The last-ever penny will be minted today in Philadelphia

just make the price a multiple of five cents

State and local taxes make this infeasible

Retailers don't, like, have to add sales tax on top of listed prices.

They just have to pay it.

Now is our chance to switch to European style "you pay the price it says on the shelf"!

> State and local taxes make this infeasible

I don’t see why that would be the case? In my country, most prices with VAT (which is what you’re charged) are nice, round numbers, but not the price without VAT.

I suppose the stores set a target price, and then adjust it a bit to make the price + VAT a “nice” number.

Is there a reason that couldn’t be done to make all prices + VAT multiples of 5c?

It's just American custom to exclude some taxes from the posted price. Many countries include all taxes in the price, something I've always wished we would do in America. After that, I'd love to see the elimination of the custom of always ending fuel cost per gallon in 9/10 of a cent.

No, it's illegal in many, looks like most states:

https://www.avalara.com/blog/en/north-america/2019/07/retail...

Oh no, a made up problem that's easily solved by changing the price slightly in any direction, whatever will we do.

Rounding sales tax on each item will often result in a different price than rounding once for the total. The store will collect the wrong amount of tax that way.

Several reasons, it really is a mess.

The local tax is set by multiple independent tax authorities that change their taxes independently, the tax you see is the aggregate of those independent authorities computed separately, which do not coordinate with each other.

Some of these taxes are conditional at point-of-sale, late-binding the taxes, such that different customers are subject to different rates across these tax authorities such that it is unlikely to round to exactly 5c.

It is widely illegal to not display the true price and taxes paid separately. Trying to retcon a price and taxes for rounding purposes that is also strictly consistent across customers so as to not violate the law is not trivial.

And on top of all of this, the Federal government does not have the authority to regulate the way States and various locales structure their sales taxes. It is a herding cats problem.

IIRC, in New York it’s illegal to absorb sales tax on individual items because by law it’s a consumer tax collected by the business and explicitly not a tax on the business itself, but - and it’s a pretty big exception - anything sold as a bulk good can include the tax in the price. That includes things like liquid fuels, grains or candy by the scoop in the supermarket, loose sand/gravel/salt/whatever for outdoor use, and things like that. It’s been a long while since I had to set up an ecommerce site for New York though.

That makes too much sense, which is why it won't happen. Though I'd be all for it.

With some 5th grade algebra, one can adjust the total of a transaction to result in a round number after taxes.

Besides that, the law (at least where I live) is that the tax must be paid, but it does not specify by whom. It's completely feasible for a retailer to pay the 2 cent difference in the tax and charge the customer a round number.

Is this really the state of American education where a percentage calculation makes a very simple situation literally impossible? You can think of no other way to overcome the complicated calculations of checks notes x times 1.06?

Come on, this is not complicated. It's elementary algebra. You sum the rounded prices, then add a credit or surcharge of 2 cents to make the tax come out to a round number.

The tax is on the actual, real amount in your transaction subtotal. You are charged sales tax on the actual, real money you pay for the entire transaction. Then you multiply by 1.06 or whatever the tax rate is. That's how sales tax works.

If one rearranges the equations as we all learned in 5th grade, one can compute the amount that the subtotal must be to get a round number after tax. Then you charge or credit the customer the difference.

Alternatively, the retailer can simply pay the 4 cent difference in sales tax.

That's it. You either do algebra or just pay the difference. It is not complicated.

You have to do this algebra per state and locale, and your reward is higher advertised prices than the shop next door. I think you both underestimate the problem and overestimate everyone involved in retail, especially the consumer.

I’m not saying it’s hard, I’m saying there is enough friction where it’s just not going to happen without legislation mandating it.

Just show the price including tax. (half-sarcastic, because obviously that would be an unpopular change for sellers because it makes the visible number go up, but it would solve two problmes...)

They could still set the post-tax price to something that results in round numbers, at downside of the pre-tax price having more decimals.

It's the same way with the penny.

Tax on a 0.99 item isn't coming out to an exact penny multiple.

So stores are already dealing with this situation

> it’s just not going to happen without legislation mandating it.

Obviously, and I don't think anyone said otherwise.

> It is widely illegal to not display the true price and taxes paid separately. Trying to retcon a price and taxes for rounding purposes that is also strictly consistent across customers so as to not violate the law is not trivial.

Having lived in Europe, this should be changed. It makes it infeasible to keep track of your total bill as you shop. The amount without tax should be printed on the receipt, if you care to reference it.

So, lobby for changes to the structure of those taxes so that's not a problem. Tthe simple solution is changing them from surcharges adding a percent onto posted prices to making them a percentage taken out of the posted price; so that coin availability is only an issue in the improbable event that you are paying your sales tax bill in cash.

Of course, retailers don't want tax-inclusive posted prices, but... ::shrug::

I've seen stores advertise "we pay your sales tax" like furniture outlets. Wouldn't this allow for legal priced items?

The issue is that the legal change would have to be made independently across thousands of decentralized tax authorities. Herding that many cats is infeasible so it can't be part of a plausible solution. In some jurisdictions, the legal process required to make the changes have effectively insurmountable voting thresholds.

It may not be convenient but any realistic solution has to recognize the hard facts that shape the nature of problem.

> Just show the price including tax.

With a tax rate as precise as 1000ths of a percent in many jurisdictions*, you'd need extreme precision on the price tag (e.g. $11.798625), OR you need to substantially overcharge for tax (rounding up the tax to the penny or nickel on each individual item, instead of on the total of ALL items).

And sales tax rates can even be different from ONE CITY BLOCK TO THE NEXT.

* Arizona: 10.725% Hawaii: 4.712% Minnesota: 7.875% etc. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sales_taxes_in_the_United_Stat...

Even with just a 6% tax, you end up with prices that need 4 digits of precision after the decimal (e.g.: $11.6494). That issue extends over a wide range of pre-tax/input prices, so one would have to DRASTICALLY change the prices so that the price including 6% tax rounds to even a penny, let alone a nickel.

While you could calculate a price that (after tax) would round a single item to the nearest nickel, it's completely IMPOSSIBLE to do so with unknown numbers of multiple items.

In addition, tax rates in the real world aren't just single-digit percentages. They have precision of 1/1000th of a percent, making such a calculation much more challenging.

Arizona: 10.725% Hawaii: 4.712% Minnesota: 7.875% etc.

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

And sales tax rates can be different from ONE CITY BLOCK TO THE NEXT, so a company with more than one location would find it IMPOSSIBLE to advertise their prices at all.