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The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
bydevslash0 ( 4203435 ) writes:
Make deceiving marketing prices ending in .99 illegal and the problem will go away.
byPowercntrl ( 458442 ) writes:
Make deceiving marketing prices ending in .99 illegal and the problem will go away.
I don't know if you've just been up late or haven't yet had your morning coffee, but when you're buying several items at a store the total is the sum of your goods and at least in most places in the USA, plus applicable sales tax. So, unless you're planning on passing a law to fundamentally rework basic arithmetic, your idea isn't going to work.
bydevslash0 ( 4203435 ) writes:
It surely feels like you haven't had your own coffee, yeah...
I was talking about individual item prices.
In other news, if you add two items with a price ending in 0.99 you end up with 0.98. By outlawing prices ending in 0.99 you not only virtually eliminate the penny from circulation - you also reduce the demand for 2p coins via the knock-on effect.
byPowercntrl ( 458442 ) writes:
I'm gonna turn this over to ChatGPT because you're not getting it:
0 and 5 are the only acceptable least significant digits for item prices if you want to ensure that the total price is never subject to rounding when any combination of items is purchased after eliminating the penny.
Explanation:
Rounding Rule: If pennies are eliminated, prices must be rounded to the nearest 5 cents when paying with cash.
Addition of Multiple Items: To avoid rounding, the total of any combination of items must always end in 0 or
bydevslash0 ( 4203435 ) writes:
See, you misinterpreted what I was trying to say in the first place. I didn't say "eliminate the penny". I said "eliminate marketing prices ending in .99". The problem is not the existence of the penny but it's overuse so the message I was trying to send was "Eliminate marketing product prices ending in .99 and you won't need to mint more 1c coins.". But of course your "smart" AI agent wasn't smart enough to deduce that from the context.
byPowercntrl ( 458442 ) writes:
"Eliminate marketing product prices ending in .99 and you won't need to mint more 1c coins."
The need for replacement pennies is because people tend not to circulate them. They're given as change to people paying in cash (usually entirely in paper denominations), then they end up tossed in jars and shoeboxes at home, and ultimately forgotten about. If the same people who received pennies actually brought them back to the stores and used them when their totals ended in least-significant digit other than 0 or 5, there'd be substantially less demand on replacement pennies from the mint.
The penny shortfall isn't caused by $x.99 prices (which again, sales tax renders a moot point in 45 of the 50 states), it's caused by people hoarding pennies for no good reason.
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byMacMann ( 7518492 ) writes:
Those pennies will not be "hoarded" forever. They return to the bank as people take their peanut butter jars full of pennies to the bank, or they put a fistful of pennies in a bucket for charities around Thanksgiving and Christmas. I know people that do both, taking pennies they collected to a bank or handing them off to a charity "penny drive".
Pennies circulate just fine, especially in states like Illinois that have some connection to the coin and have rules that require vending machines, parking meters,
bysarren1901 ( 5415506 ) writes:
The smart ones take those coins to all the self checkouts and pay for their orders. You go to the grocery store frequently, so toss a handful of coins into a plastic bag and carry it in your pocket. Ring up your order and then you can use all that change to lower your bill. No fees.
bytburkhol ( 121842 ) writes:
I guess you haven't seen any of the projects where people use pennies to cover tables or even whole floors with pennies. https://www.instructables.com/... [instructables.com]
bydrinkypoo ( 153816 ) writes:
The need for replacement pennies is caused by having pennies.
There have been calls to eliminate them for decades, so it's not like this is some new Trump or DOGE idea. It's low hanging fruit that should have been plucked long ago, but corporatism always wins in our government and the zinc industry has "lobbied" (bribed) it to keep them because it's a huge source of their profits.
This would be a great move if it was to be done a) legally and b) with consideration for its disruption to businesses, neither of which is true here. But there's no justification for keeping pennies because nothing is cheaper than a nickel any more. It's hard to even find a vending machine which takes those, so maybe we should get rid of nickels too, but one step at a time please.
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byjonadab ( 583620 ) writes:
Yes, it's time to get rid of nickels too; they cost more to mint than they're worth, and they're excessivly bulky to carry around relative to their value. If the sizes of the dime and nickel were reversed, it would be much more arguable; but the dime is small because it was originally the smallest coin made of silver, and changing the sizes would annoy a lot of people for no very good reason (which is why it has never happened, even though silver hasn't been used in circulating coins for decades). So it's
byRegistered Coward v2 ( 447531 ) writes:
The penny shortfall isn't caused by $x.99 prices (which again, sales tax renders a moot point in 45 of the 50 states), it's caused by people hoarding pennies for no good reason.
Yea, I'm the guy you're behind in line that's searching for 3 pennies to pay a $4.03 tab...
bye3m4n ( 947977 ) writes:
Just round up to the nearest nickel. I remember back in 89 pulling into Dubai. They had just eliminated fractions of the durham. Everything was paper except the 1 durham coin which was about twice the mass of a quarter. It would take some doing but in theory tax could be something the merchant could include in the price and adjust their prices accordingly. Theres a dive bar down the street that rolls the tax price into the cost. A burger is a flat $11. During happy hour some beers are just $3. They reverse
byjonadab ( 583620 ) writes:
Hoarding is the wrong word. People aren't hoarding pennies, as if they're some kind of treasure. They're just not bothering to carry them, because it's a hassle, because they represent such a tiny amount of money that it's not worth bothering with them. Even *children* mostly don't bother with pennies any more. They fish through their parents' coin jars taking the silver-colored ones that have actual value, leaving the pennies behind. In fact, the first time I saw a kid do that, was in the mid nineties
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