4 ms·
The half cent was eventually abolished in the mid-19th century of the US. I can see the penny fading away as well in the near future in the digital age. Althou
by xyst 5y ago
The half cent was eventually abolished in the mid-19th century of the US. I can see the penny fading away as well in the near future in the digital age.
Although, how will transactions paid with cash (ie, a bill of $15.97 paid with $20) be fully resolved? Would the business or the customer be shortchanged by a few pennies?
Even if a business does a thousand of these types of transactions (2-4 cent short changing on their end) they stand to lose $20-40 per month (or gain $20-40 per month if the business short changes the customer).
- zaptheimpaler 5y agoThis kind of thing comes up in deciding how to round floats as well. If you always round up or round down, the errors accumulate linearly. Floats use round-to-even [1] to prevent this, although even that method accumulates error proportional to sqrt(number of ops). [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rounding#Round_half_to_even https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rounding#Round_half_to_even
- Gustomaximus 5y agoWe got rid of one & two cent coins years ago in Australia. With card you pay as priced. With cash it rounds price down if ending in 1&2 and up for 3&4. For a while people would joke and try and line up costs to benefit themselves, in more extreme cases buy $1.02 items separately type thing and usual the world is falling people but this didn't last long and no-one thinks anything of it a year later.
- jliptzin 5y agoWhatever they lose would be made up for in time saved not counting and dealing with pennies.
- Beached 5y agoKorea does exactly this, they got rid of 1 and 5 won coins. every transaction is just rounded to the nearest 10. if we got rid of the penny, you round to the nearest 5. if the business hates losing that 2 cents, they will increase the price of their product by. 1or 2 cents so they get an extra 2 cents. if the customer hates that their product costs 3 or 4 cents more, they don't buy
- dawnerd 5y agoCanada does it that way too. But credit card / bank card transactions still use pennies cause why not. Hasn’t seem to have been a problem there and I didn’t even notice the last time I was there.
- nereye 5y agoFor what it’s worth, 10 Korean wons are worth less than a US cent (1 USD is over 1000 KRW).