I'm not sure why the article says this is so hard for retailers to figure out. They already round.
When they apply 7% sales tax to a $1.99 purchase, what do they charge you? $2.1293? Obviously not.
Just do whatever they already do.
The last-ever penny will be minted today in Philadelphia
651–660 of 981 posts
Re: The last-ever penny will be minted today in Philadelphia
#652Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 probl…
>The legal structure of sales taxes in the US present some unique challenges
Nothing about sales tax in the US is unique at all. It is not special. It is not hard. It is not a complex problem. It is basically a lookup, and computerized POS systems have managed it just fine since the dawn of computerized POS systems.
In fact, when those sales taxes were first implemented, there was problems relating to how to manage sales that resulted in fractions of a cent worth of sales tax to account for. Several states created sales tax tokens worth fractions of a cent and had to insist that it didn't technically count as money because states can't mint money legally.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sales_tax_token
Nobody went to jail. It was a minor nuisance for consumers and was quickly replaced with law changes to just have explicit rules for the edge case, which is the entire reason we have legislatures. If you don't want retailers to respond to this change in a certain way, have your legislatures say that.
>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.
Just stop already. The US is not special. The US regularly insists it cannot do the same things everyone else does and it is just wrong. We literally have textbooks full of examples from our own country. We've already phased out coinage before.
The UK went from it's absurd money system to reasonable and decimalized money within living memory! 15 February 1971. Sweden had a day where they switched from left hand roads to right hand roads! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dagen_H Most of Europe switched to Euros in living memory as well!
Stop insisting reasonable societal problems are too hard to solve, because that's the only actual reason they are hard to solve
>These problems can't be legislated away because the authority to do so is highly decentralized.
It isn't at all. It's in the Federal government, and it's in your local state government, and it's in your local-er governments, and that is just like a lot of other countries. A couple layers isn't "very decentralized".
It is only in the past 50 or so years that a singular political party has insisted that the same political party that did all sorts of speedy and useful lawmaking for a hundred years suddenly cannot adapt quickly. Meanwhile, 48 state governments continue to function mostly fine, with few problems adapting to local specific problems in a timely manner. If your state cannot adapt to this quickly and easily and without serious issues, consider electing different people.
Re: The last-ever penny will be minted today in Philadelphia
#653Earlier quoted context omitted.
If they're easily solvable then why do you need planning? Changing the currency on a whim by executive fiat is stupid, but that's just principle. In practical terms, I really have a hard time caring about the problems this specific change creates.
> If they're easily solvable then why do you need planning? Easily solvable problems still need coordination. Do you want to go to one store and have your change rounded up then go to another and have it rounded down?
Sure, who cares? This could already be happening today with rounding fractional pennies. I have no clue if stores round up, or down, or split at .5, or what. But obviously they're doing something, since there aren't physical fractional pennies and my card statements never show more than two decimal digits, so it's not a new problem. This would make the problem five times worse, but five times insignificant is still not something I'm going to worry about.
Re: The last-ever penny will be minted today in Philadelphia
#654Earlier quoted context omitted.
Does the Canadian solution of adding brail to the notes inconvenience you, or is that an acceptable way to make sure that people with disabilities can participate in cash transactions safely? Does having different sized coins strike you as an inconvenience? Why does a feature that can be used by anyone, regardless of disability, strike you as "inconvenient for almost everybody"? What, exactly, is inconvenient about h…
Different sized bills are harder to stack in a wallet. Braille is a much better way to handle the problem. No cost to the majority, while solving the problem for the minority.
I'm used to Euro notes, and having each denomination be a different colour and height in my wallet is very useful for pulling a specific one out.
I keep them in order, with €5s in the front.
Re: The last-ever penny will be minted today in Philadelphia
#655Earlier quoted context omitted.
A noticeable number of places around me in an urban area in the USA already now have signs up saying they won't make any coin change at all! Pay with a card, or exact change, or they'll round up to the dollar keep the difference. Sometimes the sign says "due to the penny shortage" and has been up for a year or whatever, I dunno. But they aren't just not giving you pennies in your change, they are refusing any coins i…
You can either put payments into the register or the safe. If it goes into the safe, it's nearly impossible to steal because there's a time lock preventing the cashier from accessing it. But you can't make change. This means you have a optimization problem to have the minimum possible cash in the register to meet all change needs. Eliminating denominations makes the optimization problem easier, if nothing else.
I wouldn't think there is enough coinage in a register to be interesting as a theft target, but i don't know! I think they would still make bill change, but maybe I misunderstood, sure. Next time I see one I'll use cash to find out!
Re: The last-ever penny will be minted today in Philadelphia
#656We 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…
Same in UK but we also size each face value differently. Which helps partially sighted people and is a good visual check.
It doesn't happen very often, but resizing coins when a new design is created strikes me as annoying.
Last time I was in the UK I also found it funny how large the 2p coin is compared to its value.
Re: The last-ever penny will be minted today in Philadelphia
#657I'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 know you're referencing more than pennies, but to speak to pennies, I find the current rounding noise in the US to be weird. Likely, it's just more of the media, talking heads, and youtube personalities trying to turn a nothing into something, story. Back when we did it in Canada, I don't recall a single person I knew concerned about penny rounding. Everyone was sick of pennies. No one cared. Everyone was happy. An…
we should have converted everything to integers.
Re: The last-ever penny will be minted today in Philadelphia
#658Earlier 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
Some pocket calculators from not too long ago supported this unit for some reason, along with radians and degrees. That's the third option on "DRG" button.
Re: The last-ever penny will be minted today in Philadelphia
#659Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wonder if this could encourage retailers to start advertising tax-inclusive prices. That way there's no rounding in the customer transaction (if they set all their tax-inclusive pricing at multiples of 5 cents), and then the sales tax would just be calculated in aggregate, and paid electronically with no rounding.
That’s illegal in a lot of places.
Advertising the tax-included price is illegal? Where?
(No snark - serious question, as I'm not from the US, and would love to see the legislation and justification which required that...)
Re: The last-ever penny will be minted today in Philadelphia
#660Earlier quoted context omitted.
If the Pennies go away, you can no longer get things for pennies on the dollar.
The famous little jingle "shave and a haircut, two bits" Most people today have no clue what a "bit" is. I imagine the future will hold something similar for the penny in all the idioms and cultural phrases we have. What the hell is a penny?
It’s kind of like lots of imperial measurements where we use metric still have these in idioms.