Why would you want to get economic analysis from a non-expert/complete amateur?

I promise you there would be significant fallout to this that Grey, who has no economics degrees nor any experience at all in economics, is not going to catch because Grey is only good at the very basic stuff that amatuers like myself can explain competently.

Death to nickels!

There’s still a fuck ton of pennies in circulation and on the ground, unless they consider them no longer legal tender we’ll have plenty.

However, if we end up following how Brazil does it, in my experience, it depends on the person/vendor and the amount. If you buy something that’s like R$3,99 you’ll usually get give them R$4 and that’s it. I’ve also had it where I’ll pay for something that’s say R$4,89, give them R$5 and get 15 or 25 centavos back. Could also depend on what’s in the drawer at that time.

Corporations will 100% pocket the difference at first, but once it becomes a normal thing to do the rounding I’ll wager it’ll fall to the Brazilian method, especially with local businesses or vendors.

I saw an interview with an economist years ago where he said that if we just followed the accepted rules of rounding (1-4 rounds to 0, 5-10 rounds to 10) then it would work out about the same. In reality I’m sure companies would just pocket the extra money

We follow normal rounding rules in Canada. 1, 2 round down to 0. 3, 4 round up to 5. 6, 7 round down to 5. 8, 9 round up to 10.

Can you game the system? Yes!

As a business, make sure all your prices (plus tax) come to a price ending in 3, 4, 8, or 9. When consumers buy a single item you’ll get the rounding up (edit: if they pay cash) and make sweet, sweet profit. But if they buy more than one item, you’re SOL on controlling the rounding.

As a consumer, you have way more control. First, pay with cash whenever the price will round down and you can probably “profit” 5 or so dollars a year. (Assuming you pay with cash on or two times a day, saving 1 to 2 cents each time.) Pay with credit or debit each time the price will would round up.

Second, you can get real fancy. You can learn tax rules in depth so you know what items will or won’t be taxed and at what rate (we have federal and provincial taxes but they don’t apply to everything and they don’t follow the same rules on what is taxed.) But, you can use this info to always know what the final bill will be and always buy combinations of items that end in 2 or 7 (or 1 and 6 if you’re lazy) and always pay cash. You can profit like $20 a year or something doing this.

In reality? No one gives a shit until that one rare time you’re paying with cash and it rounds down. It’s your lucky day and you do the Six Flags Man dance. It’s like finding a penny and picking it up.

If you’re gonna flex with an ancient Greek quote, at least use Greek letters!

We reuse these coins so the cost to produce them is unimportant.

In NL we rounded off before the euro, only had 5, 10 and 25ct coins (and 1 and 2,5 guilder); after the euro came we all of a sudden had more coins (1, 2 , 5, 10, 20, 50) but within a few years collectively stopped using the 1 and 2 cent coins. Don’t know who started, but I’m always a bit surprised when I’m in another eu country and get a single cent as change. I mean they eventually add up to something but it takes forever until you could theoretically buy something with it.

I literally throw them in the trash. I don’t see many of them because my cash transactions tend to be decimaless.

If only he did it properly. The better way to do it would have been via Congress.

Canada has a law that allows cashiers to round up or down. Without this, the US is only making a penny shortage, and you better believe customers will be screaming at cashiers for “stealing their money” if they don’t get their cent back, or shrieking “it’s legal tender!” if cashiers don’t accept their Pennies.

Nickels and dimes sure. Not sure why you’d ditch the dollar yet, it still has buying power. And dropping paper dollars for dollar coins is pants on head levels of stupid

I really hope you’re not advocating for a cashless society.

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I’d answer this with ‘we rebase the dollar when a coin can’t buy a thing.’ It should have happened decades ago. Here’s my worked example.

A penny used to be a lot of money. You could buy actual things with a penny. I’m sure our oldest contributors can point to the day that a penny would get you a piece of candy. In my earliest days, I could get that same piece of candy with a nickel, but by my teens, that piece of candy would be a dime or even quarter. I remember when a bag of M&Ms cost $0.50, That became $1.00 around the 2000s, and is now $2.00.

A penny sitting on the ground was ‘good luck’ back in the day. I think that’s because you could bend down, pick up that penny, head to the store, and plink that penny down and get something in exchange for it. Today, you can’t plink down a single penny for anything. You can’t even plink down 10 of these pennies or a dime and expect to get something today, with the cheapest things requiring 25 of these coins (or a single quarter). Not much luck if you need 25 of them to get a burst of sweetness.

If we did away with the penny, would anyone lose anything? That’s 5 seconds at Federal Minimum Wage, and about 2 seconds at my city’s minimum wage. It takes more time to reach down and pick up the penny than you’d earn working a minimum wage job, so arguments about ‘Oh, prices will go higher if we eliminate the penny’ ring hollow to me. There is functionally no difference between $7.99 and $8.00 pricewise. Even a hike of a $7.9 priced item to $8 isn’t a bunch of money. We’re almost to the point where you can’t buy something with a single dollar bill. The time for the hundredth of that dollar bill passed a LONG time ago.