241–250 of 981 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Plus US dollars just have that smell to them. I wouldn't mind though if we rotated out some of the faces on the bills, e.g. Andrew Jackson
You do know who would be the first person to rotate in, don't you.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Most of the stores in my area have started requiring people to pay with exact change or by card because they can't get pennies to make change. Personally, I think stores should just start setting prices to avoid the need for pennies, but that would be too easy, I guess.
Setting prices to avoid the need for pennies is probably technically challenging given the combination of requirements to post prices and sales taxes that don't always round the same way. If the effective tax rate is 7.432%, you can price single items so that the price plus tax ends up in a multiple of $0.05, but if you get a purchase with multiple items, you either need to round somewhere or post prices that are lik…
I know it's hard to imagine the price on the shelf being the price that you pay, but I believe it is possible even in complex tax situations.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, the quarter is pretty much the smallest useful unit of US currency and even that usefulness is shrinking pretty quickly. If we would adopt a policy of including local sales tax in advertised prices, skipping to whole dollars would be pretty painless. The main reason to keep at least quarters is all of the various coin-op machines that are still in service.
The US has too many tax permutations for this to be practicable. Companies would have to make prices a bit higher to accommodate unexpected sales tax increases in some or other jurisdiction. There's a small industry that specializes in knowing what the sales tax for a particular transaction should be at the moment it goes through.
If I’m buying online with a digital transaction you can charge whatever cents are necessary.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> everyone gets pennies as change but few carry them around let alone spend them It's not just pennies, it's all coins. In a former life I worked in retail and almost nobody would fish around in their pockets for exact (or even near) change. They'd always hand me bills for their purchase even if they had just completed a transaction and had the coins in their pocket . That was in the 90's, and I still see it happenin…
I’d regularly use quarters in vending machines, but not waste time during a retail transaction.
we could just go back to writing checks while we're at it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Does the Canadian solution of adding brail to the notes inconvenience you, or is that an acceptable way to make sure that people with disabilities can participate in cash transactions safely? Does having different sized coins strike you as an inconvenience? Why does a feature that can be used by anyone, regardless of disability, strike you as "inconvenient for almost everybody"? What, exactly, is inconvenient about h…
Different sized bills are harder to stack in a wallet. Braille is a much better way to handle the problem. No cost to the majority, while solving the problem for the minority.
For my side, even if I did agree with your preference, I am perfectly willing to deal with the incredible hardship of slightly different sized notes in my wallet in exchange for a society where disabled people need not fear being ripped off.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
For the SNAP law, could they just round down SNAP purchases in the same way to be compliant?
The SNAP equal treatment rule requirement works in both directions: Prices cannot be higher or lower for SNAP recipients. As a retailer, there is an option to request a waiver, though.
Presumably that's fine because a SNAP recipient has access to those same discounts. So wouldn't this be the same - the "cash rounding" discount is available to SNAP and people paying cash?
Some interesting complications with rounding I had not heard about before were mentioned here, worth noting I think, especially given the prominence of SNAP in the news lately: >Four states - Delaware, Connecticut, Michigan and Oregon - as well as numerous cities, including New York, Philadelphia, Miami and Washington, DC, require merchants to provide exact change, according to the National Association of Convenience…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
State and local taxes make this infeasible
> 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?
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.