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Change doesn't make sense today. Comparing the value of a penny in 1900 it would be worth $0.31 today. Therefore we should get rid of pennies, nickles, and dime

Change doesn't make sense today. Comparing the value of a penny in 1900 it would be worth $0.31 today. Therefore we should get rid of pennies, nickles, and dimes. It is a huge waste of human time to count these small denominations out. They should round up to the nearest $0.25 https://www.in2013dollars.com/us/inflation/1900?amount=0.01 https://www.in2013dollars.com/us/inflation/1900?amount=0.01

chaostheory 7y ago
With more and more things going digital everywhere, this argument gets less and less important over time
sethammons 7y ago
Each item rounds up. If you shop for food at the dollar-ish store, $1.01 now goes to $1.25. A 14 to 24% price increase that will disproportionately affect lower socioeconomic people. As someone who lived not so long ago when literally saving a dime mattered, no thank you.
- TylerE 7y ago
  Rounding up is dumb, but that is t really an argument. There are standard rounding rules (applies to the total, not the line item) that result in rounding up and down with equal frequency.
  - Scoundreller 7y ago
    Well, pretty much equal frequency. I think the rule is usually round up $x.x3, but round down $0.08. But there will be more 3s than 8s: Benford’s Law: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benford%27s_law https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benford%27s_law
    - dmurray 7y ago
      This makes 0 sense. Firstly, if you're rounding to the nearest 5c, you can round up both $x.x3 and $x.x8, and get fair rounding. Perhaps you are thinking of the slightly more complicated deal with rounding to the nearest 10c, where you round down $x.05 and up $x.15. And Benford's law applies to leading digits, not the least significant digit. It's right there in the first line of your link.
      - Scoundreller 7y ago
        You are correct about the unusual rounding to the nearest 10 cents. But Benford's law extends to less significant digits, just decreasingly so. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benford%27s_law#Generalization_to_digits_beyond_the_first https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benford%27s_law#Generalization... That's why the link says "leading digits", not "most significant digit".
- thoughtstheseus 7y ago
  Always rounding up seems unlikely, in particular for price sensitive goods.
  - throwaway5752 7y ago
    Retail net margins are often in single digits overall and net negative on competitive staples. There may not be room in cash flow to round down. edit: okay, downvoters, what did i get wrong factually? I'm just basing this statement on dozens of general, food, and discount retail 10-K filings and analysis over longer than a decade of following them.
    - AnotherGoodName 7y ago
      The USA currently rounds to nearest cent and it works well. I could buy 1.49 cents worth of something and have it rounded to 1 cent. If the rounding becomes 5cents rather than 1cent it doesn't change a lot. I'm reminded of a comedy skit from childhood based on Australia removing 1 and 2 cent pieces. A guy buys 2 cents of petrol at a time repeatedly pushing his car from pump to pump at a service station. It went on for a while and eventually the owner at the counter, who was down a whole 10 cents at this point, just shook his head and laughed while exclaiming "Dickhead!".
- ghayes 7y ago
  If you’re comfortable with not being precise to half pennies or $0.001, then there is likely a unit that you feel is equitable to round to, and the question is what unit that should be. As rounding will favor you as often as it works against you (assuming it’s not heavily gamed), there should be a unit that people trait as fair. As that choice has remained the same regardless of inflation, it might be fair to say we only use $0.01 because it’s what it used to be, not because it’s the right choice. I would argue that $0.05 or $0.10 would be better choices than pennies, for instance.
  - TylerE 7y ago
    Worth pointing out that while $0.001 (mil) coins never existed, half-cent coins were minted from 1792 to 1857. Even in 1857 $0.005 was worth way way more than even a quarter is today. Probably more than a dollar. (Actual inflation gets a bit hard to track going back that far).
    - brassattax 7y ago
      If you haven't got a ha'penny, then God bless you.
    - pmiller2 7y ago
      True, but $0.001 (mil) tokens do exist. They were usually used for sales tax accounting, IIRC.
  - jrockway 7y ago
    If you visit the grocery store twice a week, then with 24 cents rounded up each trip (worst case, not average case), you pay about $25 a year more for groceries. Meanwhile, if you round up to the penny, then the worst case is .9 cents twice a week, which is about a dollar a year. All this pales in comparison to the 1%+ markup due to people using credit cards and charging the same price for credit cards as cash, though.
  - blahedo 7y ago
    $0.10 is a tricky choice (in the US) because it's not compatible with the next denomination up ($0.25). If anything like this ever happens, we could round either to the nearest $0.05 or the nearest $0.25, but not easily in-between.
- ars 7y ago
  How many of your purchases are $1? You only have such a dramatic percent when the purchase price is very low. On a more typical $10 purchase it wouldn't have much effect.
- Symbiote 7y ago
  Several countries don't have a 0.01 coin, so they have rounding when making a cash payment. Here in Denmark, where the smallest coin is 0.50kr, and a single bag of sugar is 9.95kr, I'll pay 10kr at the till. If I buy 6 bags of sugar, which is 59.70kr, then in cash I'd pay 59.50kr. When paying by card, the exact amount is paid. For the USA, a reasonable first step would be rounding to the nearest 5¢. Someone so poor that 10¢ matters can game the system with careful purchases. The shop won't care, since handling the 1¢ coins is just a hassle for them. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cash_rounding https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cash_rounding
  - mark-r 7y ago
    When I was a kid, I remember going to a small hobby store to buy a couple of bottles of paint. The bottles were $0.25 each, and I had exactly $0.50. I took my bottles to the register and was told the total was $0.51, because of sales tax. So I only purchased one bottle, and the total was $0.25. As I was leaving I realized that the tax had been wiped out, so I went back in and purchased the second bottle for $0.25 too. These days it's common to find pennies on the ground because they aren't worth the effort to bend over to pick them up. I pick them up anyway, because I still remember a time when they mattered.
    - ficklepickle 7y ago
      I used to buy my candies one at a time as a child to avoid sales tax. Annoyed the hell out of the cashier. Thanks for reminding me :)
    - LyndsySimon 7y ago
      I'm envious of the <2% sales tax rate.
      - mark-r 7y ago
        I may be misremembering the exact amounts, it was a very long time ago - closer to 4% than 2%. I believe the tax rate today is at least double what it was back then.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
ars 7y ago
Personally I think we should just have 1 decimal digit, instead of two. Yes, that means new coins, but the coins the way they are are less and less useful every year. At some point we'll have to make a change.
- xvector 7y ago
  Dimes exist? Still too granular IMO. If a penny is worth 1/31th of what it used to be, we should drop it and go to quarters.
  - ars 7y ago
    And half dollars exist as well, so we might not actually need to issue anything new. Just slowly collect all the old coins, until only some collectors have it. The quarter idea isn't as good because you are still doing math to 2 digits (for example sales tax would have to be calculated, then some kind of rounding). Switching to a single digit is simpler.
    - hunter2_ 7y ago
      The number of digits used to write it out doesn't need to be thought of as an indicator of simplicity once you realize that you're rounding for a purpose unrelated to reducing the number of digits written after the decimal point (which is a typical reason to round, but is not the reason here). Just think of dividing a dollar 10 ways versus dividing it 4 ways.
NeedMoreTea 7y ago
Better would be to revalue the currency by dividing by ten or twenty. Change would mean something again, and have some useful value.
bostonvaulter2 7y ago
Yes it totally doesn't make sense. The coins are worth so little now. Also making pennies adds $2m a year to our trade deficit with China.
- tantalor 7y ago
  Huh? Are pennies sourced from China?
  - LyndsySimon 7y ago
    No, they're made here as far as I know - but I strongly suspect the copper and zinc is mined in China.
  - bostonvaulter2 7y ago
    As the other commentor noted, most of the zinc for pennies comes from China (I'm not sure about the copper).
kalleboo 7y ago
Sweden has kept up by continually getting rid of their smallest change. The last to be discontinued was the 50 "öre" coin in 2010, leaving the smallest Swedish coin valued at 10 US cents. The last time the US deprecated a coin denomination was the half cent in 1857. Due to inflation!

chaostheory 7y ago

With more and more things going digital everywhere, this argument gets less and less important over time

sethammons 7y ago

Each item rounds up. If you shop for food at the dollar-ish store, $1.01 now goes to $1.25. A 14 to 24% price increase that will disproportionately affect lower socioeconomic people. As someone who lived not so long ago when literally saving a dime mattered, no thank you.

TylerE 7y ago
Rounding up is dumb, but that is t really an argument. There are standard rounding rules (applies to the total, not the line item) that result in rounding up and down with equal frequency.
- Scoundreller 7y ago
  Well, pretty much equal frequency. I think the rule is usually round up $x.x3, but round down $0.08. But there will be more 3s than 8s: Benford’s Law: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benford%27s_law https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benford%27s_law
  - dmurray 7y ago
    This makes 0 sense. Firstly, if you're rounding to the nearest 5c, you can round up both $x.x3 and $x.x8, and get fair rounding. Perhaps you are thinking of the slightly more complicated deal with rounding to the nearest 10c, where you round down $x.05 and up $x.15. And Benford's law applies to leading digits, not the least significant digit. It's right there in the first line of your link.
    - Scoundreller 7y ago
      You are correct about the unusual rounding to the nearest 10 cents. But Benford's law extends to less significant digits, just decreasingly so. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benford%27s_law#Generalization_to_digits_beyond_the_first https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benford%27s_law#Generalization... That's why the link says "leading digits", not "most significant digit".
thoughtstheseus 7y ago
Always rounding up seems unlikely, in particular for price sensitive goods.
- throwaway5752 7y ago
  Retail net margins are often in single digits overall and net negative on competitive staples. There may not be room in cash flow to round down. edit: okay, downvoters, what did i get wrong factually? I'm just basing this statement on dozens of general, food, and discount retail 10-K filings and analysis over longer than a decade of following them.
  - AnotherGoodName 7y ago
    The USA currently rounds to nearest cent and it works well. I could buy 1.49 cents worth of something and have it rounded to 1 cent. If the rounding becomes 5cents rather than 1cent it doesn't change a lot. I'm reminded of a comedy skit from childhood based on Australia removing 1 and 2 cent pieces. A guy buys 2 cents of petrol at a time repeatedly pushing his car from pump to pump at a service station. It went on for a while and eventually the owner at the counter, who was down a whole 10 cents at this point, just shook his head and laughed while exclaiming "Dickhead!".
ghayes 7y ago
If you’re comfortable with not being precise to half pennies or $0.001, then there is likely a unit that you feel is equitable to round to, and the question is what unit that should be. As rounding will favor you as often as it works against you (assuming it’s not heavily gamed), there should be a unit that people trait as fair. As that choice has remained the same regardless of inflation, it might be fair to say we only use $0.01 because it’s what it used to be, not because it’s the right choice. I would argue that $0.05 or $0.10 would be better choices than pennies, for instance.
- TylerE 7y ago
  Worth pointing out that while $0.001 (mil) coins never existed, half-cent coins were minted from 1792 to 1857. Even in 1857 $0.005 was worth way way more than even a quarter is today. Probably more than a dollar. (Actual inflation gets a bit hard to track going back that far).
  - brassattax 7y ago
    If you haven't got a ha'penny, then God bless you.
  - pmiller2 7y ago
    True, but $0.001 (mil) tokens do exist. They were usually used for sales tax accounting, IIRC.
- jrockway 7y ago
  If you visit the grocery store twice a week, then with 24 cents rounded up each trip (worst case, not average case), you pay about $25 a year more for groceries. Meanwhile, if you round up to the penny, then the worst case is .9 cents twice a week, which is about a dollar a year. All this pales in comparison to the 1%+ markup due to people using credit cards and charging the same price for credit cards as cash, though.
- blahedo 7y ago
  $0.10 is a tricky choice (in the US) because it's not compatible with the next denomination up ($0.25). If anything like this ever happens, we could round either to the nearest $0.05 or the nearest $0.25, but not easily in-between.
ars 7y ago
How many of your purchases are $1? You only have such a dramatic percent when the purchase price is very low. On a more typical $10 purchase it wouldn't have much effect.
Symbiote 7y ago
Several countries don't have a 0.01 coin, so they have rounding when making a cash payment. Here in Denmark, where the smallest coin is 0.50kr, and a single bag of sugar is 9.95kr, I'll pay 10kr at the till. If I buy 6 bags of sugar, which is 59.70kr, then in cash I'd pay 59.50kr. When paying by card, the exact amount is paid. For the USA, a reasonable first step would be rounding to the nearest 5¢. Someone so poor that 10¢ matters can game the system with careful purchases. The shop won't care, since handling the 1¢ coins is just a hassle for them. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cash_rounding https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cash_rounding
- mark-r 7y ago
  When I was a kid, I remember going to a small hobby store to buy a couple of bottles of paint. The bottles were $0.25 each, and I had exactly $0.50. I took my bottles to the register and was told the total was $0.51, because of sales tax. So I only purchased one bottle, and the total was $0.25. As I was leaving I realized that the tax had been wiped out, so I went back in and purchased the second bottle for $0.25 too. These days it's common to find pennies on the ground because they aren't worth the effort to bend over to pick them up. I pick them up anyway, because I still remember a time when they mattered.
  - ficklepickle 7y ago
    I used to buy my candies one at a time as a child to avoid sales tax. Annoyed the hell out of the cashier. Thanks for reminding me :)
  - LyndsySimon 7y ago
    I'm envious of the <2% sales tax rate.
    - mark-r 7y ago
      I may be misremembering the exact amounts, it was a very long time ago - closer to 4% than 2%. I believe the tax rate today is at least double what it was back then.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

ars 7y ago

Personally I think we should just have 1 decimal digit, instead of two. Yes, that means new coins, but the coins the way they are are less and less useful every year. At some point we'll have to make a change.

xvector 7y ago
Dimes exist? Still too granular IMO. If a penny is worth 1/31th of what it used to be, we should drop it and go to quarters.
- ars 7y ago
  And half dollars exist as well, so we might not actually need to issue anything new. Just slowly collect all the old coins, until only some collectors have it. The quarter idea isn't as good because you are still doing math to 2 digits (for example sales tax would have to be calculated, then some kind of rounding). Switching to a single digit is simpler.
  - hunter2_ 7y ago
    The number of digits used to write it out doesn't need to be thought of as an indicator of simplicity once you realize that you're rounding for a purpose unrelated to reducing the number of digits written after the decimal point (which is a typical reason to round, but is not the reason here). Just think of dividing a dollar 10 ways versus dividing it 4 ways.

NeedMoreTea 7y ago

Better would be to revalue the currency by dividing by ten or twenty. Change would mean something again, and have some useful value.

bostonvaulter2 7y ago

Yes it totally doesn't make sense. The coins are worth so little now. Also making pennies adds $2m a year to our trade deficit with China.

tantalor 7y ago
Huh? Are pennies sourced from China?
- LyndsySimon 7y ago
  No, they're made here as far as I know - but I strongly suspect the copper and zinc is mined in China.
- bostonvaulter2 7y ago
  As the other commentor noted, most of the zinc for pennies comes from China (I'm not sure about the copper).

kalleboo 7y ago

Sweden has kept up by continually getting rid of their smallest change. The last to be discontinued was the 50 "öre" coin in 2010, leaving the smallest Swedish coin valued at 10 US cents. The last time the US deprecated a coin denomination was the half cent in 1857. Due to inflation!