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Seems reasonable. What’s the downside other than someone losing a zinc contract?
by firesteelrain 2y ago
Seems reasonable. What’s the downside other than someone losing a zinc contract?
- dyauspitr 2y agoWell for one all prices along sales tax have to be rounded up or down to increments of $0.05 which is the profit margin for many things produced in high volume.
- scarface_74 2y agoMost transactions aren’t cash
- Jtsummers 2y agoThis doesn't remove them from circulation. If it did, though, card transactions, versus cash, could still use smaller increments.
- daggersandscars 2y agoRounding is generally done only for cash transactions (“cash rounding”). For all other payment types, the unrounded price is used. I wrote code for this a long time ago when cash was still a major form of payment in a country that got rid of sub 0.05 coins. There were various rules to try to ensure neither the seller or buyer always benefited. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cash_rounding https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cash_rounding
- bdhcuidbebe 2y agoThe rounding up will be done by the merchant when he updstes the prices, and the buyer will always lose. No code will save you here.
- digitalPhonix 2y agoHow? If you price something at $1.03 so that it rounds up to $1.05, someone who buys two will get it rounded down to $2.05
- jaffa2 2y agoNo the price will become 1.05 and when customer buys 2 it will be 2.10 not 2.05
- mcv 2y agoI prefer if shops do that (or actually the more common €2 instead of the deceptive €1.99 or 1.95), but most shops don't round their prices.
- danudey 2y agoI recall some major US chain (TJ Maxx? JC Penney? Target? Something?) that decided to start pitching some kind of 'honest pricing' scheme, where all their stuff was just rounded up, so instead of $24.99 it would be priced at $25 flat. A noble goal, but it apparently backfired on them spectacularly because of the same reason why retailers did that in the first place.
- dpkirchner 2y agoIt was JC Penney, however they went beyond merely rounding prices. They ditched sales and coupons, which are unfortunately very popular, and that is often cited as the reason the "fair and square" plan failed.
- mcv 2y agoDid they replace the sales and coupons with simply lower prices across the board? Because that would make it more attractive to buy there. If not, it's a price increase.
- sgerenser 2y agoYes, but the lower prices across the board were close to the average selling price before, not the best price you used to be able to get using a coupon for an item on sale. Therefore deal hunters no longer wanted to shop there. The price-insensitive folks still did, but they were the ones who used to pay full price and subsidize the deal hunters, and now they were getting a lower price than before. Thus it was a money losing strategy for the company.
- firesteelrain 2y agoI think GP is saying that, when paying with cash, because there is no option for sub-5c prices, the only option is to round to the nearest 5c. If price is $1.03 then for cash customers, the price has to become $1.05. If paying debit or credit card then the price can stay $1.03 because there is no cost for computing pennies. The optics of the change is that it does cost more for the consumer if paying cash and if you have a society that wants to push more people to digital transactions then this is how you start to do it along with the optics and ramifications that go with it.
- scarface_74 2y agoThe general practice is to round up or down to the nearest unit when paying cash. That means if you only have nickels, you either round up or down to the nearest 5 cents. It should average out. Absolutely no one is getting rich off of this. The entire world is already moving to digital currencies and even if you do everything with cash, rounding up and down to the nearest nickel - per total transaction is not going to make a dent in anyone’s budget - even the poorest people. If you make 4 cash transactions a day and your total transactions are always rounded up, you’re going to be out of $3.60 a month and that’s the worse case.
- rstuart4133 2y agoI come from a country that has rounding. The unrounded price always shown on the shelf, and is what you pay unless it's cash. If you do pay cash, it's not the item's price that's rounded, it's the total. That's important because the amount being rounded is essentially random, so the shop can't chose a price that would be rounded in one direction. In a $10 purchase using 0.05 rounding the maximum difference amounts to 0.4%, but is usually 0.2% or less. It's so small it could be used as an advertising gimmick, and consequently some retailers chose to always round down. The remainder went with rounding to the nearest with the lowest value winning in a tie. I do not remember a single one always rounding up. That would be a customer relations disaster.
- krapp 2y agoWe're talking about the US. We'll just round everything up because it's simpler and blame it on communists or the wokes or something.
- duskwuff 2y agoIf you're rounding to 0.05, you don't even need to break ties - any price ending in an integer number of cents can be rounded fairly to the nearest 0.05, e.g. 1.00 -> already round 1.01, 1.02 -> round down to 1.00 1.03, 1.04 -> round up to 1.05 1.05 -> already round 1.06, 1.07 -> round down to 1.05 1.08, 1.09 -> round up to 1.10 1.10 -> already round
- 1659447091 2y agoTake a penny, leave a penny https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Take_a_penny%2C_leave_a_penny https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Take_a_penny%2C_leave_a_penny
- firesteelrain 2y agoBut we didn’t ban the penny, just stop making them for a while because plenty in circulation.
- trillic 2y agoIf I buy 10,000 $0.01 screws, they aren’t all the sudden going to charge $0.05 cents for a screw…
- pentel-0_5 2y agoReprogramming of cash registers.
- danudey 2y agoCanadian here: we don't reprogram cash registers. They tell the exact amount and then we're charged either the exact amount (via card) or a rounded-off amount (if paying cash). FWIW, 86% of "total payment volume" in Canada was digital, and 53% of transactions were contactless. If that's not the case in the US, it may be more of an adjustment.
- delfinom 2y agoYea american POS systems will have to get the rounding off added because ultimately cashiers will get grilled if their registers are off at the end of day.
- dghlsakjg 2y agoRegisters are always off at the end of the day everywhere I've worked retail. I even worked as a bank teller and it wasn't uncommon for drawers to be out small amounts.
- rascul 2y agoFrom what I recall when I worked retail, nobody cared until the difference was something like 2% or so. Then someone might care, or might not.
- pentel-0_5 2y agoIt was always easy to keep a perfect running balance when the cashier can make change accurately and when there was a penny/nickel jar because customers might not have had exact change. It's only the normalization of sloppiness, or sometimes theft, of cashiers that causes shrinkage in reconciliation. It doesn't just magically happen and isn't a foregone conclusion.
- scarab92 2y agoWe should get rid of the Nickle as well. It also costs 3x it's face value to produce, and is also effectively worthless. Many other countries have 10c or 20c as their smallest denomination.
- Xinti 2y agoAnd we aren't those countries.
- danudey 2y agoNot sure what your point is. "Concepts that have been proven in other countries are irrelevant here"? Or just "We have nothing to learn from what others have done and should start every idea from scratch"?
- collingreen 2y agoYour snarky summaries are actually extremely close to the sentiment I hear a lot. A shocking amount of "political" thinking in the us that I've been involved with STARTS with "we're the best at everything" and then explores things to do from there We collectively have this fragile ego that would rather feel tough and "self made" rather than admit any kind of deficit compared to others, even at the expense of our own growth. It reminds me of a ceo I used to work for that I flippantly described as happier to feel like a big fish in a small pond than to put his ego to the side in exchange for the ability to improve and expand the business.
- TylerE 2y agoMaybe we should try, as a nation, to stop being so intensely stupid and close minded.
- toast0 2y agoPresumably we could come up with a reformulated nickel that is much less costly to produce. It hasn't been changed outside of war issues in a long time. The reformulated penny didn't take too long to be accepted. A new nickel would probably be accepted well too.
- mcv 2y agoEasily the most sensible thing he's done. Lots of countries have done away with low value coins, and it's not like they're vital for payment. Nothing costs mere cents anymore.
- ericjmorey 2y ago[flagged]
- cozzyd 2y agoWithout someone telling me, I wouldn't have necessarily assumed this was unconstitutional.
- mcv 2y agoI also wasn't aware that the constitution specified that pennies need to exist. I can totally understand if getting rid of pennies takes a bit more work than an edict by a president, but then that needs to be done. It's still a sensible thing to do.
- firesteelrain 2y agoI don’t think they are killing the penny just stop making them for a while.
- mmcwilliams 2y agoIn this case it would be the fact that the order is unconstitutional.
- firesteelrain 2y agoHow is it unconstitutional?
- b0in 2y agoThe "coinage clause" of the Constitution. https://constitution.findlaw.com/article1/annotation37.html https://constitution.findlaw.com/article1/annotation37.html > Article I, Section 8, Clause 5 is known as the coinage clause. It gives Congress the exclusive power to coin money. The Supreme Court has also interpreted clause 5 as giving Congress the sole authority to regulate every aspect of United States currency. That supreme court interpretation is from 1820 so it's both "settled law" and "an outdated ruling", depending on who you ask.
- cheeseomlit 2y agoDoesnt that make the fed unconstitutional as well?
- NoGravitas 2y agoNo, but only because it was officially created by act of Congress: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Reserve_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Reserve_Act
- firesteelrain 2y agoThis doesn't eliminate the penny, just pausing production of it. If he had unilaterally declared the penny no longer valuable then that would be unconstitional and require an act of congress
- Salgat 2y ago