- cross-posted to:
- usnews@beehaw.org
- cross-posted to:
- usnews@beehaw.org
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Canada got rid of the penny 12 years ago. Hardly raised an eyebrow.
half of them are still circulating in the U.S.
I love your polymer notes. Makes our greenbacks look like antiques.
Probably cause Canadians aren’t weird about their currency.
All Canadian bills keep getting redesigned.
one time they made the 10$ bill vertical and no one gave a shit
I want the next one to be rotated, but still in portrait. Giant black bars on the sides, and the print is tiny. Like full screening a badly edited video.
And they put a black woman on it. Ooooooo scary!
I love the vertical $10 bill.
We Americans do occasionally get the dollar coin redesigned. Sometimes our leaders are forward thinking and recognize important historical figures. I have a few with Sacajawea on it.
Great title
I mean… it’s been a while since I’ve even seen one
Cool. Do the dollar bill next. Go buck and doublebuck coin like Canadia did.
If I can’t buy a gallon of milk or gasoline with it, it should be a coin.
So what happens when someone pays cash at the supermarket? Who rounds up?
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
willwould 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.
Pay with credit or debit each time the price will round up.
I don’t think it matters with credit or debit. The exact amount is paid.
That’s what OP it’s implying.
Just don’t pay with a prepaid card and you should be fine /s
Yes, that’s why you pay with credit/debit. To avoid the round up.
I changed “will” to “would” to hopefully make it more clear.
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.
In other words, no register will ever come out balanced.
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
They already do with sales tax. ( If the tax works out to a fraction of a cent, almost every register or POS system will round up…it’s a tiny amount per transaction, but it does happen and adds up over daily, weekly and monthly transactions)
Yes we all saw office space
Yes we all saw office space
The ol Superman III
I write POS software, and have written tax calculations that cover about 30 states, and several CA provinces.
While we do have to round (always up) when calculating sales tax, there’s no way for the business to figure out how much that rounding would be, since it’s just added to the tax collected.
And in all states that I’ve worked with, a business has to pay what they collected (even if they over collect), and can’t just calculate a percentage of total sales (since many states have tax tables, rounding rules, or 3-4 decimal tax rates, and not a flat percentage tax).
So it’s actually the government that gets the benefit of the rounding.
Didn’t know that was the case, thanks for correcting me.
You were right about the rounding / keeping the extra … it’s just someone different keeping the extra money.
Is that why sales tax is always on its own line on the receipt and it’s own account number on the trial balance?
Yea, we can process 4 different tax rates, and always list them separately.
The exception is in locations where tax is included in the price: bars that take a lot of cash tend to want to make everything even dollars, or quarters at the most, so that bartenders don’t have to make a lot of change, and can work quickly.
In these situations, we have to do the calculation backwards after the fact, but it’s still tracked as a separate tax in software.
I write POS software
Don’t be so hard on yourself!
I write POS software
I don’t know if you’re in any position to suggest decisions, but your software is often run on subpar hardware. Going to touchscreens doubled our call time, it was because of the half second or so of loading between touches. It couldn’t be used naturally because of the delay.
I’m an owner, so make many decisions (but I also have smart employees who’s opinions I trust very much).
This is a tough one to deal with, especially with smaller Android based handheld devices. In the 5" to 6" range we can get a few different things (wholesale costs):
- $150 - $200 dollar trash that will fail in a short period of time (Chinese imports direct from Alibaba / the manufacturer). << we don’t sell these.
- $300 to $400 devices, with similar hardware specs to the cheaper ones, but better made to last a couple of years (both of these classes are slow, and a bit under-powered)
- $900+ devices that are fast and well made.
You can guess which ones we sell the most of. Especially since they tend to get dropped, or lost quite a bit (we’re in the restaurant POS business).
For the stationary (15" Android) terminals, the situation is similar. But we sell these devices more than the handhelds, and after a few installs with well made but slower hardware, my tech lead ruled out offering the cheaper ones in favor of selling the ones with better specs, so that’s where we are now.
But lots of our competitors give hardware away to get the credit card processing revenue (a total rip off for the customer, but it’s the nature of the game), so they use the cheapest option.
It’s really not a big deal. Canada did this ages ago and the world didn’t explode.
But Canadian money isn’t real money
Proof! Canadian quarter in a vending machine: rejected!
Completely fake money! (/s obv. Border states often interchange Canadian/US currency, vending machines reject currency they don’t know.)
Lots of those Canadian quarters floating around in FL when we lived there.
yeah, we’re all a little loony up here
frankly they might aswell cut the 5 cent piece too while theyre at it.
Just scrap anything less than $1. Then make coins $1 $5 $10 $20 that look and feel similar to the penny, nickel, dime, & quarter but are really replacing these paper bills.
Why would you want coins instead of paper bills?
They last a lot longer. This is why Canada switched to coins for $1 and $2
We want the fantasy-trope coin-pouch hanging from our belts! We’ll tors down bags of coins! It’ll be great!
They last longer. Up to this point the government could not get the public to adopt the $1 coin, largely because it was too big physically, and cashiers didn’t have an extra slot in their coin drawer. We could change all that now, if we convert $1, $5, $10, and $20 into coins the appear similar to the penny, nickel, dime, and quarter.
Homie just wants to have his pants constantly jingling.
Make a 20¢ piece instead of the quarter and everything can go to the nearest 10¢. Then eventually we can get rid of the dime too and everything can go to the nearest 20¢.
Please do not put the idea in Trump’s head that he can mint new denominations. They will all have his face.
This is the forward thinking we need right now.
This is what the euro currency did, I expect for this reason.
No, forward thinking is to depreciate the dime, ahead of its time. When the penny was introduced it was worth the equivalent of 37 cents today. Round only to quarters. No new coins - a new 20 cent piece wouldn’t be compatible with coin infrastructure today.
If you’re gonna flex with an ancient Greek quote, at least use Greek letters!
I don’t know that the label gun does Greek. :)
*brag, the word is brag.
Sorry. Use Greek brag.
Better late than never. While the momentum is here, get rid of the nickel too.
Don’t nickels cost like 14 cents each, and won’t we need a lot more of them?
We reuse these coins so the cost to produce them is unimportant.
Oh for sure, but if the justification is that the penny costs more to make than it is worth then isn’t the nickel in that same boat?
yes, Im not arguing to get rid of coinage.
I’m all for it. Real talk though: at what point do we consider re-basing the dollar? I get that we’re nowhere near that now, but I’m guessing it’s at the “kill the $1 bill” mark?
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.
I recall the gumball machine at my childhood barber being a penny in the mid 1980s. I don’t recall when it went up exactly, but it was around then. I was born in 80 so I was pretty young when it happened. But yeah, even then the convenience store in the middle of town had a candy aisle with lots of 5 cent candy that made picking up pennies worthwhile.
I also remember in the later 80s when I began reading them, comics were $0.75 each. Over the next 15 years they went to $3, until I was in college and my comic habit was just too expensive, so I stopped the monthlies completely.
Inspired by your comment, I decided to look up when the U.S. stopped minting the half penny, as well as what a “half penny” of that time would’ve been worth when accounting for modern inflation.
The U.S. half penny was abandoned in 1857. The inflation calculators I checked don’t allow for division by half-cents, but when $0.01 from 1857 is inflated to today’s value, it comes out to somewhere between 37¢ and 38¢. If I did the math correctly, that means a U.S. half cent was worth a modern equivalent of about 19¢ at the time it was discontinued.
US slowly working its way to a Japan style monetary system where the fractional unit ceases to be used as the buying power of the main unit dwindles.
Did you know Japan had a coin called ‘sen’ which was 1/100 of a yen? They aren’t made anymore. They’d be near useless if they were because a cup of ramen is ~¥200, or 20000 sen. Although, it would be pretty funny in a show to see some ancient Japanese guy paying for his lunch with his sen collection while some uptight salaryman loses his mind in line behind him.
Anyone would lose their mind in that situation. I had ti leave a store once without buying anything because the guy in front of me was trying to buy his things with coins and I had to go to work.
nice, we need to kill our fucking euro cents too!!!
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.
They should keep pennies and put Trump’s face on them so I can throw them in the trash
I literally throw them in the trash. I don’t see many of them because my cash transactions tend to be decimaless.
So this is what it’s like to fully embrace the death of the USD?
Well, getting rid of the penny was always kinda a good idea. It costs more to make one than it’s actually worth.
Here in Canada we killed our penny years ago.
The US used to have a half penny, but it was killed over 100 years ago.
Minting such a small amount of change that sees almost no practical use is pointless.
Honestly, I’d be fine with killing the nickel too. Just start pricing everything in tenths of a dollar instead of hundredths.
Around 2006 is when the penny started to cost more to make than it’s worth. It’s only like this because of how weak the USD has become
Remember when u could buy penny candies? The dollar ain’t worth shit anymore
This doesn’t have much to do with international use of the dollar.
I’m kind of commenting on how bad our inflation has gotten …
