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The last-ever penny will be minted today in Philadelphia

cnn.com

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Re: The last-ever penny will be minted today in Philadelphia

#431

Post by zahlman »

Retric wrote: post #32
basscomm wrote: post #7

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.

It's amazing to me that people consider "saving time while paying money" to be a good thing.

I will never "tap" my debit card as long as I have any legal option. Everyone else can wait for me to exercise my consumer rights, by inputting my PIN, verifying the amount displayed on screen etc.

Re: The last-ever penny will be minted today in Philadelphia

#432

Post by [deleted] »

AnotherGoodName wrote: post #199
Amorymeltzer wrote: post #113

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…

They can round down the card transactions too if it’s really a problem to charge differing amounts. For those that seriously think this would be a major problem there was a comedy skit circulating in Australia when this happened. A guy would push his car to the petrol pump, fill with 2c of petrol, rounded down to 0. The guy at the counter just laughed at it. You could in theory do this 1000 more times (would take hou…

[deleted]

Re: The last-ever penny will be minted today in Philadelphia

#433

Post by jandrewrogers »

dragonwriter wrote: post #396
nothrabannosir wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

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.

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.

Re: The last-ever penny will be minted today in Philadelphia

#434

Post by dpark »

stonemetal12 wrote: post #377
smeej wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 w…

> 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.

> 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.

Re: The last-ever penny will be minted today in Philadelphia

#435

Post by zahlman »

expedition32 wrote: post #279
basscomm wrote: post #7

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…

Nowadays I pay for everything with my phone but back in the day I too hated using coins. Having to calculate and fish out coins? Ain't nobody got time for that.

It's amazing to me that there are people with this mindset. I enjoy the process.

Re: The last-ever penny will be minted today in Philadelphia

#436

Post by water9 »

jacobgkau wrote: post #318
nothrabannosir wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

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."

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.

Re: The last-ever penny will be minted today in Philadelphia

#437

Post by ianferrel »

MostlyStable wrote: post #51
ianferrel wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This seems like a non-issue as long as they round the price down. Because there's no law that the store can't discount their total by a small amount and then provide exact change. "Congratulations customer, we have a special coupon today for $0.03 off your purchase. Here's your change :)"

I don't see why you couldn't do it in either case. If you modify the actual price, then you are giving exact change. Why wouldn't round() be as valid a price modification as floor()?

Presumably "increase the price a small amount to avoid giving exact change" is exactly the sort of thing that laws requiring giving exact change were designed to prevent.

There will surely be some customer pissed about the extra 2 cents they were charged who will raise hell over the exact change law.

But what customer is going to be upset over a small discount?

Re: The last-ever penny will be minted today in Philadelphia

#438

Post by munk-a »

jacobgkau wrote: post #358
ivanbakel wrote: post #344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> 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 dollar…

> 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.

Re: The last-ever penny will be minted today in Philadelphia

#439

Post by pests »

oktoberpaard wrote: post #247
Amorymeltzer wrote: post #113

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…

In the Netherlands cash payments get rounded to the nearest 5 cents, in both directions. Card payments are not rounded. If I’m not mistaken, you can still demand exact change according to the law and you’re allowed to pay the exact amount (cents are still legal tender). Most merchants wouldn’t be able to give you exact change, so it depends on the situation what would happen. I’ve never heard of such a situation happ…

If someone demands exact change is it allowed to give them more? What if you don't have the exact change?

Re: The last-ever penny will be minted today in Philadelphia

#440

Post by quantified »

tempestn wrote: post #360
burningChrome wrote: post #346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> 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 c…

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 .

Exactly. Like with the Zimbabwe dollars being printed in billion-dollar denominations, $100 is irrelevant then
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