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Coin washer keeps Westin St. Francis' change shiny (2010)

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Re: Coin washer keeps Westin St. Francis' change shiny (2010)

#81

Post by pmiller2 »

TylerE wrote: post #65
ghayes wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you’re comfortable with not being precise to half pennies or $0.001, then there is likely a unit that you feel is equitable to round to, and the question is what unit that should be. As rounding will favor you as often as it works against you (assuming it’s not heavily gamed), there should be a unit that people trait as fair. As that choice has remained the same regardless of inflation, it might be fair to say we…

Worth pointing out that while $0.001 (mil) coins never existed, half-cent coins were minted from 1792 to 1857. Even in 1857 $0.005 was worth way way more than even a quarter is today. Probably more than a dollar. (Actual inflation gets a bit hard to track going back that far).

True, but $0.001 (mil) tokens do exist. They were usually used for sales tax accounting, IIRC.

Re: Coin washer keeps Westin St. Francis' change shiny (2010)

#83

Post by hunter2_ »

ars wrote: post #71
xvector wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dimes exist? Still too granular IMO. If a penny is worth 1/31th of what it used to be, we should drop it and go to quarters.

And half dollars exist as well, so we might not actually need to issue anything new. Just slowly collect all the old coins, until only some collectors have it. The quarter idea isn't as good because you are still doing math to 2 digits (for example sales tax would have to be calculated, then some kind of rounding). Switching to a single digit is simpler.

The number of digits used to write it out doesn't need to be thought of as an indicator of simplicity once you realize that you're rounding for a purpose unrelated to reducing the number of digits written after the decimal point (which is a typical reason to round, but is not the reason here). Just think of dividing a dollar 10 ways versus dividing it 4 ways.

Re: Coin washer keeps Westin St. Francis' change shiny (2010)

#84

Post by Scoundreller »

TylerE wrote: post #56
sethammons wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Each item rounds up. If you shop for food at the dollar-ish store, $1.01 now goes to $1.25. A 14 to 24% price increase that will disproportionately affect lower socioeconomic people. As someone who lived not so long ago when literally saving a dime mattered, no thank you.

Rounding up is dumb, but that is t really an argument. There are standard rounding rules (applies to the total, not the line item) that result in rounding up and down with equal frequency.

Well, pretty much equal frequency.

I think the rule is usually round up $x.x3, but round down $0.08.

But there will be more 3s than 8s: Benford’s Law:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benford%27s_law

Re: Coin washer keeps Westin St. Francis' change shiny (2010)

#85

Post by Turing_Machine »

ryanmercer wrote: post #46
Theodores wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about ultrasonic washing? The machines sold for cleaning jewellery? Are they okay?

Cleaning coins that have potential numismatic value is always a no-no, especially if it is something you intend to have graded. Even stuff that doesn't have a numismatic value, just common 'junk silver' (non key date coinage with silver content) is generally received poorly. (I'm a mod of /r/silverbugs). Disrupting/reomivng natural patina, surface damage (even microabrasion), artificial toning/patina is almost univer…

There used to be a scam known as "sweating" where the scammer would take a bunch of gold or silver coins, put them in a bag, and shake the crap out of it for a while. Small particles of precious metal would wear off and accumulate in the bottom of the bag, which could then be recovered and sold as bullion. Afterward the (now somewhat-worn) coins could still be spent at their original face value.

This was hard to detect compared to other common scams of the time(such as clipping or filing the edges of the coin) because the wear pattern was pretty close to what you'd expect from normal wear and tear.

Re: Coin washer keeps Westin St. Francis' change shiny (2010)

#86

Post by crooked-v »

m4rtink wrote: post #82

This reminds of Book Off, Japan's biggest used book store. They use special machines to slightly shave off edges of books[0], so that the books appear newer. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_Off#Operations

That trick with the edges is a pretty good value add, since a lot of people don't really care about the actual age or history of the book, they just want their bookshelves to appear neat.

Re: Coin washer keeps Westin St. Francis' change shiny (2010)

#87

Post by mark-r »

Symbiote wrote: post #74
sethammons wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Each item rounds up. If you shop for food at the dollar-ish store, $1.01 now goes to $1.25. A 14 to 24% price increase that will disproportionately affect lower socioeconomic people. As someone who lived not so long ago when literally saving a dime mattered, no thank you.

Several countries don't have a 0.01 coin, so they have rounding when making a cash payment. Here in Denmark, where the smallest coin is 0.50kr, and a single bag of sugar is 9.95kr, I'll pay 10kr at the till. If I buy 6 bags of sugar, which is 59.70kr, then in cash I'd pay 59.50kr. When paying by card, the exact amount is paid. For the USA, a reasonable first step would be rounding to the nearest 5¢. Someone so poor t…

When I was a kid, I remember going to a small hobby store to buy a couple of bottles of paint. The bottles were $0.25 each, and I had exactly $0.50. I took my bottles to the register and was told the total was $0.51, because of sales tax. So I only purchased one bottle, and the total was $0.25. As I was leaving I realized that the tax had been wiped out, so I went back in and purchased the second bottle for $0.25 too.

These days it's common to find pennies on the ground because they aren't worth the effort to bend over to pick them up. I pick them up anyway, because I still remember a time when they mattered.

Re: Coin washer keeps Westin St. Francis' change shiny (2010)

#88

Post by [deleted] »

sethammons wrote: post #49
solotronics wrote: post #36

Change doesn't make sense today. Comparing the value of a penny in 1900 it would be worth $0.31 today. Therefore we should get rid of pennies, nickles, and dimes. It is a huge waste of human time to count these small denominations out. They should round up to the nearest $0.25 https://www.in2013dollars.com/us/inflation/1900?amount=0.01

Each item rounds up. If you shop for food at the dollar-ish store, $1.01 now goes to $1.25. A 14 to 24% price increase that will disproportionately affect lower socioeconomic people. As someone who lived not so long ago when literally saving a dime mattered, no thank you.

[deleted]

Re: Coin washer keeps Westin St. Francis' change shiny (2010)

#89

Post by AnotherGoodName »

throwaway5752 wrote: post #60
thoughtstheseus wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Always rounding up seems unlikely, in particular for price sensitive goods.

Retail net margins are often in single digits overall and net negative on competitive staples. There may not be room in cash flow to round down. edit: okay, downvoters, what did i get wrong factually? I'm just basing this statement on dozens of general, food, and discount retail 10-K filings and analysis over longer than a decade of following them.

The USA currently rounds to nearest cent and it works well. I could buy 1.49 cents worth of something and have it rounded to 1 cent.

If the rounding becomes 5cents rather than 1cent it doesn't change a lot.

I'm reminded of a comedy skit from childhood based on Australia removing 1 and 2 cent pieces. A guy buys 2 cents of petrol at a time repeatedly pushing his car from pump to pump at a service station. It went on for a while and eventually the owner at the counter, who was down a whole 10 cents at this point, just shook his head and laughed while exclaiming "Dickhead!".

Re: Coin washer keeps Westin St. Francis' change shiny (2010)

#90

Post by dmurray »

Scoundreller wrote: post #84
TylerE wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rounding up is dumb, but that is t really an argument. There are standard rounding rules (applies to the total, not the line item) that result in rounding up and down with equal frequency.

Well, pretty much equal frequency. I think the rule is usually round up $x.x3, but round down $0.08. But there will be more 3s than 8s: Benford’s Law: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benford%27s_law

This makes 0 sense. Firstly, if you're rounding to the nearest 5c, you can round up both $x.x3 and $x.x8, and get fair rounding. Perhaps you are thinking of the slightly more complicated deal with rounding to the nearest 10c, where you round down $x.05 and up $x.15.

And Benford's law applies to leading digits, not the least significant digit. It's right there in the first line of your link.

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