Allowing gas stations to denominate their prices by the 10th of a cent has always struck me as a just an underhanded and extreme way to practice the "9.99" retail psychological trick. Why not allow retailers to price things 9.99999? Ridiculous.
It's because technically the dollar is divided into Dimes, Cents, and Mil. (this is why dimes say 'One Dime' on them instead of 'Ten Cents'. So while the mil isn't really used anywhere else that regular people see any more due to inflation, it is a valid division of the dollar and that's why they are able to get away with it.
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.
The article also points out that some states and a lot cities require retailers to provide exact change. Congress would need to pass legislation to allow rounding nationally. I'm guessing in the meantime they'll continue holding pennies from previous years?
So, implement sales tax like Europe does VAT and include it in on the shelf price, and make sure all shelf prices end in 0 or 5. Then, adding up items in a cart will also end in 0 or 5, and the tax is already included, so there is no math beyond the addition that could change the total to anything ending in something that is not 0 or 5. No matter how people pay, cash or card, the price will be the same, and it will always end in 0 or 5. As an added bonus, customers don't have to wonder how much tax they'll pay, because that's already included in the price.
I know this is supposed to be a joke but... businesses have pushed for this the other way around in the past, asking for a new coin to raise prices. > The Coca-Cola Company sought ways to increase the five cent price, even approaching the U.S. Treasury Department in 1953 to ask that they mint a 7.5 cent coin. [ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fixed_price_of_Coca-Cola_from_... ]
The wikipedia article says that this was specifically the price of a 6.5oz Coke. The obvious way to raise the price by 50% is to cut the amount by a third, selling 4.33oz Cokes. https://www.reddit.com/r/BottleDigging/comments/1kng6aq/coca... suggests that Coca-Cola was comfortable producing bottles in several different sizes. Now, a 4 1/3 oz Coke is obviously too small to be worth bothering with. But that's also true…
When I was a kid, most sodas had a short can size of 8oz available, good for "lunches" and similar.
Funny story, Coca Cola just announced thin 7.5oz cans last month, to be available in January.
Shrinkflation is often done by phasing out an old size, often by jacking up the price first to aid the sales of the "family size" version on its way out, and then introducing a "New" size that's just a bit smaller.
I see this excuse all the time, but why not? This calculation does not need to happen more often than the product prices are adjusted. There's no difference in effort between labeling something "$5.52+tax" and labeling it "$6".
The difference is where the product is labeled. Is it labeled nationally like Arizona Iced Tea? Is it labeled at a regional bottling facility? Or is it labeled at the store itself? And what about when tax rates change, you gonna go pull all the labels off everything in the whole store and update them? Most of this could be resolved by not putting the prices on the products themselves, but that isn't as good of an exp…
> Most of this could be resolved by not putting the prices on the products themselves
That is already often the case. Prices are usually on the shelves not on the product itself at many stores. And when purchasing online there is no reason that the sales tax couldn't be included in the listed price.
Also sellers could just charge the same price everywhere and take the sales tax out of the revenue.
Can you explain further? Canada has sales tax and successfully phased out the penny.
Sales taxes in the US are truly and insanely decentralized. The US has thousands of independent sales tax authorities with their own laws and regulations about how sales tax must be computed and displayed. These jurisdictions overlap, the sales tax you pay may be the aggregate of multiple different sales tax authorities between which there is no coordination. Rounding to the nearest 5c or whatever creates a situation…
> effectively impossible
Let’s assume you are correct. It is impossible to ever make this change for reasons X, Y, and Z.
What happens when stores just can’t get pennies anymore? Does the sky fall?
At big retailers the price tag code indicates what type of price it is. For example the last digits can mean: 0: full 9: sale 8: reduced 7: clearance (item will not restock) I forget the exact system Sears used but we could tell at a glance if a deal was really “good”. I’m curious if Sears and WalMart used different systems and if WalMart exploited knowledge of the Sears system to signal better prices to shoppers. Li…
That sounds close to the Sears system to me, but they used the tens place. 8x was used for returned big ticket items, like appliances and treadmills. It would start at 88 and the rightmost digit would decrement to indicate how many weeks it had been sitting there. It was 00 for full, 99 for sale (the majority of items, except for the one week every year they established the full price for that product), 8x for cleara…
Ah yeah, I forget the details. It was a sophisticated system. I’m curious of the origins. Did this have bookkeeping or business reporting benefits in the pre-digital age? Even when we were using computers at the turn of the millennium it helped signal discount eligibility without having to update and synchronize inventory with promotional offers.
I think we should issue a new dollar that’s 10x the value of the current dollar, and / 10 the value of everything. I mean it wouldn’t make a substantive difference, but psychologically, I think it would feel better if the mean value of the house in the US was 52k instead of 522k, and I could start carrying cash again and have 100 bucks not go by in like 2 fast food orders.
>> 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…
When the $1000 bill was retired, a loaf of bread cost a couple cents. There was indeed a push to purge them during the drug scares of the late 20th century. A suitcase of $1000 bills is far sexier than one of $100 bills. It really was porting them. With bitcoin, it's moot. A $100 is basically a tank of gas and a sandwich in CA.
> A $100 is basically a tank of gas and a sandwich in CA.
I was just lamenting with my wife the other day about how "$100 is the new 20 bucks"
When I was a kid, mowing someone's yard for $20 was a really good payout. Kids my neighborhood last year were doing it for $70 lol.
This is one of the stupidest comments I have seen on the internet bar none. Wasting money is bad. I should not have to explain further.
A penny is reused over and over again, every time it changes hands. It’s not necessarily bad that it costs a few cents to make one if it has utility. It costs more to make a ceramic mug than it does to fill it with coffee. That doesn’t make a ceramic mug uneconomical, because it’s used lots of times and the cost amortizes. ...Having said that, I don’t think there’s actually much value to having an individual token of…
does it change hands? when was the last time you actually used a penny to buy something? do you ever deposit your pennies into your bank account?
most people throw them in a change jar and forget about them.
>> 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…
> rats chewing up the money Profit for the US government. Fixed by plastic bills. Every $ printed but never redeemed is a significant profit (assuming other costs are low like printing). Especially yummy when countries just want to hoard the currency - same as selling stamps that are never used: estimate the stock of U.S. currency circulating in Argentina ... U.S. currency inflows during 1988-1992 totaled $20.8 billi…
> Every $ printed but never redeemed is a significant profit
Redeemed? Redeemed for what? Its not like they're still trading dollars for gold at any kind of fixed rate.