6 ms·

I suspect it's because nobody wants to admit that a penny has become worthless, and probably a nickel too. Also, there may be people who are worried that they w

I suspect it's because nobody wants to admit that a penny has become worthless, and probably a nickel too. Also, there may be people who are worried that they will start getting ripped off by the rounding process. I read a book about units of measure, and there was often strong local resistance to adopting regional or national standards because folks thought it would be a chance for merchants to surreptitiously raise prices. They were probably right.

quickthrower2 3y ago
I think Spain and other countries had this kind of inflation when moving to the Euro.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- kolinko 3y ago
  Exactly opposite. Accessing Euro-zone in 1999 has stabilised Spain's inflation at around 2-4%, before getting into Euro it was wild. https://tradingeconomics.com/spain/inflation-cpi https://tradingeconomics.com/spain/inflation-cpi From 1997 until 2021 it was at a stable 2-4%. 1985-1995 it was 5%-10%, and 1965-1985 it was 10-20%. Also, if you compare inflation of say Czech Republic, Slovakia, Poland, Estonia and Estonia (or any other comparable countries), you will have a difficult time spotting which ones of them have Euro and when it was adopted.
  - ffgjgf1 3y ago
    It didn’t necessarily have much to do with the Euro. Inflation was high everywhere back in the 80s
- zeroq 3y ago
  Yes, in Germany Euro was dubbed Teuer-o ("teuer" meaning expensive). Basically, most prices were converted 1:1 from Deutsch Mark to Euro.
phyzome 3y ago
If you get rid of the penny and the nickel, then you may have trouble making change with just 10 and 25 cent pieces.
- dr_dshiv 3y ago
  The dime has got to go
  - cduzz 3y ago
    Nah, it's the only one that makes sense. Cash based commerce should just be rounded to the 1/10th dollar not the 1/100th dollar; there's just no need for such precision. I'd just announce that while still legal tender, the penny, nickle, and quarter won't be minted any longer except in low volumes for collectors, and that cash transactions may be rounded down to the nearest 10th dollar if proper change is not available. IE a cup of coffee costing $4.17 would cost $4.10 if paying cash. I suspect vendors would just update the cost of everything to land on the 1/10th increment. I guess you may need to worry about people playing arbitrage games with metered things like gasoline, but even there it's probably just a marginal problem. Dime is a weird word; it doesn't convey that it's a tenth of a dollar, does it? [edited to add examples and digression on gasoline]
    - twoodfin 3y ago
      Gasoline isn’t a digression, it’s a great example of why removing precision from prices is a bad idea. Imagine you own a gas station. Your actual cost to fill your tanks is some multiple of the price you can charge per gallon. Requiring 10 cent-rounded prices kneecaps your ability to efficiently price your product. Flipping it around, if you think $1/10 increments are good enough for a gas station owner, why aren’t they good enough for Microsoft when its shares are traded? Decimalization in equity markets has been widely seen as a success because more precise prices communicate information about the relative interests of buyers and sellers more accurately. Given the predominance of digital transactions, it’s hard to argue that the transactional efficiency gains of less precise prices are worth the downsides.
cwmoore 3y ago
Worse than worthless--it requires underpaid arithmeticians!
PinkSheep 3y ago
In Russia the smallest coins are practically out of circulation, the price tags are still in x.99 but rounded at checkout.
- fsckboy 3y ago
  in most of the US, rounding at the checkout is against regulations as it throws off sales tax computations, even though it's only by a small amount.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - scld 3y ago
    a regulation requiring all pricing be post-tax would fix this pretty easily
  - lostlogin 3y ago
    Couldn’t they round, then calculate tax? I found US sales tax baffling - I live somewhere that requires the display price to be the out-of-pocket amount.
    - jandrewrogers 3y ago
      The problem in the US is that the local sales tax is the sum of sales taxes created by several independent authorities. These authorities have varying geographic and subject matter scope, and can modify their sales tax on their own schedule. There are effectively thousands of independent sales tax jurisdictions in the US and the details of the computation in those jurisdictions churn regularly. By “late binding” the sales tax, they avoid having to churn the printed/published prices. I think there is also a policy view that taxes should not be hidden, that there is a public interest in making the public aware of precisely how much they are paying in taxes. Taxes that are baked into the price tend to be forgotten about by the public.
      - 3y ago
wharvle 3y ago
US should drop nickel and dime, go to 25¢, 50¢, and $1 coins. Nothing smaller than a quarter’s really worth screwing with, when dealing with physical currency. We’ve gone so long without dropping the penny that the dime’s nearly worthless, too.
- imglorp 3y ago
  One problem is sales tax. With a percentage calculation after a sale, uneven totals are the rule. It would be better if retail prices all included tax, rounded already.
  - colanderman 3y ago
    That is true even with pennies. 5% of $4.99 is 24.95¢.
    - ssl-3 3y ago
      An rounding error is inevitable, but the question is: Should this potential error be multiplied by a factor of about 5, 10, or 25?
  - lamontcg 3y ago
    prices should include all taxes and fees
    - lostlogin 3y ago
      > prices should include all taxes and fees Ever tried Airbnb? It makes the even the most relaxed human start to twitch.
  - nerdbert 3y ago
    In many eurozone countries totals are rounded to the nearest 5 cents at the register if you pay cash. If you pay electronically then the exact amount is debited. There are some weirdos who decide how to pay based on whether or not the rounding is in their favor (e.g if the total ends in a 2 they'll pay cash but if it ends in a 3 they'll pay with card). But I don't think these amounts are enough for stores to care, especially considering how much they save by not having to deal with 1¢ and 2¢ coins.
gus_massa 3y ago
In Argentina we unofficially deprecate the coin/bill when they are worth approximately US$0.03 (don't ask how I made statistics). Now all prices are rounded to AR$10. The AR$20 and AR$50 bills are fine, but the AR$10 bills are very old and almost destroyed. The AR$10 are still used because otherwise it's difficult to pay some values. (I've not seen a AR$5 bill in the wild since January or February.) Soon we will round all prices to AR$50 and unofficially deprecate the AR$20 bills.
- bscphil 3y ago
  > Now all prices are rounded to AR$10 ... Soon we will round all prices to AR$50 A 5x change in what constitutes a negligible amount of money on a human-noticeable timeframe seems like a shocking rate of inflation. For reference, $3 here in the United States has about the same buying power that $1 did in 1982, 40 years ago. So the price of common consumer goods has only risen 3x in a time frame that represents more than half the average human lifespan in this country. Source: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=BJl0 https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=BJl0
  - cableshaft 3y ago
    That's the reality of Argentina though: "Argentina's inflation rate will end the year at 210% and remain high in 2024, investment bank J.P. Morgan said in a note after the new government of libertarian President Javier Milei sharply devalued the peso currency in a bid to tackle a major economic crisis. The South American country's new government is battling to bring down the highest inflation rate since 1991, warning of possible hyperinflation without tough austerity measures. The government unveiled a package of "shock" economic measures earlier this week to overturn a deep fiscal deficit, and devalued the peso currency by over 50%, which it admits will in the short term fan inflation further. J.P. Morgan expects monthly inflation in December to be 25%, which would take the annual rate to around 210%. Prices rose 12.8% in November before the recent devaluation. The bank added that planned subsidy cuts and increases in taxes would accelerate prices in the first half of 2024." https://finance.yahoo.com/news/argentina-inflation-end-210-stay-155338956.html https://finance.yahoo.com/news/argentina-inflation-end-210-s...
hakfoo 3y ago
It's because there's one company that produces the weird bronze-plated-zinc blanks used for cents, and it resides in a politically powerful legislator's district. Since it also features Lincoln, the Illinois contingent will also cling to it for dear life.
- jerrysievert 3y ago
  great! we haven't had a dollar coin released in a while, let's deprecate the penny and put Lincoln on a dollar coin! he can be featured as part of a rotation of existing dollar coins over the next several years as we get them back into circulation.
  - hakfoo 3y ago
    They already put him on a $1 coin in 2010. They went through every president starting in the mid-2000s, but by the time they had gotten to him, we had plenty of $1 coins in the vaults, so the mintage was small and not-for-circulation-- about 97 million coins total. (By comparison, the 2000 Sacajawea type was over 1.2 billion)
  - from-nibly 3y ago
    Solving problems for whiners doesn't get them to stop whining.
leobg 3y ago
What’s the book? Sounds interesting

quickthrower2 3y ago

I think Spain and other countries had this kind of inflation when moving to the Euro.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
kolinko 3y ago
Exactly opposite. Accessing Euro-zone in 1999 has stabilised Spain's inflation at around 2-4%, before getting into Euro it was wild. https://tradingeconomics.com/spain/inflation-cpi https://tradingeconomics.com/spain/inflation-cpi From 1997 until 2021 it was at a stable 2-4%. 1985-1995 it was 5%-10%, and 1965-1985 it was 10-20%. Also, if you compare inflation of say Czech Republic, Slovakia, Poland, Estonia and Estonia (or any other comparable countries), you will have a difficult time spotting which ones of them have Euro and when it was adopted.
- ffgjgf1 3y ago
  It didn’t necessarily have much to do with the Euro. Inflation was high everywhere back in the 80s
zeroq 3y ago
Yes, in Germany Euro was dubbed Teuer-o ("teuer" meaning expensive). Basically, most prices were converted 1:1 from Deutsch Mark to Euro.

phyzome 3y ago

If you get rid of the penny and the nickel, then you may have trouble making change with just 10 and 25 cent pieces.

dr_dshiv 3y ago
The dime has got to go
- cduzz 3y ago
  Nah, it's the only one that makes sense. Cash based commerce should just be rounded to the 1/10th dollar not the 1/100th dollar; there's just no need for such precision. I'd just announce that while still legal tender, the penny, nickle, and quarter won't be minted any longer except in low volumes for collectors, and that cash transactions may be rounded down to the nearest 10th dollar if proper change is not available. IE a cup of coffee costing $4.17 would cost $4.10 if paying cash. I suspect vendors would just update the cost of everything to land on the 1/10th increment. I guess you may need to worry about people playing arbitrage games with metered things like gasoline, but even there it's probably just a marginal problem. Dime is a weird word; it doesn't convey that it's a tenth of a dollar, does it? [edited to add examples and digression on gasoline]
  - twoodfin 3y ago
    Gasoline isn’t a digression, it’s a great example of why removing precision from prices is a bad idea. Imagine you own a gas station. Your actual cost to fill your tanks is some multiple of the price you can charge per gallon. Requiring 10 cent-rounded prices kneecaps your ability to efficiently price your product. Flipping it around, if you think $1/10 increments are good enough for a gas station owner, why aren’t they good enough for Microsoft when its shares are traded? Decimalization in equity markets has been widely seen as a success because more precise prices communicate information about the relative interests of buyers and sellers more accurately. Given the predominance of digital transactions, it’s hard to argue that the transactional efficiency gains of less precise prices are worth the downsides.

cwmoore 3y ago

Worse than worthless--it requires underpaid arithmeticians!

PinkSheep 3y ago

In Russia the smallest coins are practically out of circulation, the price tags are still in x.99 but rounded at checkout.

fsckboy 3y ago
in most of the US, rounding at the checkout is against regulations as it throws off sales tax computations, even though it's only by a small amount.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- scld 3y ago
  a regulation requiring all pricing be post-tax would fix this pretty easily
- lostlogin 3y ago
  Couldn’t they round, then calculate tax? I found US sales tax baffling - I live somewhere that requires the display price to be the out-of-pocket amount.
  - jandrewrogers 3y ago
    The problem in the US is that the local sales tax is the sum of sales taxes created by several independent authorities. These authorities have varying geographic and subject matter scope, and can modify their sales tax on their own schedule. There are effectively thousands of independent sales tax jurisdictions in the US and the details of the computation in those jurisdictions churn regularly. By “late binding” the sales tax, they avoid having to churn the printed/published prices. I think there is also a policy view that taxes should not be hidden, that there is a public interest in making the public aware of precisely how much they are paying in taxes. Taxes that are baked into the price tend to be forgotten about by the public.
    - 3y ago

wharvle 3y ago

US should drop nickel and dime, go to 25¢, 50¢, and $1 coins. Nothing smaller than a quarter’s really worth screwing with, when dealing with physical currency. We’ve gone so long without dropping the penny that the dime’s nearly worthless, too.

imglorp 3y ago
One problem is sales tax. With a percentage calculation after a sale, uneven totals are the rule. It would be better if retail prices all included tax, rounded already.
- colanderman 3y ago
  That is true even with pennies. 5% of $4.99 is 24.95¢.
  - ssl-3 3y ago
    An rounding error is inevitable, but the question is: Should this potential error be multiplied by a factor of about 5, 10, or 25?
- lamontcg 3y ago
  prices should include all taxes and fees
  - lostlogin 3y ago
    > prices should include all taxes and fees Ever tried Airbnb? It makes the even the most relaxed human start to twitch.
- nerdbert 3y ago
  In many eurozone countries totals are rounded to the nearest 5 cents at the register if you pay cash. If you pay electronically then the exact amount is debited. There are some weirdos who decide how to pay based on whether or not the rounding is in their favor (e.g if the total ends in a 2 they'll pay cash but if it ends in a 3 they'll pay with card). But I don't think these amounts are enough for stores to care, especially considering how much they save by not having to deal with 1¢ and 2¢ coins.

gus_massa 3y ago

In Argentina we unofficially deprecate the coin/bill when they are worth approximately US$0.03 (don't ask how I made statistics). Now all prices are rounded to AR$10. The AR$20 and AR$50 bills are fine, but the AR$10 bills are very old and almost destroyed. The AR$10 are still used because otherwise it's difficult to pay some values. (I've not seen a AR$5 bill in the wild since January or February.) Soon we will round all prices to AR$50 and unofficially deprecate the AR$20 bills.

bscphil 3y ago
> Now all prices are rounded to AR$10 ... Soon we will round all prices to AR$50 A 5x change in what constitutes a negligible amount of money on a human-noticeable timeframe seems like a shocking rate of inflation. For reference, $3 here in the United States has about the same buying power that $1 did in 1982, 40 years ago. So the price of common consumer goods has only risen 3x in a time frame that represents more than half the average human lifespan in this country. Source: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=BJl0 https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=BJl0
- cableshaft 3y ago
  That's the reality of Argentina though: "Argentina's inflation rate will end the year at 210% and remain high in 2024, investment bank J.P. Morgan said in a note after the new government of libertarian President Javier Milei sharply devalued the peso currency in a bid to tackle a major economic crisis. The South American country's new government is battling to bring down the highest inflation rate since 1991, warning of possible hyperinflation without tough austerity measures. The government unveiled a package of "shock" economic measures earlier this week to overturn a deep fiscal deficit, and devalued the peso currency by over 50%, which it admits will in the short term fan inflation further. J.P. Morgan expects monthly inflation in December to be 25%, which would take the annual rate to around 210%. Prices rose 12.8% in November before the recent devaluation. The bank added that planned subsidy cuts and increases in taxes would accelerate prices in the first half of 2024." https://finance.yahoo.com/news/argentina-inflation-end-210-stay-155338956.html https://finance.yahoo.com/news/argentina-inflation-end-210-s...

hakfoo 3y ago

It's because there's one company that produces the weird bronze-plated-zinc blanks used for cents, and it resides in a politically powerful legislator's district. Since it also features Lincoln, the Illinois contingent will also cling to it for dear life.

jerrysievert 3y ago
great! we haven't had a dollar coin released in a while, let's deprecate the penny and put Lincoln on a dollar coin! he can be featured as part of a rotation of existing dollar coins over the next several years as we get them back into circulation.
- hakfoo 3y ago
  They already put him on a $1 coin in 2010. They went through every president starting in the mid-2000s, but by the time they had gotten to him, we had plenty of $1 coins in the vaults, so the mintage was small and not-for-circulation-- about 97 million coins total. (By comparison, the 2000 Sacajawea type was over 1.2 billion)
- from-nibly 3y ago
  Solving problems for whiners doesn't get them to stop whining.

leobg 3y ago

What’s the book? Sounds interesting