671–680 of 981 posts
Copper pennies weigh 3.11 grams. Copper is currently US$10987 per tonne https://www.metal.com/en/prices/LME_CA_3M so a copper penny is worth 3.4¢. This is a surprisingly low number to me; I would have expected it to be closer to 10¢ or 20¢, since presumably it was about 1¢ of copper when it was still copper. By comparison, a silver dime (90% silver, 10% copper) is 2.268 grams, and silver is US$1486.77/kg https://www.…
I'd say screw it, get rid of nickles and dimes as well. Quarters can stay, for now. It's a complete waste of money and time continuing to mint such low-value currency. It can't be used for just about anything. Unfortunately, I do see the problem with part of this. For a handful of items where it does matter, it will force people to use cards more if they want to avoid rounding. And the card providers already have a c…
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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.
But even if there had been, an 8oz can is 23% bigger than a 6.5oz bottle. 6.5oz is ludicrously small. How did that become a commercial size in the first place?
As far as I can tell, a juice box today is 6.75oz, but you buy them in bulk and they're not actually large enough to be good for a small child's lunch.
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For large volume businesses, $400 / year is what we usually call.. a rounding error.
A large volume business isn't doing 10k transactions.
If a store games prices to charge 0.2% more on a million transactions it's still 0.2% for them. Except the rounding on multi-item purchases isnt predictable so it would probably take a miracle of data engineering and behavioral science to hit 0.1% benefit on average.
Meanwhile stores are using 30% off coupons and buy on get one free to get people in the door, whilst hiding double digit price increases.
Worrying about the two pennies is stupid on either side of the transaction. Don't listen to the professional complainers.
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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?
If there's a TV ad for a medium pizza for $10 at a chain they can't possibly know the tax rates for whatever actual store I'm going to go order from.
And the listing on a website won't know until I actually put in my shipping information.
We eliminated pennies in Canada in 2012 and the transition was a non-issue. The vast majority of retailers would round cash transactions to the nearest $0.05, but a few would round down to the nearest $0.05 in favor of the customer. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Withdrawal_of_low-denomination... Canadian cash is better than American cash in several ways: No penny, durable polymer banknotes (instead of dirty wrinkly c…
Also has the polymer based colouful bank notes. Far easier to tell what you are handing over. Also given us some good names.
$5 (Pink) = Prawn/Piglet
$10 (Blue) = Bluey
$20 (Red) = Lobster/Red back
$50 (Yellow) = Pineapple/Banana
$100 (Green) = Avacado
So you get sentences like "They needed cash so I threw a pineapple at them".
I'd say screw it, get rid of nickles and dimes as well. Quarters can stay, for now. It's a complete waste of money and time continuing to mint such low-value currency. It can't be used for just about anything. Unfortunately, I do see the problem with part of this. For a handful of items where it does matter, it will force people to use cards more if they want to avoid rounding. And the card providers already have a c…
I'd like to get a dollar coin that is distinctive enough to not be confused with the quarter. Last time I got change for cash, the cashier mistook a dollar coin for a quarter when giving me coins.
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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.
When the final calculation of XX.YYY litres * AAA.9 pence/litre is done, it's then rounded off to 1 pence.
Currency conversions are also frequently done with readers that aren't a round multiple of pence, even in official government tables: https://www.trade-tariff.service.gov.uk/exchange_rates/view/...
Too early to say "ever", considering there has been no act of congress on this matter and the penny continues to be legal tender. The decision to stop minting it is a (legally debatable) executive order, and the next president or even the current one can change their mind about it tomorrow.
I watched a video on the demise of the penny and its predicament was so succinctly explained: everyone gets pennies as change but few carry them around let alone spend them, so we are stuck producing ever more. One news outlet even did an "experiment" where they threw hundreds of pennies on the ground in a city on a busy morning and not one person stopped to pick any up.