The last-ever penny will be minted today in Philadelphia

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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?

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.

> 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?

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?

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

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

> There's 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.

> 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.

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

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.

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?

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.

> 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.

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

> 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.

> 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 :)

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.

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...

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.

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

Has that changed and it has to be dollars now?

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.

Problem is it isn't just the $5.99 rounds to $6.00 it is tax. If the end cost is $6.36 will the state be happy with that one penny less? For any state 1 penny per transaction is millions of dollars per year! (note that I had to change your price from 4.99 to 5.99 - 5.00 times any tax rate is an even multiple of 5 and so cannot make the point).

Nobody wants 10 months in a year. What we want is 13 28-day months a year plus one or two intercalary days. But organized religion gets in the way.

Is gas sold as a whole penny amounts in those locations? Where I am it's always something and 9/10ths of a cent.

> Pretending that these problems don't exist because they don't exist elsewhere is not helpful.

Pretend that’s everything in the US is globally unique to us also is not helpful. “No one else has sales tax like us” is likely not true but also not super relevant. Tax collecting agencies in 50 states and however many territories could issue guidance tomorrow for how to deal with this and it would have the force of law until/unless legislatures see fit to define different rules.

> for every complex problem there is a solution that is simple, obvious, and wrong.

Sure, but for every simple problem there is a small army of people online pretending it’s insurmountable.

No! The US is totally different from Canada. We cannot learn from anyone else’s success because we are a unique snowflake.

This. A large chunk of the US population has been programmed that ALL CHANGE from when they were children in the 1950s is bad.

Here in Argentina the law says they must be rounded down. Initially it was for 5 AR$cents, and some shops still has the oficial sign that says AR$ 0.05.

We unofficially drop the coins/bills when the reach ~US$0.03, so now we dropped the AR$50 bills and everythig in cash is rounded down to AR$100 (US$0.07).

(The only exception is the photocopy shop 2 blocks away from home.)

Credit cards are charged the exact ammount, with cents that are irrelevant.

I think people underestimate how many stores used to set prices to avoid pennies. When I was a kid it was frequent. Goose the price so cost + tax rounded to the nearest nickel. But now everything is 23.99 or sometimes 23.95, and they use the pennies place to denote clearance items. Like 19.94 or 3.98.

For large volume businesses, $400 / year is what we usually call.. a rounding error.

Allowing gas stations to denominate their prices by the 10th of a cent has always struck me as a just an underhanded and extreme way to practice the "9.99" retail psychological trick. Why not allow retailers to price things 9.99999? Ridiculous.

Things have always been rounded (tax). There's just a change in what multiple it's rounded to.

1) DMV is state-run, not federal govt. 2) Why can't we at least spend 5 minutes studying how it went in Canada, and learn that govt guidance was helpful to the transition, so do that too? 3) Sure. And even more because, even when he DOES pick up on a good idea (I support elimination of the penny), he does so in a haphazard / slipshod way that the end result is often worse than if nothing had been done.

Generally in accounting, insignificant amounts are... insignificant (like how tax calculations are rounded to the dollar).

Please don't strawman this, there is ample evidence for rounding pennies on everyday transactions.

The amount is only rounded at the end of the transaction. Those fractions make a difference if you're buying more than a few gallons

There’s a reason for this. Prices that force cashiers to make change force them to run the transaction through the cash register so it is recorded, and the amount in the register can be checked at the end of a day or shift to detect theft. If prices are round numbers, such as $1, the cashier can pocket the payment.

I wonder if this could encourage retailers to start advertising tax-inclusive prices. That way there's no rounding in the customer transaction (if they set all their tax-inclusive pricing at multiples of 5 cents), and then the sales tax would just be calculated in aggregate, and paid electronically with no rounding.

It's because technically the dollar is divided into Dimes, Cents, and Mil. (this is why dimes say 'One Dime' on them instead of 'Ten Cents'.

So while the mil isn't really used anywhere else that regular people see any more due to inflation, it is a valid division of the dollar and that's why they are able to get away with it.

of course 9.99...(repeating) is mathematically 10, so I have a hard time being against allowing that.

And in inflation-adjusted terms, rounding to the nearest nickel now is about as significant as rounding to the nearest penny was in 1978.

The tax authorities cannot unilaterally change the law with "guidance".

It is explicitly written into statute in many cases, requiring legislative action across thousands of independent tax authorities. Complicating it more is that in some cases a change must satisfy constitutional requirements which are even harder to change.

Everything is easy if you pretend that you can change things by authoritarian fiat instead of abiding by existing statutory and constitutional restrictions. The courts would never allow it.

Charges take into account severity of the crime and intent. Nobody is going to get criminal charges for rounding pennies on cash transactions.

If the law is slow to change or there are no available pennies, the stores can adjust the prices to match the expected rounding of prices. I can't imagine someone being prosecuted from rounding a penny but it's a quick and easy way to avoid any doubt.

> rats chewing up the money

Profit for the US government. Fixed by plastic bills.

Every $ printed but never redeemed is a significant profit (assuming other costs are low like printing).

Especially yummy when countries just want to hoard the currency - same as selling stamps that are never used:

  estimate the stock of U.S. currency circulating in Argentina ... U.S. currency inflows during 1988-1992 totaled $20.8 billion

https://www.federalreserve.gov/pubs/ifdp/1993/460/ifdp460.pd...

In 1934 the dollar was worth approximately 24x more than in 2025. A cheap loaf of bread is about $2 here in NYC, so it would be about 8¢ at the time.

On one hand, the difference between 2¢ and 8¢ looks completely inconsequential now. OTOH it's a four-fold difference.

Unlikely that stores would be required to price in 5 cent increments. That would presumably require legislative action and would fly in the face of gas stations today pricing with fractional cents.

But yeah, this isn’t a real issue regardless.

There's no reason you can't have 400 degrees in a circle and therefore 100 for a right angle.

It's a degree scale: you can choose any number you want.

It's probably the case that the real risk is being suspended from SNAP for failing to comply with their rules.

> I can't imagine someone being prosecuted from rounding a penny

Under this executive, I wouldn't be so sure. If a grocery chain starts deviating from the law, then the government can use it against them to further a political agenda like we've seen with Eric Adams for example.

> then they stand to lose from one to four cents per cash sale for any sale that is not a multiple of five cents

Which is much less than they're paying the CC companies on card sales.

> It's not always "just stop making them and see how the market deals with it."

On the other hand, we’ve been delaying this inevitable and necessary action for decades over hand-wringing about the implications of rounding up or down by a maximum of two damn cents per transactions _for decades_. If we did it “the right way” I’m sure it would take years and years and cost millions of dollars to “study the effects” of eliminating the penny. Just do it already. Even with the best plan in the world people are going to whine about rounding.

> The tax authorities cannot unilaterally change the law with "guidance".

The standard model for regulation is generally that the law empowers some agency to clear up any ambiguities.

Doubtful that any state has legislation on how to handle taxation if pennies are unavailable so a state tax body issuing reasonable guidance is a very believable outcome.

> It is explicitly written into statute in many cases, requiring legislative action across thousands of independent tax authorities. Complicating it more is that in some cases a change must satisfy constitutional requirements which are even harder to change.

Show me the legislation that says “taxes must be collected to the penny based on the posted price without rounding”.

What are these “thousands of independent tax authorities” anyway? Are you under the impression that every city and county needs to agree change the tax law? State law trumps local laws. Washington State doesn’t need Seattle to agree with laws specifying new rounding rules.

> Everything is easy if you pretend that you can change things by authoritarian fiat instead of abiding by existing statutory and constitutional restrictions. The courts would never allow it.

Have you not been around for the last 10 months?

But also the courts tend to be fairly reasonable. Faced with conflicting requirements they generally don’t say “fuck it you’re all going to jail” but direct legislatures to fix the issue. No way we end up in a situation where pennies are unavailable and the courts tell stores that they have to shut down or stop accepting cash entirely because there isn’t a legislatively specified way to round transactions to the nickel.

Unless I’m missing something, existing pennies are also not being removed from circulation, so none of this seems to be a major issue yet. Legislatures could do their jobs and clear this up quickly of they choose to.

Individual stores generally only have to deal with one. Set the prices at the store, and make them tax-inclusive while you're at it. This isn't rocket science.

Companies serve billions of web pages per second. We can't handle 12,000 tax calculations?

Sure, on paper. In reality bored fedcops trying to justify their budgets is how you get plenty of unjustifiable suffering.

The secret service probably won't cause a Waco out of it, but I'm sure they'll do something dumb.

Is the tax unknown at the time of setting the price? If that's the problem, set the final price at price + tax, deduce tax, display that. What's the matter?

Whenever I'm late to a meeting I blame it on the french revolutionary calendar.

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

That's not the point. Businesses are obviously happy to raise prices under the confusion of other changes, but I find it very hard to believe "accounting fees" are a plausible way to do so. People know that the register machine can do the calculations easily - it already does so. And there is a good reason for businesses not to introduce such fees, because they are directly visible to the consumer who is going to complain and shop elsewhere.

The UPS example is apples to oranges. Tariffs are poorly understood, and consumers rarely shop around for shipping - they tend to take the service given by the merchant. The agency people will show on 2 random cents on every shop is way higher.

>It's not super relevant to the discussion of whether rounding can/will be gamed.

It's very relevant. How are consumers going to react to a price like $1.03? Especially since that's almost certainly something that would previously have been priced at $1.

Watch 'Pop' (Malcome McDowell) in Son of a Critch :) . I don't remember the episode/season.... where he goes on and on about some $1 bill that will be decommissioned and goes to the bank to get some...

Sales taxes in the US are truly and insanely decentralized.

The US has thousands of independent sales tax authorities with their own laws and regulations about how sales tax must be computed and displayed. These jurisdictions overlap, the sales tax you pay may be the aggregate of multiple different sales tax authorities between which there is no coordination.

Rounding to the nearest 5c or whatever creates a situation where in many locales it would be impossible to comply with sales tax and pricing laws because different tax authorities requiring mutually exclusive ways of making this change.

This creates an obvious need to change the law. This is not trivial because they are often written into statute or constrained by constitutional processes. It requires thousands of jurisdictions to all change their laws at the same time in the same way, which is effectively impossible. Even if it weren't the process would require several years. In many locales it requires a democratic vote -- what if the voters vote against it? Courts aren't going to let the government ignore these requirements because it would be inconvenient.

It really is a "herding cats" problem. There are many other things in the US that effectively can't be changed because there is no central authority to overcome coordination problems by fiat. Even at the level of all 50 States, resolving these kinds of coordination problems typically takes several decades.

The easy thing for stores to do then seems to be apply the cash rounding to EBT and card transactions.

So they just make the price with tax a multiple of 5 cent and still show the price without.

The other direction avoids a lot of stupid complains. Nobody will complain if the shop gives them a $0.04 gift.

If only it were that simple. Some sales taxes are conditional at the point-of-sale. Different customers may pay a different tax rate. This creates a situation where the display price will be incorrect part of the time and may not round to 5c or whatever the legal quantum is.

Since I'm already doing armchair stuff I'll just say that there's an argument to be made that consumer electronics HAVE to be cheaper due to the extremely inflated cost of essentials right now, which is the result of lack of regulation. It's not the system regulating itself it's just more bottom line chasing.

I don't get it. Why couldn't a cashier pocket $1.99?

Of course that's true, that doesn't mean you should.

That’s illegal in a lot of places.

Because they were handed $2 and have to get the change out of the register.

“The bill, written by a physician and an amateur mathematician, never became law.”

But I can't subdivide 400 in to as many ways as 360. Think about the pie industry. They could be put out of business!!

Ok— Walmart decides to do something the government doesn’t like re:tariffs or whatnot. They can either plead fealty and retract their decision or the C-Suite can defend themselves against conspiracy to commit a zillion misdemeanors an hour…

So do whatever they do with mils but for the penny too. They don’t nor have they ever minted a mil coin, so the procedure for this is already well established if this is correct.

Indeed, gradiens are a scale where a circle is divided into 400 equal parts. Really fucked me up a few times when I got a new calculator and wasn’t paying attention to what the little “grad” meant.

Ok, but if the cashier is stealing they could just have change in their pocket?

I'm skeptical that preventing theft is the reason for these prices rather than the psychological trick of looking cheaper.

I'd be amazed if prices weren't engineered so they rounded up far more often than down.

And the reality is that with most price tags ending in .99, retailers will actually round down to .95 to preserve the psychological benefit of not crossing a dollar barrier.

thats a strawman argument

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

Easily solvable problems still need coordination. Do you want to go to one store and have your change rounded up then go to another and have it rounded down?

Is that even remotely possible?

You'd have to ensure a positive expectation value over not only every item, but every combination of items a consumer could by. You could focus only on the most likely possible orders (assuming you have the data, I don't know how many stores actually track combination of items bought), but it's not obvious to me that there's a tractable top n most likely orders that gives a reasonable enough estimate of expectation value.

On top of that, you would be interfering with whatever system you already have that sets the cents of each item (whether marketing with 99¢, or % discounts, or a system that tracks that 97¢ means lowest sale, etc).

A large volume business isn't doing 10k transactions.

I doubt that most people in the US know the local sales tax. Let alone any change that may occur due to laws changing or traveling. I'd like to see the out the door price listed but that throws the 99 cent game off retailers like. Also I don't shop very often but Aldi US is the only place I've seen the eink price displays, the rest still have paper.

Congress seems like the most dysfunctional branch of government going on a couple decades now.

They poll worse than the most unpopular presidents

Turns out the station charges you a round number of cents per gallon. Then there are federal taxes, which are, IIRC, 24.5 cents per gallon. And then there's state tax, which varies from state to state but seems to always be x.4 cents per gallon.

So I don't think it's just "evil retailer tricks".

>The legal structure of sales taxes in the US present some unique challenges

Nothing about sales tax in the US is unique at all. It is not special. It is not hard. It is not a complex problem. It is basically a lookup, and computerized POS systems have managed it just fine since the dawn of computerized POS systems.

In fact, when those sales taxes were first implemented, there was problems relating to how to manage sales that resulted in fractions of a cent worth of sales tax to account for. Several states created sales tax tokens worth fractions of a cent and had to insist that it didn't technically count as money because states can't mint money legally.

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

Nobody went to jail. It was a minor nuisance for consumers and was quickly replaced with law changes to just have explicit rules for the edge case, which is the entire reason we have legislatures. If you don't want retailers to respond to this change in a certain way, have your legislatures say that.

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

Just stop already. The US is not special. The US regularly insists it cannot do the same things everyone else does and it is just wrong. We literally have textbooks full of examples from our own country. We've already phased out coinage before.

The UK went from it's absurd money system to reasonable and decimalized money within living memory! 15 February 1971. Sweden had a day where they switched from left hand roads to right hand roads! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dagen_H Most of Europe switched to Euros in living memory as well!

Stop insisting reasonable societal problems are too hard to solve, because that's the only actual reason they are hard to solve

>These problems can't be legislated away because the authority to do so is highly decentralized.

It isn't at all. It's in the Federal government, and it's in your local state government, and it's in your local-er governments, and that is just like a lot of other countries. A couple layers isn't "very decentralized".

It is only in the past 50 or so years that a singular political party has insisted that the same political party that did all sorts of speedy and useful lawmaking for a hundred years suddenly cannot adapt quickly. Meanwhile, 48 state governments continue to function mostly fine, with few problems adapting to local specific problems in a timely manner. If your state cannot adapt to this quickly and easily and without serious issues, consider electing different people.

Sure, who cares? This could already be happening today with rounding fractional pennies. I have no clue if stores round up, or down, or split at .5, or what. But obviously they're doing something, since there aren't physical fractional pennies and my card statements never show more than two decimal digits, so it's not a new problem. This would make the problem five times worse, but five times insignificant is still not something I'm going to worry about.

we should have converted everything to integers.

Some pocket calculators from not too long ago supported this unit for some reason, along with radians and degrees. That's the third option on "DRG" button.

Advertising the tax-included price is illegal? Where?

(No snark - serious question, as I'm not from the US, and would love to see the legislation and justification which required that...)

Has a Mil ever been minted?

So, implement sales tax like Europe does VAT and include it in on the shelf price, and make sure all shelf prices end in 0 or 5. Then, adding up items in a cart will also end in 0 or 5, and the tax is already included, so there is no math beyond the addition that could change the total to anything ending in something that is not 0 or 5. No matter how people pay, cash or card, the price will be the same, and it will always end in 0 or 5. As an added bonus, customers don't have to wonder how much tax they'll pay, because that's already included in the price.

> effectively impossible

Let’s assume you are correct. It is impossible to ever make this change for reasons X, Y, and Z.

What happens when stores just can’t get pennies anymore? Does the sky fall?