901–910 of 981 posts
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In Canada, the rounding is done after tax, and only affects what the cash-paying customer or vendor receives. The sales tax amount is not affected.
It seems crazy to even advertise the pre-tax price.
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…
Governments should simply put a cap on credit card merchant fees of half a percent or something like that, which I’m pretty sure is what they do in other countries. Problem solved.
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…
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I'll agree on all but one point. The cotton/linen notes feel so much better in the hand than the candy wrapper plastic of Canadian bills. I know it's a dumb reason, but I just hate the feeling.
Australian here. Barely anyone uses cash anymore. It's weird to see debates about moving towards technology we had 35 years ago which we don't even use anymore.
A friend from Australia came to visit and after a day driving around New York State said “it feels half finished”
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... How is this related to what I said?
> It's amazing to me that people consider "saving time while paying money" to be a good thing. If you’re checking it at a grocery store it’s likely there’s someone in line behind you waiting to pay, it’s a fairly common aspect of physical transactions. Waiting for you to count out your pennies is the kind of thing that evokes rage in people because it’s so rude.
I usually use the self check-out which is usually not at all busy when I get there.
> Waiting for you to count out your pennies
I was explicitly talking about using a debit card, and as I established repeatedly throughout the thread, my country hasn't used pennies for over a decade.
But on the occasions that I pay cash, I do try to make exact change, because that's courteous to the cashier (and also just satisfies my aesthetic sense). I'm quick about this, because being the sort of person who posts on Hacker News, my mental arithmetic is pretty good.
> is the kind of thing that evokes rage in people because it’s so rude.
I've had people in front of me "waste" far more time than that because they had to cancel items (and deliberate over what to send back), struggle to pull things out of their cart, etc. It doesn't bother me. If I urgently needed to be somewhere else I would have planned my trip for another time. It already takes quite a while because I walk both ways (which I also enjoy quite a bit by the way).
People ITT are talking about the value of time, but I can't reasonably value each second equally. Time is not nearly as fungible as money; ten seconds saved on an outing is just not going to translate into ten seconds spent on my projects. Nor can I make myself feel as though every moment not spent on acquiring capital is equally wasted.
And I deeply resent the implication that using XYZ technology to save time is a moral imperative.
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> Let me assure you that all Canadian banknotes are the same size too [...] not sure how the article got this fact wrong. Because Canada is just part of the U.S. (flame away)
> Because Canada is just part of the U.S. As a Canadian, I'm amused to hear this because it is basically true as a first approximation. Random factoid - Canadian coins ($2, $1, $0.25, $0.10, $0.05, $0.01 (withdrawn)) come in almost the same denominations as US coins ($1 (uncommon), $0.05 (rare), $0.25, $0.10, $0.05, $0.01), and they are the same diameter and thickness, but maybe having different weight and magnetic p…
On the surface, I agree 100%. Dig deeper and the differences are stark.
Years ago I came from Australia to work at a ski resort in the US. I stayed 6 months, had a great time. At the end I went to Canada to see a friend. After 30 minutes in Canada I felt more at home than after 6 months in the US.
Canada is a friendly, kind, gentle place, everything the US is not.
I’ve now lived in Canada for 20 years, been to almost every province and territory. I’ve also and travelled extensively in the US (40+ states). It’s a fun place to visit and parts are spectacularly beautiful, I do not want to live there. Now I have a young daughter it’s doubly so.
Yes, I’m generalizing and using broad strokes. The thing about generalizations is they’re usually right.
Canada feels like being surrounded by friends and family, I have no doubt the expression “dog eat dog” comes from the US.
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How do you figure? My threat model includes people stealing the card. I can have tap disabled on the card, and then thieves don't know my PIN. Yes, yes, that's like 13 bits of entropy. But it's not like they can use a computer to brute-force it.
I think your threat model is incomplete. You’re far more likely to have your card cloned and pin stolen through a fake terminal. I’ve actually had that happen to me vs 0 times have I had fraudulent transactions due to a stolen card. Tap/dip payment is non cloneable even by a fake terminal. Outside the US tap+pin/dip+pin is even common but banks for some reason really are averse to requiring Americans to add a pin to…
... at the self-checkout of a major grocery store?
> Outside the US tap+pin/dip+pin is even common
As far as I can tell "dip + pin" is exactly what I do with a debit card. This is literally the first time I've ever heard the term "EMV", so I looked it up:
> EMV cards are smart cards, also called chip cards, integrated circuit cards (ICC), or IC cards, which store their data on integrated circuit chips, in addition to magnetic stripes for backward compatibility. These include cards that must be physically inserted or "dipped" into a reader
As far as I can tell, that exactly describes my debit card.
> but banks for some reason really are averse to requiring Americans to add a pin to credit cards.
Well, yes, the entire selling point of tapping the card is that you don't spend those precious seconds on entering a pin. And my point here is to reject that culture of hurrying up (at the potential expense of carelessness).
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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.
I haven't found them to be noticeably less accepting of American coins than Canadian ones. (Small sample size; American coins in change definitely are less common than they used to be, although it does happen.)
Especially dimes. Man do they just not want to take any kind of ten-cent piece sometimes.