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Many are reporting this as if failing to mint new pennies each year is going to produce some kind of shortage. There are billions of pennies sitting in drawers
by didgetmaster 11mo ago
Many are reporting this as if failing to mint new pennies each year is going to produce some kind of shortage. There are billions of pennies sitting in drawers or jars in homes across the nation (I certainly have one with about a thousand pennies in it).
I doubt anyone who needs a penny will be unable to find one within the next 100 years.
- JohnFen 11mo agoMost of the stores in my area have started requiring people to pay with exact change or by card because they can't get pennies to make change. Personally, I think stores should just start setting prices to avoid the need for pennies, but that would be too easy, I guess.
- deleted 11mo ago[deleted]
- knollimar 11mo agoIf your sales tax rate is 8.875%, what do you price a banana at to avoid change?
- randerson 11mo agoThis problem is easily solved in countries that use VAT
- knollimar 11mo agoIt really isn't; it's just acceptable to accumulate this rounding error I'm implying in those countries. Which is fine, but should be acknowledged.
- carlosjobim 11mo agoYou price it including sales tax. Sticker price is final price.
- rufus_foreman 11mo agoIf someone is buying a banana for resale, or buying with WIC or SNAP benefits (among other things), they would not owe sales tax. So if the price included sales tax, the sticker price would not be the final price. You do not know the final price until you know how they are paying for it, what they are using it for, and when they are buying it (among other things). Falsehoods programmers believe about sales tax (among other things).
- carlosjobim 11mo agoThen that discount can be deducted by the cash register when it's time to pay.
- knollimar 11mo agothis is me preempting: yes I know I picked a bad example since produce isn't often taxed. Assume it's a prepackaged organic banana.
- micromacrofoot 11mo ago$10
- ianferrel 11mo agoSetting prices to avoid the need for pennies is probably technically challenging given the combination of requirements to post prices and sales taxes that don't always round the same way. If the effective tax rate is 7.432%, you can price single items so that the price plus tax ends up in a multiple of $0.05, but if you get a purchase with multiple items, you either need to round somewhere or post prices that are like $9.346263437.
- thayne 11mo agosales tax should be charged per item, not for the total transaction, so that it's possible to list prices that include the sales tax.
- MrZander 11mo agoSales tax varies by state/county/city. It is generally not cost-effective to have each individual store label all their products with local sales taxes applied.
- ryandrake 11mo agoI see this excuse all the time, but why not? This calculation does not need to happen more often than the product prices are adjusted. There's no difference in effort between labeling something "$5.52+tax" and labeling it "$6".
- MrZander 11mo agoThe difference is where the product is labeled. Is it labeled nationally like Arizona Iced Tea? Is it labeled at a regional bottling facility? Or is it labeled at the store itself? And what about when tax rates change, you gonna go pull all the labels off everything in the whole store and update them? Most of this could be resolved by not putting the prices on the products themselves, but that isn't as good of an experience for the shopper.
- 11mo ago
- jandrewrogers 11mo agoIt isn't that simple. There are stacked tax jurisdictions that can change their fraction of the tax independently. Some of those taxes are conditional at point-of-sale so the exact rate varies from customer to customer. It is a mess but also not easy to unwind or patch over.
- c22 11mo agoThere's a cash-heavy business I work with that's already having a hard time sourcing the pennies they need. I guess they're all in a jar under your desk.
- MangoToupe 11mo agoI have a hard time believing any business relies on access to Pennies when all cash transactions can be rounded to a nickel in some way amenable to both parties. I imagine most customers just don’t give a damn.
- c22 11mo agoI'm pretty sure they're considering doing this, but I don't know what all the pros and cons or complexities are.
- didgetmaster 11mo agoIt seems to me that if there was truly a shortage of pennies, banks could offer to pay 2 cents for every penny someone turned in (still far cheaper than minting a new one) and enough people would pull out their penny jars and cash them in.
- allknowingfrog 11mo agoThat...actually seems economically sound, but it's also a strong argument for the idea that pennies are effectively worthless.
- c22 11mo agoNow we've unlocked a new lucrative business model where we can cut the customer out entirely! Simply buy pennies from the bank on the dollar and sell them back for 100% profit...
- mrweasel 11mo agoI don't know how accurate this is, but someone posted on Reddit some Burger King is already having a hard time getting pennies from their bank: https://old.reddit.com/r/mildlyinteresting/comments/1opdlm2/local_burger_king_no_longer_uses_pennies/ https://old.reddit.com/r/mildlyinteresting/comments/1opdlm2/...
- embedding-shape 11mo ago> I doubt anyone who needs a penny will be unable to find one within the next 100 years. Based on my experience with the universe, this ability of being able to find something whenever you need it, only happens until you start expecting it and when you really need it, you're not gonna be able to find it anywhere. Maybe "Murphy's law" isn't what I'm looking for but something similar? For when what you really need is no longer there, universe always works against you? Can't recall.
- johnisgood 11mo agoSelective attention or confirmation bias with a hint of cosmic irony?
- cindyllm 11mo ago[dead]