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In the US, there are other weird complications if prices were rounded to the nearest nickel. One that is not mentioned much is that some large businesses have u
by jandrewrogers 3y ago
In the US, there are other weird complications if prices were rounded to the nearest nickel. One that is not mentioned much is that some large businesses have used the last digit of the price to encode metadata for decades. It is the equivalent of a tagged pointer in software, except the extra bits are buried in the least significant digit of the price, precisely because changing the value by a couple cents was below the pricing noise floor. I have to imagine quantizing prices to the nearest nickel would create Y2K-like software problems for some companies which makes them an interested party in maintaining the status quo.
- reaperman 3y agoYou don't have to quantize the unit price to the smallest coin, only the total final purchase amount. Gasoline is typically priced at $x.xx9/gallon, with the "unit" ending in 9/10th's of one penny, and this doesn't break anything, they just use bankers rounding before calculating the final payment amount. Similarly, sales taxes often result in a fractional penny as well, which again gets floor() or bankers_rounding().