7 ms·

What This Country Needs Is an 18¢ Piece [pdf]

39 points by jdleesmiller 9y ago

dizzystar 9y ago
It's interesting from a purely computational perspective, but I'm pretty sure most people would have some difficulty counting out in denominations that aren't mod 5. Noting that this is from 2003, before many stores introduced the automatic changer, I'm not sure if the 17% increase in efficiency would make a huge difference. Humans themselves aren't efficient, and many registers across America aren't designed to be an assembly line with no niceties. One would think the 50c coin would be in wider circulation than it is, so I'm assuming the authors are correct that the odd denomination wouldn't see large acceptance.
- pandaman 9y ago
  USSR had 2 and 3 cent coins along with 3 rouble bill, I don't recall people having any difficulty with these.
  - chch 9y ago
    As did the United States, for the coins [1][2]! [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two-cent_piece_(United_States) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two-cent_piece_(United_States) [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-cent_nickel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-cent_nickel
- ghaff 9y ago
  Hey. I forgot about those things. I wonder when they went away.
s0rce 9y ago
Interesting idea, however, it seems like it would be slower for people to calculate what change to give, also Americans won't even use the $1 coin, I can't see the 18c coin gaining wide acceptance.
- saghm 9y ago
  I can only speak for myself, but I (an American) tend to any away from using coins at all just because they're rather unwieldy compared to bills or credit/debit cards, which are light, easily stored in a wallet, and useful in much smaller quantities.
  - gozur88 9y ago
    That's because American coins aren't worth anything. I'd like to see $5 and $20 coins, and the elimination of the penny and nickel, which would mean I don't have to carry around paper money any more. Traveling to Europe I found the euro coins to be much more convenient.
    - saghm 9y ago
      Interesting! Out of curiosity, what aspects of coins do you find more convenient than paper money?
      - gozur88 9y ago
        In the US you pay in paper money and you're almost always going to get some change in coins. Pretty much that means you're always carrying around both bills and coins. The coins have so little value most people pay with bills and then just pocket the coins without counting them. At the end of the day the coins go into a jar, and eventually you have to lug that twenty pound jar to the bank or one of those coin machines. Why not carry usable amounts of cash in coins instead? You pay in coins and you get coins back in change. Of course that doesn't work if need to carry larger denominations, but if you're going to buy lunch or pop down to the liquor store it's more convenient, IMO.
        ghaff 9y ago
        I'm the opposite. I carry a wallet-like thing anyway for cards and other misc paper. Paper currency is just a few more pieces of paper. Coins are another pouch or something that I need to carry. Although, to tell the truth, I pay cash so seldom in the US these days that it doesn't really matter.
jstanley 9y ago
"This country"? The author is at the University of Waterloo, but the Abstract talks about the USA. It should be called "What THAT country needs is an 18c piece"!
- deanmen 9y ago
  Canada has the same coin denominations as the US, except that it has now eliminated the penny.
  - rspeer 9y ago
    The article already accounts for a difference between Canadian and US currency -- the US has no $2 coins and nearly nonexistent $1 coins, and the smallest bill in Canadian currency is $5. They suggest "optimizing" Canadian change with an 83-cent piece... which of course makes no sense once the penny is eliminated, so now there must be a different optimal coin.
    - uiri 9y ago
      The author could easily base calculations off of cost(100; 1, 2, 5, 20, 40) and multiply the result by 5 to find the new optimal coin. This avoids unduly weighting values which are impossible without a penny which is what cost(500; 5, 10, 25, 100, 200) would do.
  - dharness 9y ago
    *Also we have loonies and toonies
- vlasev 9y ago
  If you look at the bottom of the first page, you'll see it's a play on this: “What this country needs is a really good five-cent cigar.” T. R. Marshall (US Vice-President), New York Tribune, January 4, 1920
andrewstuart 9y ago
Transactions are rounded by default in Australia.
grenoire 9y ago
Reminds me of McNugget numbers (http://mathworld.wolfram.com/McNuggetNumber.html http://mathworld.wolfram.com/McNuggetNumber.html).
forinti 9y ago
In 2010, after reading an article similar to this one (but lighter on the maths), I wrote a Perl script to calculate what would be the best combination of 4, 5, or 6 coins. I did not look into the actual distribution of prices and just supposed that every value was equally probable. http://alquerubim.blogspot.com.br/2010/09/otimizando-niqueleira.html http://alquerubim.blogspot.com.br/2010/09/otimizando-niquele... http://alquerubim.blogspot.com.br/2010/09/otimizando-niqueleira-ii.html http://alquerubim.blogspot.com.br/2010/09/otimizando-niquele...
paulcole 9y ago
> For people who make change on a dailg basis, it is desirable to make change in as efficient a manner as possible Is it though? You're going to save a few random seconds here and there, not big chunks of time. Plus it's not like the change making process is hugely slowing down checkout lines.
protomyth 9y ago
I would rather we scrap this whole base 10 and have the Dollar divided into 12 pence (like the old pence to shilling). That given a nice 2, 3, 4, and 6 for divisibles instead of 2 & 5. I would bet that 18c would get labeled a devil's coin by some. Of course, I'm one of those folks who would like to to see the $1, $5, and $10 bills replaced with coins. Might be nice to follow the example of some of the Chinese coins and have a hole in the middle for convenience.
nayuki 9y ago
Currency denominations (coins and bills) are usually based on numbers like 1, 2, 5, 10, 25, 50, 100, 200, etc. An extreme example is that Japanese yen are denominated as 1, 5, 10, 50, 100, 500, 1000, 2000(uncommon), 5000, 10000. But I noticed that it takes a lot of 1's to pay or make change, whereas the 5's are less used. What if we use denominations like 1 and 3 instead? The benefit is that the ratio 1:3 is similar to the ratio 3:10, so they are more evenly spaced on a logarithmic scale. Specifically, I'd like to explore what happens if the denominations are 1, 3, 10, 30, 100, 300, 1000, 3000, etc...
Humphrey 9y ago
Australia solved this problem back in 1990 by removing 1c and 2c coins. When paying in cash, transactions are rounded to the nearest 5c. No rounding occurs for digital transactions. Have just spent a month in the USA for the first time, I found that the only reason coins < 25c were used were when change was given. And this was only the case because adding tax to the price made most prices having unrounded final amounts. In Australia, all prices are quoted including tax, which means that prices can be rounded, and so the need for coins in minimised. I love the mathematical slant of this paper, but it'd make much more sense to try and get rid of the need for coins. Perhaps, the USA could remove all coins except for quarters?
- froindt 9y ago
  I've sworn for years if I ever own a store, all prices will either include tax, or will be to a round dollar or quarter. The US got rid of the half cent when it couldn't be used to buy anything of worth. Inflation adjusted, it had the value of 14 cents. I've started to leave pennies, nickels, and dimes in the "leave a penny, take a penny" holders.
  - Humphrey 9y ago
    Yeah, although if you did that, everybody would subconsciously think that your prices were higher. Perhaps just show the inc. tax and ex. tax prices. AirBNB and Uber do this nicely already. Half cents! ha ha... I find it funny how US petrol stations quote gas to the tenth of a cent. Such as $3.39 9/10 a gallon. I also found it really difficult having all the paper notes the same colour. I'd look in my wallet and I couldn't tell whether I had hundreds of dollars, or just ten one dollar bills. The poor shop keepers who had to wait for me to look at each bill and coin individually before handing them over :-p

39 points by jdleesmiller 9y ago

It's interesting from a purely computational perspective, but I'm pretty sure most people would have some difficulty counting out in denominations that aren't mod 5. Noting that this is from 2003, before many stores introduced the automatic changer, I'm not sure if the 17% increase in efficiency would make a huge difference. Humans themselves aren't efficient, and many registers across America aren't designed to be an assembly line with no niceties. One would think the 50c coin would be in wider circulation than it is, so I'm assuming the authors are correct that the odd denomination wouldn't see large acceptance.

pandaman 9y ago
USSR had 2 and 3 cent coins along with 3 rouble bill, I don't recall people having any difficulty with these.
- chch 9y ago
  As did the United States, for the coins [1][2]! [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two-cent_piece_(United_States) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two-cent_piece_(United_States) [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-cent_nickel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-cent_nickel
ghaff 9y ago
Hey. I forgot about those things. I wonder when they went away.

s0rce 9y ago

Interesting idea, however, it seems like it would be slower for people to calculate what change to give, also Americans won't even use the $1 coin, I can't see the 18c coin gaining wide acceptance.

saghm 9y ago
I can only speak for myself, but I (an American) tend to any away from using coins at all just because they're rather unwieldy compared to bills or credit/debit cards, which are light, easily stored in a wallet, and useful in much smaller quantities.
- gozur88 9y ago
  That's because American coins aren't worth anything. I'd like to see $5 and $20 coins, and the elimination of the penny and nickel, which would mean I don't have to carry around paper money any more. Traveling to Europe I found the euro coins to be much more convenient.
  - saghm 9y ago
    Interesting! Out of curiosity, what aspects of coins do you find more convenient than paper money?
    - gozur88 9y ago
      In the US you pay in paper money and you're almost always going to get some change in coins. Pretty much that means you're always carrying around both bills and coins. The coins have so little value most people pay with bills and then just pocket the coins without counting them. At the end of the day the coins go into a jar, and eventually you have to lug that twenty pound jar to the bank or one of those coin machines. Why not carry usable amounts of cash in coins instead? You pay in coins and you get coins back in change. Of course that doesn't work if need to carry larger denominations, but if you're going to buy lunch or pop down to the liquor store it's more convenient, IMO.
      - ghaff 9y ago
        I'm the opposite. I carry a wallet-like thing anyway for cards and other misc paper. Paper currency is just a few more pieces of paper. Coins are another pouch or something that I need to carry. Although, to tell the truth, I pay cash so seldom in the US these days that it doesn't really matter.

jstanley 9y ago

"This country"? The author is at the University of Waterloo, but the Abstract talks about the USA. It should be called "What THAT country needs is an 18c piece"!

deanmen 9y ago
Canada has the same coin denominations as the US, except that it has now eliminated the penny.
- rspeer 9y ago
  The article already accounts for a difference between Canadian and US currency -- the US has no $2 coins and nearly nonexistent $1 coins, and the smallest bill in Canadian currency is $5. They suggest "optimizing" Canadian change with an 83-cent piece... which of course makes no sense once the penny is eliminated, so now there must be a different optimal coin.
  - uiri 9y ago
    The author could easily base calculations off of cost(100; 1, 2, 5, 20, 40) and multiply the result by 5 to find the new optimal coin. This avoids unduly weighting values which are impossible without a penny which is what cost(500; 5, 10, 25, 100, 200) would do.
- dharness 9y ago
  *Also we have loonies and toonies
vlasev 9y ago
If you look at the bottom of the first page, you'll see it's a play on this: “What this country needs is a really good five-cent cigar.” T. R. Marshall (US Vice-President), New York Tribune, January 4, 1920

andrewstuart 9y ago

Transactions are rounded by default in Australia.

grenoire 9y ago

Reminds me of McNugget numbers (http://mathworld.wolfram.com/McNuggetNumber.html http://mathworld.wolfram.com/McNuggetNumber.html).

forinti 9y ago

In 2010, after reading an article similar to this one (but lighter on the maths), I wrote a Perl script to calculate what would be the best combination of 4, 5, or 6 coins. I did not look into the actual distribution of prices and just supposed that every value was equally probable. http://alquerubim.blogspot.com.br/2010/09/otimizando-niqueleira.html http://alquerubim.blogspot.com.br/2010/09/otimizando-niquele... http://alquerubim.blogspot.com.br/2010/09/otimizando-niqueleira-ii.html http://alquerubim.blogspot.com.br/2010/09/otimizando-niquele...

paulcole 9y ago

> For people who make change on a dailg basis, it is desirable to make change in as efficient a manner as possible Is it though? You're going to save a few random seconds here and there, not big chunks of time. Plus it's not like the change making process is hugely slowing down checkout lines.

protomyth 9y ago

I would rather we scrap this whole base 10 and have the Dollar divided into 12 pence (like the old pence to shilling). That given a nice 2, 3, 4, and 6 for divisibles instead of 2 & 5. I would bet that 18c would get labeled a devil's coin by some. Of course, I'm one of those folks who would like to to see the $1, $5, and $10 bills replaced with coins. Might be nice to follow the example of some of the Chinese coins and have a hole in the middle for convenience.

nayuki 9y ago

Currency denominations (coins and bills) are usually based on numbers like 1, 2, 5, 10, 25, 50, 100, 200, etc. An extreme example is that Japanese yen are denominated as 1, 5, 10, 50, 100, 500, 1000, 2000(uncommon), 5000, 10000. But I noticed that it takes a lot of 1's to pay or make change, whereas the 5's are less used. What if we use denominations like 1 and 3 instead? The benefit is that the ratio 1:3 is similar to the ratio 3:10, so they are more evenly spaced on a logarithmic scale. Specifically, I'd like to explore what happens if the denominations are 1, 3, 10, 30, 100, 300, 1000, 3000, etc...

Humphrey 9y ago

Australia solved this problem back in 1990 by removing 1c and 2c coins. When paying in cash, transactions are rounded to the nearest 5c. No rounding occurs for digital transactions. Have just spent a month in the USA for the first time, I found that the only reason coins < 25c were used were when change was given. And this was only the case because adding tax to the price made most prices having unrounded final amounts. In Australia, all prices are quoted including tax, which means that prices can be rounded, and so the need for coins in minimised. I love the mathematical slant of this paper, but it'd make much more sense to try and get rid of the need for coins. Perhaps, the USA could remove all coins except for quarters?

froindt 9y ago
I've sworn for years if I ever own a store, all prices will either include tax, or will be to a round dollar or quarter. The US got rid of the half cent when it couldn't be used to buy anything of worth. Inflation adjusted, it had the value of 14 cents. I've started to leave pennies, nickels, and dimes in the "leave a penny, take a penny" holders.
- Humphrey 9y ago
  Yeah, although if you did that, everybody would subconsciously think that your prices were higher. Perhaps just show the inc. tax and ex. tax prices. AirBNB and Uber do this nicely already. Half cents! ha ha... I find it funny how US petrol stations quote gas to the tenth of a cent. Such as $3.39 9/10 a gallon. I also found it really difficult having all the paper notes the same colour. I'd look in my wallet and I couldn't tell whether I had hundreds of dollars, or just ten one dollar bills. The poor shop keepers who had to wait for me to look at each bill and coin individually before handing them over :-p