The last-ever penny will be minted today in Philadelphia

>But with 20 million customers a year, and 17% of them paying with cash, the policy will eventually cost Kwik Trip a couple of million dollars a year, McHugh said.

If we figure two-fifths of cash transactions need to be rounded up and the store is losing an average of 1.5 cents each time, their expected losses would be around $2,000, yeah?

> Kwik Trip, a family-owned convenience store chain that operates in the Midwest, decided to round down cash purchases in stores where it hasn’t been able to find pennies.

They're rounding all cash transactions down to the nearest nickel, so an average of 2 cents per transaction, 3.4 million customers, gives me $68,000 assuming each "customer" makes a single transaction per year. If they mean that there are 20 million unique customers, not 20m transactions, then the a long tail of customers who make frequent small transactions in cash could make their claim check out.

I would bet they have a way to write it off.

Edit: why disagree? Can't the write it off as a loss, uncollected account, or promotional? Maybe even goodwill

Writing it off as a loss isn't useful.

Without a write off, their income is $X (what they actually collected), with a write off, their income is $Z (what they should have collected) - $Y (what they didn't collect), but $X = $Z - $Y. There's no material difference between counting what they actual collect as income vs what they should have collected minus the goodwill discount. Unless there's some specific tax justification (maybe accounting differences could justify remitting less sales tax overall and retaining more of the funds, etc)