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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

#581

Post by ryandrake »

dmoy wrote: post #495
jcranmer wrote: post #490

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Prices in the US are not tax-inclusive, so the effect of sales tax ruins that plan.

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...

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?

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

#584

Post by jdpage »

kjkjadksj wrote: post #225
rando001111 wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

to my knowledge the legislation only says that the executive branch needs to make the "necessary" amount of pennies. the argument is that because they're losing money literally printing money that the "necessary" amount is zero and that therefore doing this follows the law because zero is an amount.

I don’t understand why it costing more than face value to mint is such a bad thing

A better measure, assuming that pennies facilitate value exchange[1], would be whether the cost to mint a penny exceeded the marginal increase in GDP[2] due to having that additional penny available.

[1]: This assumption may not be true; if they're worth so little that people lose track of them, they could actually make it harder to exchange value.

[2]: Making the GDP higher is also a very debatable measure, but I think this generalizes to other dollar-denominated measures of prosperity.

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

#585

Post by zamadatix »

Uvix wrote: post #578
wat10000 wrote: post #354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Round them all. Why is this so difficult?

Retailers will reject ever rounding down because they lose money, and customers will reject ever rounding up because they lose money.

Completely different discussion. Regardless, you skipped explaining why these options worked for Canadian Penny (just 12 years ago) at a time when their penny had more buying power than the current US penny, yet the exact same thing cannot ever possibly work for the US penny.

Things don't just happen to cost *.99 today either, the market just has wiggle room for bullshit about values. With inflation, the coinage that corresponds to also inflates over time. The penny is long past its time.

Furthermore:

> Rounding to the closest nickel will cost consumers about $6 million a year, according to a July study by the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond. That is fairly modest, coming to about five cents each across 133 million American households.

The US lost ~$85 million minting pennies in 2024 because they cost more to make than they are worth. That's over a 10x savings, not a loss. 5 cents is also less than 0.00006% of median household income in 2024.

If people were actually that worried we'd have had laws about credit card transaction fees decades ago.

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

#586

Post by potato3732842 »

SkyPuncher wrote: post #545
simpleguitar wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

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.

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

#587

Post by robocat »

zahlman wrote: post #431
Retric wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I've seen a pattern where people that value their own time at $0 unfortunately often value the time of others at $0. Worse is valuing others at $0 and your own at $lots (which is also common).

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

#588

Post by criddell »

wasabi991011 wrote: post #163
criddell wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do they deal with sales tax? Connecticut has a 6.35% sales tax so if I buy something for $1, the total will be $1.0635.

Paying cash, you would pay $1.05.

I'm referring to states that don't allow rounding.

> in some states, merchants could face legal trouble for rounding up or down

It seems obvious to me they are already rounding to the $1/100. Why is rounding to $1/20 a problem?

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

#589

Post by throw20251101 »

jcranmer wrote: post #490
bjourne wrote: post #481

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Er... So just adjust prices to whole multiples of 5 cents? Helps math-challenged cashiers too...

Prices in the US are not tax-inclusive, so the effect of sales tax ruins that plan.

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?

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

#590

Post by potato3732842 »

ekelsen wrote: post #332
quantified wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

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

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