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I know you're referencing more than pennies, but to speak to pennies, I find the current rounding noise in the US to be weird. Likely, it's just more of the me
by b112 1y ago
I know you're referencing more than pennies, but to speak to pennies, I find the current rounding noise in the US to be weird. Likely, it's just more of the media, talking heads, and youtube personalities trying to turn a nothing into something, story.
Back when we did it in Canada, I don't recall a single person I knew concerned about penny rounding. Everyone was sick of pennies. No one cared. Everyone was happy. And the math seems fair enough:
https://www.budget.canada.ca/2012/themes/theme2-info-eng.html https://www.budget.canada.ca/2012/themes/theme2-info-eng.htm...
Basically, if something is $1.01 or $1.02, you round down. If it's $1.03 or $1.04, you round up. Rounding is to be applied after all taxes are paid, etc.
Of course, there was also central guidance and, well, everyone just followed it. It's called "having a society".
People blathering on about stores fixing the rounding are morons, there's no way to do so if you buy more than one item. No one gets ripped off with the above method. In the end, it just works out.
And really, who cares?! It's a penny.
- ryanmcbride 1y agoRounding is such a weird boogeyman to me because people are like "the companies are just going to use it to get more money from the customers" but, they're doing that anyway. They don't need this excuse to raise prices they'll just do it anyway. Same thing when people complain that raising minimum wage will increase prices, meanwhile prices have increased for 50 years completely separate from wages. They don't need the excuse to raise prices they're just gonna do it anyway. If they want companies to not raise prices the only answer is regulation, but regulation is communism and therefore bad. I'm so god damn tired.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- 542458 1y ago> If they want companies to not raise prices the only answer is regulation Or competition. Consumer electronics are much cheaper than they were in the past, and that's not because of regulation. (To be clear, I'm not saying that regulation is wrong or anything, I'm saying that "use regulation to lower prices" and "remove barriers to competition to lower prices" are both tools in the toolbox.
- ryanmcbride 1y agoSince I'm already doing armchair stuff I'll just say that there's an argument to be made that consumer electronics HAVE to be cheaper due to the extremely inflated cost of essentials right now, which is the result of lack of regulation. It's not the system regulating itself it's just more bottom line chasing.
- metabagel 1y agoRight. Most gas stations list prices ending in 9/10 of a cent.
- emodendroket 1y agoLet's face it, these arguments are simply post hoc rationalizations. If the proposal were instead to introduce a "milli" coin people would find some way that meant you were getting ripped off too.
- simpleguitar 1y agoAs the article points out, there are laws that say people who pay via SNAP debit cards "cannot be charged more than others". If cash payments are rounded down, but debit card payments aren't, they are in violation of state law. The article also points out that rollback of pennies in Canada and other places were planned, addressing these kinds of issues. USA is doing it with no such planning.
- internetter 1y agoCan you not argue that the average is the same and thus the law isn’t violated?
- immibis 1y agoDoes the law say the average price must be the same, or does it say the price must be the same? Reality: the supermarket does it the common sense way, and never gets sued, but if they do get sued, the outcome is "you must now refund 2 cents from every SNAP transaction you ever did"
- hcknwscommenter 1y agoVery unlikely that would happen. The way similar issues have been dealt with in the past is that settlement is negotiated to something "reasonable" (at least arguably so) and administrable. Probably the settlement amount would just go to a fund that the state would then distribute according to its priorities.
- maxerickson 1y agoIt's probably the case that the real risk is being suspended from SNAP for failing to comply with their rules.
- dragonwriter 1y agoNo, because the law applies to individual transactions, not averages.
- 1y ago
- jacobgkau 1y ago> Basically, if something is $1.01 or $1.02, you round down. If it's $1.03 or $1.04, you round up. So everything's going to be $1.03 or $1.04. Not sure why you think retailers (or any sellers) would ever, ever, ever let this play into customers' advantage. But apparently pointing out that obvious truth makes me a "moron," because you can think of some clever ways to get around it that retailers surely won't work around.
- bigfishrunning 1y agobut then you buy 2 things, and it's $2.06. round down! or you buy 4 and it's $4.12. round down! it'll come out in the wash. there are much bigger things to worry about.
- jacobgkau 1y agoYou attempt that at my store. To help ensure my business is sustainable in these hard times (/s), I'm imposing a "multi-item order" fee at my store. Now what?
- chokolad 1y agoWhat's stopping you from doing it now ?
- jacobgkau 1y agoThere's not as much incentive to right now, because I don't have an excuse to round up prices, and customers don't have a case for rounding down prices. This discussion's about the possible effects of rounding, not about whether businesses are in control of their prices.
- dpark 1y ago> There's not as much incentive to right now Yeah, because stores don’t have an incentive to raise prices usually…
- mikkupikku 1y agoMedia is just doing media things, ignore them. Nobody I know has even mentioned the penny thing, let alone expressed a strong opinion about it. From my perspective I have seen zero evidence of the American public caring one iota.
- quantified 1y agoWhen the US attempted to transition to the metric system, gas stations raised their prices per unit volume and the American consumer was convinced that the metric system was bad. I have family that think metric is bad because some fringe people thought there should be 10 hours in a day and 100 minutes in an hour, also something like 10 months a year, and the whole thing is bad because some awkward ideas were floated. Here, it's a question of resolution, with a proven history that transitions screw the consumer, though maybe it won't be so. We're ok with arbitrary hundredths of a dollar, why were we not at thousandths? The American half cent disappeared a long time ago. You still need to include the cents in a tax bill that runs into the millions of dollars. It's just an awkward stage in inflation. Eventually a US dollar will be worth what a Zimbabwean dollar was, and we won't have $100 bills anymore.
- ekelsen 1y agoDuring the French Revolution, they tried to make a right angle have 100 degrees and even recomputed all new trig tables for this new standard. It obviously did not catch on :) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gradian https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gradian
- rurp 1y agoThe Indiana pi bill mandated certain mathematical values be changed to the wrong value. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indiana_pi_bill https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indiana_pi_bill
- JumpCrisscross 1y ago“The bill, written by a physician and an amateur mathematician, never became law.”
- onraglanroad 1y agoThere's no reason you can't have 400 degrees in a circle and therefore 100 for a right angle. It's a degree scale: you can choose any number you want.
- BrenBarn 1y ago> It's called "having a society". That must be nice.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- kube-system 1y agoThere are already stores in the US that are rounding their transactions because of the penny shortage that is already happening. Many are just simply rounding all transactions down to the nearest $0.05.
- verelo 1y agoGrowing up in Australia 1 cent pieces were gone before i knew what money was. Coming to Canada in 2009 on a trip, i was shocked to see them. They were annoying and instantly drove me crazy, but i felt bad throwing them out. I threw them out anyway, helping reduce inflation
- pwg 1y ago> Likely, it's just more of the media, talking heads, and youtube personalities trying to turn a nothing into something, story. It's not. Some US states have laws on the books that make it illegal for retailers to round up. The turmoil is that if the retailer can only round down to the nearest five cents, then they stand to lose from one to four cents per cash sale for any sale that is not a multiple of five cents. Add those one to four cent losses up over a large enough number of transactions and the retailer stands to lose a considerable sum over the course of a year. And many retail shops already operate with thin margins anyway, so the loss from "always round down" could erase whatever thin margins some shops already operate under.
- IncreasePosts 1y agoThey can add a "total not divisible by 5" fee, ranging from 1 to 4 cents
- gus_massa 1y agoThe other direction avoids a lot of stupid complains. Nobody will complain if the shop gives them a $0.04 gift.
- chaboud 1y agoThe shop will. It can be a lot of money in aggregate. It also creates really pathological purchasing incentives, where spreading out large purchases over several small purchases can yield significant savings for the purchaser. There's one exceedingly simple answer: Keep the penny (possibly a new one that is cheaper to make). We're basically breaking into jail on this one, creating more problems than we're solving.
- gus_massa 1y agoHi from Argentina! Here we unofficially deprecated the AR$10, AR$20 and AR$50 bill, so the smallest one is the AR$100 bill (~US$0.07). Every price include taxes. What are they selling? Candies one by one? Inside the candy store everything is rounded to a multiple of AR$100. A single candy is AR$100. You many get an offer of 3 candies for AR$200, or 2 small candies for AR$100, or other fancy candies in packages of 13 for AR$1000. Everything else is more expensive, like AR$700 or more, but all multiples of AR$100. The photocopy shop near my home has a copy for AR$120. They usually sell many copies, so a 20% is relevant. They have a stash of AR$20, but it's probably the only shop nearby. I also collect the AR$20 just to pay the photocopies, just to be nice to avoid finishing their stash and also because I don't know what to do with the AR$20. I guess a single apple is probably a problem. It cost like AR$400-AR$500 depending on the weight. Someone very smart can learn to choose and apple with the exact weight to get a AR$499 apple and pay AR$400 :) Luckily inflation changes the price so it's difficult to learn. Also AR$499 will be illegaly rounded to AR$500. And most people will buy more than 1 apple, let's say that the total is AR$10,000 and AR$100 is only a 1% that is lower than the spoilage of rotten fruit.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- hinkley 1y agoI think people underestimate how many stores used to set prices to avoid pennies. When I was a kid it was frequent. Goose the price so cost + tax rounded to the nearest nickel. But now everything is 23.99 or sometimes 23.95, and they use the pennies place to denote clearance items. Like 19.94 or 3.98.
- pge 1y agoThere’s a reason for this. Prices that force cashiers to make change force them to run the transaction through the cash register so it is recorded, and the amount in the register can be checked at the end of a day or shift to detect theft. If prices are round numbers, such as $1, the cashier can pocket the payment.
- why_at 1y agoI don't get it. Why couldn't a cashier pocket $1.99?
- flymasterv 1y agoBecause they were handed $2 and have to get the change out of the register.
- why_at 1y agoOk, but if the cashier is stealing they could just have change in their pocket? I'm skeptical that preventing theft is the reason for these prices rather than the psychological trick of looking cheaper.
- hinkley 1y agoNow that you mention it, there’s quite a lot of overlap between family owned and this pricing to my recollection. If your wife is stealing from the till that’s very different from some high school guy you hired.
- gblargg 1y agoThings have always been rounded (tax). There's just a change in what multiple it's rounded to.
- Thrymr 1y agoAnd in inflation-adjusted terms, rounding to the nearest nickel now is about as significant as rounding to the nearest penny was in 1978.
- harikb 1y agoWatch 'Pop' (Malcome McDowell) in Son of a Critch :) . I don't remember the episode/season.... where he goes on and on about some $1 bill that will be decommissioned and goes to the bank to get some...
- HWR_14 1y agoI'd be amazed if prices weren't engineered so they rounded up far more often than down.
- wasabi991011 1y agoIs that even remotely possible? You'd have to ensure a positive expectation value over not only every item, but every combination of items a consumer could by. You could focus only on the most likely possible orders (assuming you have the data, I don't know how many stores actually track combination of items bought), but it's not obvious to me that there's a tractable top n most likely orders that gives a reasonable enough estimate of expectation value. On top of that, you would be interfering with whatever system you already have that sets the cents of each item (whether marketing with 99¢, or % discounts, or a system that tracks that 97¢ means lowest sale, etc).
- babypuncher 1y agoAnd the reality is that with most price tags ending in .99, retailers will actually round down to .95 to preserve the psychological benefit of not crossing a dollar barrier.
- nightshift1 1y agowe should have converted everything to integers.
- dennis_jeeves2 1y agoThis infact is the original concept of the penny.
- ourmandave 1y agoHave you never seen the documentary Office Space where penny rounding goes terribly wrong?! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NnPBSy5FsOc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NnPBSy5FsOc
- OJFord 1y agoBut it's simple to fix: keep all values representable. So get rid of 2c if you have them, or 5, but keep the 1. Since we got rid of the half penny in the UK there simply isn't half penny pricing. (I do remember 2-for-a-penny sweets though, but they'd probably be at least 5p each now anyway.)
- conductr 1y agoOf course you’re absolutely right and the whole thing just illustrates how dysfunctional the US is. I mean, this edict originated in a tweet or whatever it’s called now. Even after months, nobody could be bothered to think about how to properly execute it that solves the various concerns. We really can’t solve the simplest of problems any longer our politicians just cause noise with no signal and just actively undermine everything they touch. Not even talking specifically about the person you might think I am, this is a systemic issue.
- julianlam 1y agoCanadian here. Honestly, the hardest part about Canada dropping the penny is that sometimes you'll go someplace cool and see one of those penny rolling machines, and... um... there are no more pennies. But they usually have a little bowl of bronze slugs (or old pennies) just for the machines now.
- stevage 1y agoKind of emblematic of the issue of Americans not looking to other countries to see what works and what doesn't.
- epolanski 1y ago+1 We getting rid in Europe of 1 and 2 cents which are more valuables than pennies and nobody gives two damns. Even roundings in Italy, by law, now are 5 cent based: meaning you can't have a bill that ends with 5 cents it has to get rounded to the nearest multiple of ten cents. Seriously, nobody cares.
- benchly 1y agoI've thought on this as someone who travels between the US and Canada a lot, and the scene about the embezzlement scheme from Office Space often comes to mind (the "Pennies for everyone" tray: https://getyarn.io/yarn-clip/ea64c5fd-3c6d-46f9-b729-beef7b0f6f9f https://getyarn.io/yarn-clip/ea64c5fd-3c6d-46f9-b729-beef7b0...) For me, it's not about the pennies I'm losing. You're right, I don't care about them and the end of their minting doesn't mean much to me at all. No, it's about who is getting the pennies I'm losing. Let's say Nestle, a company I loath, has a box of instant noodles for $0.99 USD. Our hypothetical noodles are very popular, so everyone in the US tends to buy them. Suddenly, pennies go away. Nestle thinks "hmm, so our customers were already paying $0.99, might as well just bump the price up to $1.00, nobody will care." And they'd be correct. As a typical consumer, I'd pay $1.00 for something that I was just paying $0.99 for because the difference is negligible to me. But if everyone in the US buys them for lunch, that's not a negligible difference to Nestle. That's nearly $3,500,000 USD in extra revenue that week. If the consumer behavior remains consistent, that's an extra $182,000,000 USD per year. Maybe that seems like small potatoes compared to what Nestle grosses annually on a global scale, but even the richest of companies can do A LOT with that much extra cash. But of course, that is an extreme and overly simplified example. However, it illustrates the idea that while the individual will not really feel the change, the collectives or corporations will. I'm not an economics expert by any stretch of the imagination, but one thing I'm fairly sure about is when something like this type of change happens, the corporations are unchallenged at finding ways to exploit it, which usually translates to more money going up to them and less coming back down to the individual.
- nayuki 1y ago> box of instant noodles for $0.99 USD If you as a consumer care about rounding, then just buy three of them: 3× $0.99 = $2.97, which rounds down to $2.95 USD, netting you a $0.02 bonus (the maximum possible). The rounding is done at the end of the transaction, not per item. I speak from experience in Canada - it is indeed possible to execute this transaction in real life. And basic food items have no sales tax, so the price you see on the shelf is the price that you pay at checkout. It is 100% realistic to go into a food store, grab 3 items at $0.99 CAD each, and pay $2.95 CAD in cash. Because you as a consumer has control over the transaction, I find any arguments against rounding to be ridiculous.
- sumtechguy 1y agoAlso to add we are already rounding. When you do taxes it does not come out to a full penny. There is a fraction of a penny (hi there office space and superman 3). That fraction is already rounded. Also many transactions are with credit cards. Those can just keep going the way they are and no rounding needed.
- dennis_jeeves2 1y ago> Of course, there was also central guidance and, well, everyone just followed it. It's called "having a society". Nice concept.
- smallmouth 1y agoHa! There'll be no rounding down.
- refurb 1y agoI think the issue is you’re confusing social media comments with broad, overall opinions. I’d bet most Americans don’t even know they are getting rid of the penny. Or if they saw it on the news, they forgot about it a day later. It ranks pretty low on general concerns. Social media commentary about the issue are a tiny minority - first people need to come across the topic, then they need to muster up the effort to actually comment. People who don’t care don’t comment. I see this mistake with a lot of people. Issues they think are top of mind across people aren’t even known by the vast majority.