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The last-ever penny will be minted today in Philadelphia

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

#601

Post by whycome »

zahlman wrote: post #381
Night_Thastus wrote: post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In what part of the world do they use US pennies ? The US currency system sure. But pennies , specifically?

Before Canada stopped using its penny, it was common to find American pennies in circulation. It's still fairly common to find American nickels, quarters and dimes in circulation. (Probably mostly dimes if I had to guess.) They're generally accepted at par because nobody is even really looking at them and if they did it wouldn't really represent being, well, short-changed.

I’ve found that self-checkouts in Canada are a great way to get rid of piles of change. You can pretty much dump it in. Curiously, it will reject all the US coins and spit them back out.

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

#602

Post by donatj »

I've got a ridiculous question, but hear me out.

Pennies have more zinc in them than they are worth, right?

Did the penny have any sort of stabling force against inflation… a sort of "Zinc Standard" as it were?

Civil libertarians are always talking about how moving away from gold coins, and later moving away from the gold standard that backed the non-gold coins is the root of inflation.

If gold can have such an effect, why not zinc?

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

#603

Post by connicpu »

donatj wrote: post #602

I've got a ridiculous question, but hear me out. Pennies have more zinc in them than they are worth, right? Did the penny have any sort of stabling force against inflation… a sort of "Zinc Standard" as it were? Civil libertarians are always talking about how moving away from gold coins, and later moving away from the gold standard that backed the non-gold coins is the root of inflation. If gold can have such an effec…

You can't legally melt down US coins for their metals

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

#604

Post by gus_massa »

IncreasePosts wrote: post #475
pwg wrote: post #464

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Likely, it's just more of the media, talking heads, and youtube personalities trying to turn a nothing into something, story. It's not. Some US states have laws on the books that make it illegal for retailers to round up. The turmoil is that if the retailer can only round down to the nearest five cents, then they stand to lose from one to four cents per cash sale for any sale that is not a multiple of five cents. A…

They can add a "total not divisible by 5" fee, ranging from 1 to 4 cents

The other direction avoids a lot of stupid complains. Nobody will complain if the shop gives them a $0.04 gift.

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

#605

Post by whycome »

SkyPuncher wrote: post #548
AnotherGoodName wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> enforced the whole right to refuse service. This is what everyone forgets. If you can't provide exact change, then you can refuse service.

It’s a self-service gas station. Refuse…yourself? You pumped the gas before paying.

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

#606

Post by jandrewrogers »

ryandrake wrote: post #581
dmoy wrote: post #495

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

If only it were that simple. Some sales taxes are conditional at the point-of-sale. Different customers may pay a different tax rate. This creates a situation where the display price will be incorrect part of the time and may not round to 5c or whatever the legal quantum is.

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

#607

Post by ryanmcbride »

542458 wrote: post #357
ryanmcbride wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rounding is such a weird boogeyman to me because people are like "the companies are just going to use it to get more money from the customers" but, they're doing that anyway. They don't need this excuse to raise prices they'll just do it anyway. Same thing when people complain that raising minimum wage will increase prices, meanwhile prices have increased for 50 years completely separate from wages. They don't need t…

> If they want companies to not raise prices the only answer is regulation Or competition. Consumer electronics are much cheaper than they were in the past, and that's not because of regulation. (To be clear, I'm not saying that regulation is wrong or anything, I'm saying that "use regulation to lower prices" and "remove barriers to competition to lower prices" are both tools in the toolbox.

Since I'm already doing armchair stuff I'll just say that there's an argument to be made that consumer electronics HAVE to be cheaper due to the extremely inflated cost of essentials right now, which is the result of lack of regulation. It's not the system regulating itself it's just more bottom line chasing.

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

#608

Post by why_at »

pge wrote: post #537
hinkley wrote: post #524

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think people underestimate how many stores used to set prices to avoid pennies. When I was a kid it was frequent. Goose the price so cost + tax rounded to the nearest nickel. But now everything is 23.99 or sometimes 23.95, and they use the pennies place to denote clearance items. Like 19.94 or 3.98.

There’s a reason for this. Prices that force cashiers to make change force them to run the transaction through the cash register so it is recorded, and the amount in the register can be checked at the end of a day or shift to detect theft. If prices are round numbers, such as $1, the cashier can pocket the payment.

I don't get it. Why couldn't a cashier pocket $1.99?

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

#610

Post by coded_monkey »

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…

You are mistaken. Merchants are allowed to round to the nearest 5 cents and you can’t do anything about it (except pay by card). Of course, budget stores like Lidl and Aldi still use them but any other corporation is not going to care.

http://www.nederlandsemunten.nl/Artikelen_over_munten/De_cen...

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