they could just do this today if they believe their customers will accept it. Did you forget that stores can just raise prices?

As I already pointed out, customers would be more likely to accept it if there's an excuse for it (pennies are being phased out) than just randomly. The discussion's about what rounding may cause, not about what stores have the legal ability to do.

> It’s nonsense because stores aren’t actually going to do it, but also because we’re talking about pennies. Oh, no. The store ripped me off for 2 cents. How will I survive?

So this argument is just "you may be right, but I don't care." That's not an argument, imo.

Sales taxes already result in rounding, which the store could try to take advantage of. They never do. They set prices to end in 99 because it's psychologically more attractive. That will most likely continue. If they're required to price in multiples of 5, we'll see prices ending in 95.

There are already stores in the US that are rounding their transactions because of the penny shortage that is already happening. Many are just simply rounding all transactions down to the nearest $0.05.

I'm pretty sure the OP was talking about a far future where a $100 bill is worth less than the current penny

> If they want companies to not raise prices the only answer is regulation

Or competition. Consumer electronics are much cheaper than they were in the past, and that's not because of regulation. (To be clear, I'm not saying that regulation is wrong or anything, I'm saying that "use regulation to lower prices" and "remove barriers to competition to lower prices" are both tools in the toolbox.

> Where’s the law preventing someone from doing this right now? I don’t think this cynicism is justified.

You don't think businesses take advantage of situations for more profit?

Take this year's tariffs as an example. As you may've heard, UPS is charging customs brokerage fees of dozens or hundreds of dollars on top of the actual tariff payment; identical shipments sent via FedEx or DHL are only charged a few dollars for the service of customs brokerage, so we know UPS's actual costs for providing that service aren't that high. They saw a situation where consumers would be confused about prices and took advantage of it to make a lot more money by simply charging a lot more than they need to.

"But where's the law saying they couldn't have just raised their prices by hundreds of dollars without tariffs? Where's the law?!" There wasn't one, they could've raised their prices for international shipments before the tariffs happened. But consumers would have noticed a lot more and accepted it a lot less. They took advantage of the situation because the situation allowed them to get away with it.

> Similarly, if places are willing to price stuff at $1.03 for the few extra cents they’ll collect some of the time, then they can just raise prices on 99c items right now to $1 to collect the extra cent, which they don’t do because such prices have a psychological effect on the consumer that outweighs the small gain.

I'm not sure what you're arguing here. You admitted the $0.99 number has a psychological effect that outweighs the $0.01 gain of charging the extra cent. That would be the reason they don't do that. It's not super relevant to the discussion of whether rounding can/will be gamed.

Though I think the parent means, eventually in the (hopefully) distant future, we'll get rid of the $100 bill because it will be worth too little.

No one is going to buy “multi transaction fee” because of pennies being phased out. This makes no sense.

You have constructed a whole chain of absurd claims that have no basis Did you forget that right now, today, stores willingly take a cent off virtually every price so they can do the x.99 thing?

> So this argument is just "you may be right, but I don't care." That's not an argument, imo.

No. I can simultaneously believe that you are wrong and also that the fundamental concern is absurd.

It's a little silly. The smallest denomination the US has ever had was a half cent. In terms of relative purchasing power, it was more valuable than a dime is today. The country didn't collapse.

>I'd say screw it, get rid of nickles and dimes as well. Quarters can stay, for now.

Let's do it like Japan does, only one type of currency. And that currency will be the penny. One dollar note? No buddy... that's a one hundred cent note now.

We may or may not continue to mint one dollar coins (previously one cent coins), but everything will make... cents.

(I guess this style of humor is better delivered verbally?)

The experience of other countries that have actually implemented this (see: Canada) demonstrates that this is not actually a problem.

As far as I am aware, USD is used for larger amounts in such countries. Smaller purchases are made in the local currency.

There are also plenty of places where flashing a 100 dollar bill and a Rolex will ensure you don't get home at all.

But there would be rounding down, so how is this relevant?

Now people stop shopping at your store.

Growing up in Australia 1 cent pieces were gone before i knew what money was. Coming to Canada in 2009 on a trip, i was shocked to see them. They were annoying and instantly drove me crazy, but i felt bad throwing them out. I threw them out anyway, helping reduce inflation

> They don't know how many things anyone is going to buy.

They have historical data, so they know on average people buy 5 things, and they will have data on what impact on purchasing behavior the changes have. Most likely they will tune for increased volume as people spend more to avoid losing a couple of cents.

No, because the law applies to individual transactions, not averages.

What's even to say anything will be rounded down? If Walmart says "we're going to round anything from $0.01 to $0.04 up to $0.05," do you think the free market would put them out of business out of principle, or would they get away with it? I think they'd get away with it.

Before Canada stopped using its penny, it was common to find American pennies in circulation.

It's still fairly common to find American nickels, quarters and dimes in circulation. (Probably mostly dimes if I had to guess.) They're generally accepted at par because nobody is even really looking at them and if they did it wouldn't really represent being, well, short-changed.

> The fact that it's 'normal' or 'required for growth' to me sounds like economic bollocks

Please see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CnoDKqlcR4Y

SNAP is a major source of revenue for grocers so it seems like you wouldn't have to prod them very hard to do that.

They're all easily solvable problems. The issue, as GP mentioned, is that the pennies are just stopping without the thought through these problems and planning for the solutions. This was done via a social media post, not a well thought out transition like Canada had.

Right. Most gas stations list prices ending in 9/10 of a cent.

If the store is e.g. Walmart, then their scale's already large enough that I don't think this is going to put them under. And if every store's doing it, then there'll be nowhere to turn to.

> So everything's going to be $1.03 or $1.04.

Rounding would apply on the total transaction, not individual items (because otherwise the individual posted item prices would just be false.) So, if there is an abuse route with round-half-down, it is that optimizing buyers would structure purchase to always total $x.01 or $x.02, possibly splitting planned purchases into multiple purchases to achieve that.

But even that isn't realistically a significant issue.

The 500-euro bill is being phased out for similar reasons. Though it's worth noting a 100-dollar bill was worth more than twice what it is today when Pablo Escobar died.

Let's face it, these arguments are simply post hoc rationalizations. If the proposal were instead to introduce a "milli" coin people would find some way that meant you were getting ripped off too.

The article also points out that some states and a lot cities require retailers to provide exact change. Congress would need to pass legislation to allow rounding nationally. I'm guessing in the meantime they'll continue holding pennies from previous years?

Countries like Ecuador that use US dollars mint their own coins for local circulation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecuadorian_centavo_coins

Americans like to pretend that history and the experience of the rest of the world doesn't exist and that things that large numbers of other countries have done successfully (and which even the US has done in the past, in this case, as the half-penny, after all, was phase out a long time ago) are impossible to do successfully.

Now your customers go and shop at a store that isn't cartoonishly customer-hostile. Now what?

What percentage of people live in a jurisdiction without a sales tax? In my local area, sales tax is 8.8%. And if you take the bridge across the river, tax is 8.9%. So there is already rounding involved, $1.03 becomes $1.12167. Unless of course you bill also includes a mix of taxable and non-taxable items like food, etc..

I'm not really sure about "He said it was to reduce [...] criminals having to store it". Storage shouldn't be a huge problem - IIRC you can pack about a hundred million onto a standard pallet. Even for Escobar, who is THE outlier here, and assuming he's holding 100% of it in cash, that's about 300 pallets which easily fits into a normal warehouse. If you've got that much money it shouldn't be impossible to keep a warehouse like that clean and dry.

Now, "illicit activity" more broadly speaking checks out to me. The EU stopped printing the 500 euro note because it was primarily used for illegal transactions and money laundering.

When the $1000 bill was retired, a loaf of bread cost a couple cents. There was indeed a push to purge them during the drug scares of the late 20th century. A suitcase of $1000 bills is far sexier than one of $100 bills. It really was porting them.

With bitcoin, it's moot.

A $100 is basically a tank of gas and a sandwich in CA.

Nobody has to round down. There's no government rule.

I would expect many businesses to implement ceil()-flavored rounding.

Won't someone think of the children?

If the national government literally stops creating a certain precision of money, i expect the "exact change" requirement should be invalid.

> You still need to include the cents in a tax bill that runs into the millions of dollars

Not in all cases. The IRS does not use cents when you file your tax return, they say round to the nearest dollar.

JPY has the benefit that people probably don't try to use floating point numbers for currency. (ignoring the central joke of your comment)

> The issue, as GP mentioned, is that the pennies are just stopping without the thought through these problems and planning for the solutions.

That's not an "issue". That's the way things that actually happen, happen.

Nothing avoids rounding.

Sales taxes as they are known in the US were largely introduced in the 20th century. The half-penny was phased out in the mid-19th century.

The legal structure of sales taxes in the US present some unique challenges that simply don't exist as problems that needed to be solved in other countries. These problems can't be legislated away because the authority to do so is highly decentralized. Pretending that these problems don't exist because they don't exist elsewhere is not helpful.

This is very much a case of the Mencken quote that for every complex problem there is a solution that is simple, obvious, and wrong.

> 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.

It makes no sense to spend more money to mint the actual money, then the money is worth OK. You might not like it, but something has to be done because to continue in a slow and methodical process 1) forgets that the government is the same entity that runs the DMV 2) people love to throw out criticisms of solutions that aren’t perfect not realizing that it’s still better than the status quo. To do nothing is costing money or in the case of Ukraine it’s costing lives. 3) I bet you $100 You don’t like Trump.

> UPS is charging customs brokerage fees of dozens or hundreds of dollars on top of the actual tariff payment

To reinforce this point... UPS just does this all the time. I had to have a number of personal effects[1] shipped up from the US to Canada that I requested self-declaration forms for them and never received them - UPS decided to brokerage the shipment themselves. We then spent the next three months fighting a six hundred dollar charge[2] that should have never existed.

UPS is going to defraud customers on brokerage fees regardless of the scenario - it's just what UPS does. You've got bigger problems to worry about - the impact of dropping the penny will be unnoticeable in the sea of general corruption and fraud.

1. Items that you own in one country and are shipping to Canada for personal possession are exempt from most normal tariffs.

2. To really add icing to outrage - this was more than double the original shipping price and, considering we delivered an itemization with the shipment for customs UPS could calculate their BS fee upfront and show the actual cost to the customer but they don't because the US doesn't force them to.

Exactly. Like with the Zimbabwe dollars being printed in billion-dollar denominations, $100 is irrelevant then

It's impractical to eliminate the nickel and penny, while keeping the quarter and dime. The most practical way forward is to keep only the dime, but people will be quite upset about the loss of the quarter.

> there are laws that say

Hmm, maybe this is why it should be handled by Congress and not at the whim of the executive. They can handle all this in one piece of legislation.

You volunteering your business to be the the test legal case for that? Or are you stocking pennies?

You’re arguing about nonsense scenarios. Hypothetically every business could also tack a “convenience fee” of $20 on every purchase like TicketMaster and make 200k off this imaginary customer.

Also even if a business rounded up every transaction, the expected benefit is 2 cents per transaction vs fair rounding, not 4 cents.

The wikipedia article says that this was specifically the price of a 6.5oz Coke.

The obvious way to raise the price by 50% is to cut the amount by a third, selling 4.33oz Cokes.

https://www.reddit.com/r/BottleDigging/comments/1kng6aq/coca... suggests that Coca-Cola was comfortable producing bottles in several different sizes.

Now, a 4 1/3 oz Coke is obviously too small to be worth bothering with. But that's also true of a 6 1/2 oz Coke. These sizes seem more like something you dispense with an eyedropper than something you drink. A normal can is 12 oz! Who'd want to buy a six-ounce beverage?

You can address both problems at once by doubling the price and increasing the volume all the way up to 8.67 oz.

> 3) I bet you $100 You don’t like Trump.

I actually like Trump (or at least his presidency) a lot more than I think most Hacker News browsers do. I like Trump's presidency more than most of my co-workers and many of my friends do. My arguments in this thread are entirely my own, not the product of some political allegiance.

“change will be provided via Venmo” sign at the entrance :)

Some people are poor. Did you know that? Some people live in poverty. I'm sure that is a big surprise to you. Some Americans still have to spend nickels and dimes. Crazy, right? Some people don't have infinite Bitcoin from mommy and daddy.

That's an entirely off-topic comment that has nothing to do with anything I said and adds nothing to the discussion.

> Likely, it's just more of the media, talking heads, and youtube personalities trying to turn a nothing into something, story.

It's not. Some US states have laws on the books that make it illegal for retailers to round up. The turmoil is that if the retailer can only round down to the nearest five cents, then they stand to lose from one to four cents per cash sale for any sale that is not a multiple of five cents. Add those one to four cent losses up over a large enough number of transactions and the retailer stands to lose a considerable sum over the course of a year. And many retail shops already operate with thin margins anyway, so the loss from "always round down" could erase whatever thin margins some shops already operate under.

I’d like to see an estimation of how often coinage is actually used. I play a lot of pinball so I handle quarters frequently but I can’t really think of what I do with the smaller denominations except collect them in a jar.

I wouldn’t mind having larger coin denominations though. Dollar and five dollar coins would be very convenient.

There used to be a $10 coin called an eagle, may as well be violently American and call it eagles.

The Indiana pi bill mandated certain mathematical values be changed to the wrong value.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indiana_pi_bill

What if the stores detain you and force you to work in their perfume department to pay off the million-dollar multi-item fee they just thought up? What if they also do a bunch of allergen testing on you to figure out what you're allergic to and then make you exclusively sell perfumes containing those allergens?

All because of that darn penny-rounding.

They can add a "total not divisible by 5" fee, ranging from 1 to 4 cents

If it means shops stop charging $4.99 and start charging $5.00, I will be ecstatic.

If your shop can be wiped out by losing that little on each transaction it wasn't long for the world anyways... Retail margins are thin by industry preference but they're not 1-4 cents per transaction thin.

Er... So just adjust prices to whole multiples of 5 cents? Helps math-challenged cashiers too...

I wonder how long you could get away with venmoing 2¢ to people before your account gets closed

If they're easily solvable then why do you need planning?

Changing the currency on a whim by executive fiat is stupid, but that's just principle. In practical terms, I really have a hard time caring about the problems this specific change creates.

Why is everyone talking about rounding?

I've read there's enough pennies in bank vaults to last for years.

It used to be that they gave you the choice. You could round or you could use pennies but you had to be consistent throughout the return, because even the IRS doesn’t care if you manage to scrape out 49 cents.

Has that changed and it has to be dollars not?

While minting this currency the government continues to nickel and dime the American people.

Prices in the US are not tax-inclusive, so the effect of sales tax ruins that plan.

More annoying especially during the SNAP gap due to the shutdown the law forbids differential pricing in general so shops couldn't offer lower prices for EBT/SNAP customers as a way to help their neighbors.

And sales tax varies a loooooot, and change constantly

There's 12000+ distinct sales tax regimes in the US

https://sovos.com/content-library/sut/state-by-state-guide-t...

I don't want to be glib, but hey what the hey. This is how you can see that the United States is in decline; it can no longer discontinue a coin through legislation.

Can you explain further? Canada has sales tax and successfully phased out the penny.