It’s really not a big deal. Canada did this ages ago and the world didn’t explode.
But Canadian money isn’t real money
yeah, we’re all a little loony up here
Proof! Canadian quarter in a vending machine: rejected!
Completely fake money! (/s obv. Border states often interchange Canadian/US currency, vending machines reject currency they don’t know.)
Lots of those Canadian quarters floating around in FL when we lived there.
I mean… it’s been a while since I’ve even seen one
Canada got rid of the penny 12 years ago. Hardly raised an eyebrow.
I love your polymer notes. Makes our greenbacks look like antiques.
half of them are still circulating in the U.S.
Probably cause Canadians aren’t weird about their currency.
All Canadian bills keep getting redesigned.
one time they made the 10$ bill vertical and no one gave a shit
And they put a black woman on it. Ooooooo scary!
I love the vertical $10 bill.
We Americans do occasionally get the dollar coin redesigned. Sometimes our leaders are forward thinking and recognize important historical figures. I have a few with Sacajawea on it.
I want the next one to be rotated, but still in portrait. Giant black bars on the sides, and the print is tiny. Like full screening a badly edited video.
So what happens when someone pays cash at the supermarket? Who rounds up?
I saw an interview with an economist years ago where he said that if we just followed the accepted rules of rounding (1-4 rounds to 0, 5-10 rounds to 10) then it would work out about the same. In reality I’m sure companies would just pocket the extra money
They already do with sales tax. ( If the tax works out to a fraction of a cent, almost every register or POS system will round up…it’s a tiny amount per transaction, but it does happen and adds up over daily, weekly and monthly transactions)
I write POS software, and have written tax calculations that cover about 30 states, and several CA provinces.
While we do have to round (always up) when calculating sales tax, there’s no way for the business to figure out how much that rounding would be, since it’s just added to the tax collected.
And in all states that I’ve worked with, a business has to pay what they collected (even if they over collect), and can’t just calculate a percentage of total sales (since many states have tax tables, rounding rules, or 3-4 decimal tax rates, and not a flat percentage tax).
So it’s actually the government that gets the benefit of the rounding.
Didn’t know that was the case, thanks for correcting me.
You were right about the rounding / keeping the extra … it’s just someone different keeping the extra money.
I write POS software
Don’t be so hard on yourself!
Is that why sales tax is always on its own line on the receipt and it’s own account number on the trial balance?
Yea, we can process 4 different tax rates, and always list them separately.
The exception is in locations where tax is included in the price: bars that take a lot of cash tend to want to make everything even dollars, or quarters at the most, so that bartenders don’t have to make a lot of change, and can work quickly.
In these situations, we have to do the calculation backwards after the fact, but it’s still tracked as a separate tax in software.
I write POS software
I don’t know if you’re in any position to suggest decisions, but your software is often run on subpar hardware. Going to touchscreens doubled our call time, it was because of the half second or so of loading between touches. It couldn’t be used naturally because of the delay.
I’m an owner, so make many decisions (but I also have smart employees who’s opinions I trust very much).
This is a tough one to deal with, especially with smaller Android based handheld devices. In the 5" to 6" range we can get a few different things (wholesale costs):
- $150 - $200 dollar trash that will fail in a short period of time (Chinese imports direct from Alibaba / the manufacturer). << we don’t sell these.
- $300 to $400 devices, with similar hardware specs to the cheaper ones, but better made to last a couple of years (both of these classes are slow, and a bit under-powered)
- $900+ devices that are fast and well made.
You can guess which ones we sell the most of. Especially since they tend to get dropped, or lost quite a bit (we’re in the restaurant POS business).
For the stationary (15" Android) terminals, the situation is similar. But we sell these devices more than the handhelds, and after a few installs with well made but slower hardware, my tech lead ruled out offering the cheaper ones in favor of selling the ones with better specs, so that’s where we are now.
But lots of our competitors give hardware away to get the credit card processing revenue (a total rip off for the customer, but it’s the nature of the game), so they use the cheapest option.
Yes we all saw office space
Yes we all saw office space
The ol Superman III
There’s still a fuck ton of pennies in circulation and on the ground, unless they consider them no longer legal tender we’ll have plenty.
However, if we end up following how Brazil does it, in my experience, it depends on the person/vendor and the amount. If you buy something that’s like R$3,99 you’ll usually get give them R$4 and that’s it. I’ve also had it where I’ll pay for something that’s say R$4,89, give them R$5 and get 15 or 25 centavos back. Could also depend on what’s in the drawer at that time.
Corporations will 100% pocket the difference at first, but once it becomes a normal thing to do the rounding I’ll wager it’ll fall to the Brazilian method, especially with local businesses or vendors.
In other words, no register will ever come out balanced.
We follow normal rounding rules in Canada. 1, 2 round down to 0. 3, 4 round up to 5. 6, 7 round down to 5. 8, 9 round up to 10.
Can you game the system? Yes!
As a business, make sure all your prices (plus tax) come to a price ending in 3, 4, 8, or 9. When consumers buy a single item you’ll get the rounding up (edit: if they pay cash) and make sweet, sweet profit. But if they buy more than one item, you’re SOL on controlling the rounding.
As a consumer, you have way more control. First, pay with cash whenever the price will round down and you can probably “profit” 5 or so dollars a year. (Assuming you pay with cash on or two times a day, saving 1 to 2 cents each time.) Pay with credit or debit each time the price
willwould round up.Second, you can get real fancy. You can learn tax rules in depth so you know what items will or won’t be taxed and at what rate (we have federal and provincial taxes but they don’t apply to everything and they don’t follow the same rules on what is taxed.) But, you can use this info to always know what the final bill will be and always buy combinations of items that end in 2 or 7 (or 1 and 6 if you’re lazy) and always pay cash. You can profit like $20 a year or something doing this.
In reality? No one gives a shit until that one rare time you’re paying with cash and it rounds down. It’s your lucky day and you do the Six Flags Man dance. It’s like finding a penny and picking it up.
Pay with credit or debit each time the price will round up.
I don’t think it matters with credit or debit. The exact amount is paid.
That’s what OP it’s implying.
Yes, that’s why you pay with credit/debit. To avoid the round up.
I changed “will” to “would” to hopefully make it more clear.
Oddly reminiscent of the Roman empire.
I guess this is a good thing, but I can imagine some companies taking advantage of this
Canada did this thirteen years ago.
If you’re gonna flex with an ancient Greek quote, at least use Greek letters!
I don’t know that the label gun does Greek. :)
*brag, the word is brag.
Sorry. Use Greek brag.
It’s going to be harder to ask people what they’re thinking 🤔
Got a nickel for your thoughts?
Better late than never. While the momentum is here, get rid of the nickel too.
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The one good executive order to come out of that bag of puss
If only he did it properly. The better way to do it would have been via Congress.
Canada has a law that allows cashiers to round up or down. Without this, the US is only making a penny shortage, and you better believe customers will be screaming at cashiers for “stealing their money” if they don’t get their cent back, or shrieking “it’s legal tender!” if cashiers don’t accept their Pennies.
IIRC, Canada had at least some period of time where while change provided was rounded to the nearest nickel, the penny was still legal tender. (Prices / totals were not rounded; non-cash payments were still denominated / accurate to the penny.)
And, yes, it would be better to get congress and the executive together and have an actual plan for discontinuing the penny and the nickel (and maybe the dime or quarter?). I think on this issue, the executive acting alone is better than doing nothing / maintaining the status quo.
So this is what it’s like to fully embrace the death of the USD?
Well, getting rid of the penny was always kinda a good idea. It costs more to make one than it’s actually worth.
Here in Canada we killed our penny years ago.
The US used to have a half penny, but it was killed over 100 years ago.
Minting such a small amount of change that sees almost no practical use is pointless.
Remember when u could buy penny candies? The dollar ain’t worth shit anymore
Honestly, I’d be fine with killing the nickel too. Just start pricing everything in tenths of a dollar instead of hundredths.
Around 2006 is when the penny started to cost more to make than it’s worth. It’s only like this because of how weak the USD has become
This doesn’t have much to do with international use of the dollar.
I’m kind of commenting on how bad our inflation has gotten …
They should keep pennies and put Trump’s face on them so I can throw them in the trash
I literally throw them in the trash. I don’t see many of them because my cash transactions tend to be decimaless.
We should also kill the nickel and paper dollar at this point.
I really hope you’re not advocating for a cashless society.
I want coin op machines again that don’t require lugging around a roll of quarters
I’m ready for that possibility
Monero
Great, so throw every homeless or vulnerable person, abuse victims, children, etc who do not have access to a bank account or phone into a completely worse state. Food? Busses? For any of these people they are just now off the table. Eliminate whole sects of the restaurant, service, and gig economy industry overnight and millions will lose their jobs. The amount of people who work under the table at restaurants is outstanding.
Nickels and dimes sure. Not sure why you’d ditch the dollar yet, it still has buying power. And dropping paper dollars for dollar coins is pants on head levels of stupid
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It would make counterfeiting harder, for one. It would also replace the quarter for coin op devices which are almost entirely impractical at this point.
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Did you respond to the wrong post?
I said I use coin op shit. It takes way too many quarters to use that shit. I handle coins all the time but I want to handle LESS COINS. I still LIKE coins but the denominations below quarters AREN’T useful and paying 3 dollars in quarters is insane.
Cash machines jam all the time. This is why most pay machines now are credit card - I DO NOT LIKE PAYING WITH CREDIT CARDS. I do not want that. The current coin situation in the US is dumb.
The half penny was eliminated when it was worth more than a dime in todays money.
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You don’t want an eagleydoo?
