I'd say screw it, get rid of nickles and dimes as well. Quarters can stay, for now.
It's a complete waste of money and time continuing to mint such low-value currency. It can't be used for just about anything.
Unfortunately, I do see the problem with part of this. For a handful of items where it does matter, it will force people to use cards more if they want to avoid rounding. And the card providers already have a choke-hold on retailers, and the whole thing is basically a scheme that funnels money from the poor to the wealthy via interest and fees on the consumer, interchange fees, and rewards programs.
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.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.
As 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.
> there are laws that say
Hmm, maybe this is why it should be handled by Congress and not at the whim of the executive. They can handle all this in one piece of legislation.
The article also points out that some states and a lot cities require retailers to provide exact change. Congress would need to pass legislation to allow rounding nationally. I'm guessing in the meantime they'll continue holding pennies from previous years?
I don't want to be glib, but hey what the hey. This is how you can see that the United States is in decline; it can no longer discontinue a coin through legislation.
So, round down debit cards too? This seems like a really easy problem to solve.
When 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.
During 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 :)
> You still need to include the cents in a tax bill that runs into the millions of dollars
Not in all cases. The IRS does not use cents when you file your tax return, they say round to the nearest dollar.
>> and we won't have $100 bills anymore.
Heard some pundits on the radio talking about the elimination of the penny and one of them who worked at the Secret Service as an analyst talked about why the US paper money only goes to $100 bills. He said it was to reduce criminals and illicit activity and criminals having to store it.
He related the story of Pablo Escobar's brother or cousin who was the accountant for the cartel. He said they were losing billions of dollars every year because of various kinds of attrition like rats chewing up the money, it getting too wet and disintegrating. They were losing so much because they had to store it and that wasn't always the best because they had so much of it on hand which seemed to lend credence to his story.
So if you were to get rid of the $100 bills that would further erode the ability of criminals to store so much of it.
Nobody wants 10 months in a year. What we want is 13 28-day months a year plus one or two intercalary days. But organized religion gets in the way.
Kind of emblematic of the issue of Americans not looking to other countries to see what works and what doesn't.
> 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.
> then they stand to lose from one to four cents per cash sale for any sale that is not a multiple of five cents
Which is much less than they're paying the CC companies on card sales.
If it means shops stop charging $4.99 and start charging $5.00, I will be ecstatic.
Er... So just adjust prices to whole multiples of 5 cents? Helps math-challenged cashiers too...
If your shop can be wiped out by losing that little on each transaction it wasn't long for the world anyways... Retail margins are thin by industry preference but they're not 1-4 cents per transaction thin.
The half-penny was discontinued in 1857. Adjusted for inflation it was worth 37 cents in todays money when it was discontinued.
But add a $3.50 coin so that we can strongly incentivize coffee to stay below a certain price.
I know this is supposed to be a joke but... businesses have pushed for this the other way around in the past, asking for a new coin to raise prices.
> The Coca-Cola Company sought ways to increase the five cent price, even approaching the U.S. Treasury Department in 1953 to ask that they mint a 7.5 cent coin. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fixed_price_of_Coca-Cola_from_...]
The wikipedia article says that this was specifically the price of a 6.5oz Coke.
The obvious way to raise the price by 50% is to cut the amount by a third, selling 4.33oz Cokes.
https://www.reddit.com/r/BottleDigging/comments/1kng6aq/coca... suggests that Coca-Cola was comfortable producing bottles in several different sizes.
Now, a 4 1/3 oz Coke is obviously too small to be worth bothering with. But that's also true of a 6 1/2 oz Coke. These sizes seem more like something you dispense with an eyedropper than something you drink. A normal can is 12 oz! Who'd want to buy a six-ounce beverage?
You can address both problems at once by doubling the price and increasing the volume all the way up to 8.67 oz.
Just take a zero out of everything and change the name from dollar to something else!
*dllar*
There used to be a $10 coin called an eagle, may as well be violently American and call it eagles.
US Peso
Old trick. The last I checked about 10+ countries have done it.
One of the things I admire most about Italy is how they have held the line on the price of an espresso.
Itâs still just slightly over âŹ1 if you drink it standing at the bar.
They really have their priorities straight when it comes to food and drink prices.
So they charge more for an espresso if you want to drink it seated? Or take it away?
My local just went from $3.50 to $4 this week :(
Gourmet high-end Keurig pods are like $0.50 each. Make your own coffee.
The last time a coin was dropped was the half penny in the late 1850s, when I think it was worth about 25 cents today, so there is a precedent for what you are suggesting.
CCP Grey has a nice video and discusses the precedent: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y5UT04p5f7U
We eliminated pennies in Canada in 2012 and the transition was a non-issue. The vast majority of retailers would round cash transactions to the nearest $0.05, but a few would round down to the nearest $0.05 in favor of the customer. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Withdrawal_of_low-denomination...
Canadian cash is better than American cash in several ways: No penny, durable polymer banknotes (instead of dirty wrinkly cotton paper), colorful banknotes (instead of all green) that are easy to distinguish, $1 and $2 coins in wide circulation (instead of worn-out $1 bills).
> the transition was a non-issue
I'm reminded of when Minnesota passed the Minnesota Clean Indoor Air Act (MCIAA) close to 20 years ago. (Some) restauranteurs - along with the GOP - made pronouncements about how this would destroy the economy. No one would go to out to eat or for a drink again. Doom and gloom.
Last I checked, there are plenty of restaurants open in the state, and things are going fine. In fact, just before the MCIAA went into effect, I had a newborn, and we went out to eat one time with him in tow. We asked for a non-smoking area but were placed immediately next to a family chain smoking. We decided to never go out to eat again until we could do so without risk of second-hand smoke.
My point is that there are frequently these predictions of things being impossible or even just incredibly difficult and not worth the effort, and in the end, it's not a big deal.
> I'm reminded of when Minnesota passed the Minnesota Clean Indoor Air Act (MCIAA) close to 20 years ago. (Some) restauranteurs - along with the GOP - made pronouncements about how this would destroy the economy. No one would go to out to eat or for a drink again. Doom and gloom.
Yeah, they had done the same thing when California did the same thing 30 years ago. The fact that it didn't happen then didn't stop them from doing it everywhere else similar laws were subsequently proposed.
People overestimated the importance that smokers placed on being able to smoke in public.
A Japanese airline (Air Do) tried reintroducing the smoking section in the 1990s. It did not go well for them, and Japan's tobacco use rate was several times the US's.
I'll agree on all but one point. The cotton/linen notes feel so much better in the hand than the candy wrapper plastic of Canadian bills. I know it's a dumb reason, but I just hate the feeling.
Australian here. Barely anyone uses cash anymore. It's weird to see debates about moving towards technology we had 35 years ago which we don't even use anymore.
But, a cashless society is not a panacea. It may be higher tech and more convenient, but it can have significant privacy costs, not to mention the issues with payment card networks engaging in censorship, charging fairly high transaction fees, and pushing the problem of fraud on their networks to every merchant. Considering the payment card network market is seemingly impossible to enter, and governments don't seem to be able or perhaps willing to regulate things, there are ways in which cashless is a downgrade. It would be nice if we could back up and try to resolve some of these issues in a durable by-design way, but sadly it's probably never happening.
Electronics continue to fail in severe weather events, and cash keeps working, which is important when we're talking about food.
Going to the US feels like going backwards in time in many ways. Banking, public transit, healthcare, education.
A friend from Australia came to visit and after a day driving around New York State said âit feels half finishedâ
Plus US dollars just have that smell to them. I wouldn't mind though if we rotated out some of the faces on the bills, e.g. Andrew Jackson
Is that what cocaine smells like?
You do know who would be the first person to rotate in, don't you.
let's wait a few years before rotating faces to avoid debating another blatantly illegal thing Dear Leader would propose (actually he already did but it was out of the news rather quickly)
I am suspicious of any claims about relative cleanliness. As with wooden vs plastic cutting boards, our intuitions are likely misleading.
To be an effective fomite the currency has to not kill the microbe, and it has to readily give up the microbe to the next recipient. Organic materials like cotton or linen seem more likely to simply absorb a viral envelope or bacterial cell wall, thereby rendering it ineffective. Furthermore, the porous nature makes it more difficult for the note to give up any microbe that isn't immediately killed before it naturally dies over time.
A brief search of the scientific literature doesn't seem to show any conclusive results, but it does seem like the relative performance is pathogen specific.
"Dirty" also connotes physical appearance, you know.
If you canât crumple it up and throw it at someone, itâs not real money.
The linked article raises a few problems that the US could have with that solution:
> Four states - Delaware, Connecticut, Michigan and Oregon - as well as numerous cities, including New York, Philadelphia, Miami and Washington, DC, require merchants to provide exact change.
This seems like a non-issue as long as they round the price down. Because there's no law that the store can't discount their total by a small amount and then provide exact change.
"Congratulations customer, we have a special coupon today for $0.03 off your purchase. Here's your change :)"
> In addition, the law covering the federal food assistance program known as SNAP requires that recipients not be charged more than other customers. Since SNAP recipients use a debit card thatâs charged the precise amount, if merchants round down prices for cash purchases, they could be opening themselves to legal problems and fines, said Jeff Lenard, spokesperson for NACS.
I don't see why you couldn't do it in either case. If you modify the actual price, then you are giving exact change. Why wouldn't round() be as valid a price modification as floor()?
> require merchants to provide exact change
All the items in my dad's farm shop were priced so they came out to a round dollar amount after tax, and that was 40 years ago.
But less decent people canât resist the dark pattern of using $x.99 prices everywhere.
Itâs far more complicated than that. There is no one sales tax for everyone.
Oregon residents didnât pay sales tax when making purchases in Idaho. Washington charges sales tax on out of state purchases if that stateâs sales tax is less than Washingtonâs, including if it is zero.
How do they deal with sales tax? Connecticut has a 6.35% sales tax so if I buy something for $1, the total will be $1.0635.
They could do what every other country does, and include the sales tax in the shelf label price.
Paying cash, you would pay $1.05.
If the US properly got rid of pennies (instead of Trump just doing another end-run around congress, by ordering the Mint to stop making them, on shaky legal ground), the legislation could easily supersede those state laws.
I think this is wrong.
As far as I can tell the relevant statute is 31 USC §5112, and it does not require the minting of all authorized coins:
â(a) The Secretary of the Treasury *may mint* and issue only the following coins: ... (6) ... a one-cent coin that is 0.75 inch in diameter and weighs 3.11 grams.â
(Emphasis mine)
There may be another clause somewhere that requires the Treasury to issue all coins, but that seems unlikely to me. The _number_ of coins to issue of each type is left to the discretion of the Treasury; why wouldn't that include the option to issue none?
What exactly is the law?
Can you show me the statute requiring the treasury department to coin pennies?
[flagged]
Some interesting complications with rounding I had not heard about before were mentioned here, worth noting I think, especially given the prominence of SNAP in the news lately:
>Four states - Delaware, Connecticut, Michigan and Oregon - as well as numerous cities, including New York, Philadelphia, Miami and Washington, DC, require merchants to provide exact change, according to the National Association of Convenience Stores (NACS).
>In addition, the law covering the federal food assistance program known as SNAP requires that recipients not be charged more than other customers. Since SNAP recipients use a debit card thatâs charged the precise amount, if merchants round down prices for cash purchases, they could be opening themselves to legal problems and fines, said Jeff Lenard, spokesperson for NACS.
>âRounding down on all transactions presents several challenges beyond the loss of an average of 2 cents per transaction,â Lenard said. âWe desperately need legislation that allows rounding so retailers can make change for these customers.â
They can round down the card transactions too if itâs really a problem to charge differing amounts.
For those that seriously think this would be a major problem there was a comedy skit circulating in Australia when this happened. A guy would push his car to the petrol pump, fill with 2c of petrol, rounded down to 0. The guy at the counter just laughed at it. You could in theory do this 1000 more times (would take hours) for $20 of free petrol. At least until the worker got sick of it and enforced the whole right to refuse service.
> enforced the whole right to refuse service.
This is what everyone forgets. If you can't provide exact change, then you can refuse service.
Itâs a self-service gas station. RefuseâŚyourself? You pumped the gas before paying.
I had this same idea and seem to recall even trying it, but it was mostly thwarted when they added minimum liquid delivery amounts.
In the Netherlands cash payments get rounded to the nearest 5 cents, in both directions. Card payments are not rounded. If Iâm not mistaken, you can still demand exact change according to the law and youâre allowed to pay the exact amount (cents are still legal tender). Most merchants wouldnât be able to give you exact change, so it depends on the situation what would happen. Iâve never heard of such a situation happening, though.
You are mistaken. Merchants are allowed to round to the nearest 5 cents and you canât do anything about it (except pay by card). Of course, budget stores like Lidl and Aldi still use them but any other corporation is not going to care.
http://www.nederlandsemunten.nl/Artikelen_over_munten/De_cen...
Thanks for the correction. So only the part about legal tender was correct, which is probably what I was confused with. The relevant part:
> The one and two cent coins will remain legal tender, and retailers can choose whether or not to participate. The Netherlands cannot declare the smallest coins worthless on its own in Europe; this must be arranged in Brussels.
The government page about this: https://www.rijksoverheid.nl/onderwerpen/betalingsverkeer/vr...
> Of course, budget stores like Lidl and Aldi still use them but any other corporation is not going to care.
What do you mean with this? Surely the Lidl and Aldi donât give exact change by default in the Netherlands in 2025?
If someone demands exact change is it allowed to give them more? What if you don't have the exact change?
Apparently I was wrong about that part. Only the part about cents still being legal tender was correct. So you can pay the exact amount, but not demand the exact change.
You could always refuse service, I guess.
For the SNAP law, could they just round down SNAP purchases in the same way to be compliant?
The SNAP equal treatment rule requirement works in both directions: Prices cannot be higher or lower for SNAP recipients. As a retailer, there is an option to request a waiver, though.
IMO, this is a strawman that is either going to be ignored or fixed easily.
The law did not account for every possible situation. Removal of the penny from national currency is clear a situation where minor variations on otherwise normal transactions would not be in violation of the intent of the law.
It'd be like TSA griping that your 100ml bottle of mouthwash was overfilled by .1ml because of slight variations in the filling process. Nobody cares.
How does this work with coupons, discount for loyalty card holders, etc.?
Presumably that's fine because a SNAP recipient has access to those same discounts. So wouldn't this be the same - the "cash rounding" discount is available to SNAP and people paying cash?
So, that sounds like a yes, they could round up or down SNAP purchases just like cash purchases.
They probably will, but that means a POS software update on a tight deadline.
It's not like pennies just cease existing. You just can't buy them from the mint anymore.
I bet if you give customers an easy and free way to deposit change or to turn it into larger denominations you easily get enough pennies to delay ther update a couple years
Or, in reality, most commodity POS systems are actually able to support various countries and tax regimes, and is plenty ready to be configured a variety of ways and work perfectly fine in changing systems.
For example, the exact same physical hardware in American supermarkets for self checkout is also used in countries like Australia that have more coins than the US, and the machines literally do not have enough coin slots for every coin, so they just don't dispense certain coins in that place.
The POS market is rather robust and has been around the block for quite a while and has no problem managing quite literally arbitrary fees. Businesses in our city added a "cost of living" fee to all bills (just raise prices FFS, so dumb) and they didn't have to go out and buy new POS systems, because POS systems are very configurable.
Like, other industries that have been selling software products for decades are actually kind of good at their jobs and it's really just software as a service that reliably makes garbage. POS software can handle all sorts of things you probably don't even realize.
Go lookup all the functionality that Square advertises their POS systems have, and understand that they are new entrants to the market and do not have all the features that legacy vendors have built up over decades. The functionality has been so thoroughly figured out for so long and so straightforward, that a POS you bought in the 90s is likely still fit for service today.
Meanwhile, retailers are actually open to improving and modernizing their POS infrastructure regularly. They added those coupon printers to existing stacks and didn't have to do anything special because POS systems are absolute legends of interoperability. They use extremely standardized ports, including a special supplementary power version of USB, and are very tolerant to mix and match hardware. POS vendors even sell their hardware without forcing you to buy their software. The system is very open.
Right, but getting fined in this situation means the government is incompetent. They should just tell retailers the "right" thing to do and not fine any retailers that follow the guidelines.
The idea that this is complicated legally is an example of why so many Americans are so frustrated with their government. Common sense should rule the day, not mindless legalism.
The issue with "common sense" is there's no way to run anything based on it because you'll get 100 different ideas of what that means in any situation. 90% of customers would be fine with the rounding to the nearest 5 cent plan but there's a streak of stubborn people who'd refuse to accept it and waste some legal time trying to get proven 'right' so the stores want legal clarity so they don't have to deal with that.
Too early to say "ever", considering there has been no act of congress on this matter and the penny continues to be legal tender. The decision to stop minting it is a (legally debatable) executive order, and the next president or even the current one can change their mind about it tomorrow.
lets hope not. This is long overdue and should pose relatively little issue compared to most other recent questionable executive orders.
stop minting and stop accepting is commonly separated to allow adjustment. so likely a later president will just add the second phaseout step.
I agree it's time to follow Canada and the rest of the world but it needs to be done through congress, not executive orders. It needs to have a proper framework for migration and laws for how payments are rounded.
I donât believe we actually have a law that dictates how to round in Canada. Thereâs just a government recommendation.
I get that the U.S. is a much lower trust culture, but is it really necessary? The rounding is only for cash transactions.
I say we eliminate both pennies and (significantly more importantly) executive orders
> (significantly more importantly) executive orders
How would that work?
The president is the executive of the federal government and needs to issue directives to employees telling them how to do their jobs.
This is like saying we should get rid of CEOs sending emails.
You know what I mean: executive orders in their current incarnation. Better congressional and judicial oversight, more limited scope of powers.
I watched a video on the demise of the penny and its predicament was so succinctly explained: everyone gets pennies as change but few carry them around let alone spend them, so we are stuck producing ever more. One news outlet even did an "experiment" where they threw hundreds of pennies on the ground in a city on a busy morning and not one person stopped to pick any up.
> everyone gets pennies as change but few carry them around let alone spend them
It's not just pennies, it's all coins. In a former life I worked in retail and almost nobody would fish around in their pockets for exact (or even near) change. They'd always hand me bills for their purchase even if they had just completed a transaction and had the coins in their pocket. That was in the 90's, and I still see it happening today, even though I'm no longer in the retail world.
Iâd regularly use quarters in vending machines, but not waste time during a retail transaction.
In most other countries, since prices are shown including all taxes you can often have the money ready while waiting in line etc.
> but not waste time during a retail transaction.
we could just go back to writing checks while we're at it.
It's amazing to me that people consider "saving time while paying money" to be a good thing.
I will never "tap" my debit card as long as I have any legal option. Everyone else can wait for me to exercise my consumer rights, by inputting my PIN, verifying the amount displayed on screen etc.
I used to do this for vending machines but now itâs common to need more than eight of them per transaction so it's kinda silly.
People are very lazy to do basic math. I always minimize the coins I am carrying by doing math on my head so that the combined value of a certain coin never exceeds the amount of the next available coin/bill, that way I never exceed the carrying capacity of my wallet.
Most people I know just pocket everything and put on a box at home for undetermined time.
It's not even just that. Coins are heavy, large and noisy. Bills are way more convenient and cards even more so. If we could solve privacy issues with cards I would say get rid of all bills. Maybe just keep a few $100s in my wallet in case my cards get declined for some reason.
That's incredibly bizarre. If I have coins my first instinct is to spend them ASAP so I don't have to carry them around.
I always pick them up. Every penny buys enough pasta to keep you alive for another 15 minutes. So in case I ever go broke, I've staved off my eventual starvation by 15 minutes.
How did you arrive at this conclusion?
It was always just an estimate but today I verified it with a chatbot before I made any claim about the time. Caught it in a mistake too, which I untangled by reminding it that food calories are actually kilocalories.
I like this perspective :)
Only place I've ever noticed them is the $0.01 pony ride that's been sitting at my grocery store for 30 years.
Even they've gotten the hint and simply leave a tray of pennies next to it so people can actually use it.
Theyâre probably doing that so your kid or some kid can use it and leave the penny tray because they arenât trying to make money off of it anymore.
Itâs just for fun, sounds like a nice gesture.
Yep. That's exactly what is was.
I remember moving out of a place (decades ago). I was the last roommate out, and so was stuck with some of the cleanup (wanted to get that deposit back!).
One of the things we had was a ton of pennies (no idea why). I had no room in my car, so I spend a few minutes late at night flinging pennies out onto the sidewalk after a long day of cleaning the place.
Would it not have been better/easier for all involved to have just set a container of all the pennies on the street on your way out? If someone really could use them, you're kind of a dick for making them pick them up one at a time, but if they were all together...
Yeah, in retrospect that would have been better.
>But with 20 million customers a year, and 17% of them paying with cash, the policy will eventually cost Kwik Trip a couple of million dollars a year, McHugh said.
If we figure two-fifths of cash transactions need to be rounded up and the store is losing an average of 1.5 cents each time, their expected losses would be around $2,000, yeah?
> Kwik Trip, a family-owned convenience store chain that operates in the Midwest, decided to round down cash purchases in stores where it hasnât been able to find pennies.
They're rounding all cash transactions down to the nearest nickel, so an average of 2 cents per transaction, 3.4 million customers, gives me $68,000 assuming each "customer" makes a single transaction per year. If they mean that there are 20 million unique customers, not 20m transactions, then the a long tail of customers who make frequent small transactions in cash could make their claim check out.
Whatever the total ends up being, it's basically a marketing expense that they're electing to make. Probably they do it for a year and then switch to rounding to the nearest nickel, which is what everyone else will be doing.
Certianly the costs in employee time making change in pennies and stocking / transporting / changing pennies is way higher
I would bet they have a way to write it off.
Edit: why disagree? Can't the write it off as a loss, uncollected account, or promotional? Maybe even goodwill
Writing it off as a loss isn't useful.
Without a write off, their income is $X (what they actually collected), with a write off, their income is $Z (what they should have collected) - $Y (what they didn't collect), but $X = $Z - $Y. There's no material difference between counting what they actual collect as income vs what they should have collected minus the goodwill discount. Unless there's some specific tax justification (maybe accounting differences could justify remitting less sales tax overall and retaining more of the funds, etc)
They must mean unique customers, not customer transactions.
They have about 878 stores, according to Wikipedia, so if it was transactions, each store would only see about 62 transactions per day, which is way too low.
Sure. But multiply by whatever number you want and it is still the same percentage of revenue.
What's more contemptible: that CNN refused to spend the 30 seconds that it would take to do the math; or that it interviewed a "spokesman" that also didn't spend 30 seconds to do the math, and was sure that nobody would check?
This is the kind of article that should be written by AI (or not written, really.) If you completely fictionalized the empty interviews, nothing would be lost.
Maybe the "spokesman" has been told to angle for a government subsidy for the inconvenience of losing pennies? And from a gas station, which add that goofy fraction of a cent at the end of their pricing.
20 million customers doesn't mean 20 million transactions. Considering we are talking about a convenience store I'm sure a large chunk of their customers visit every day, some probably multiple times a day.
Assuming 3.4 million customers (cash users) and 2.5 cents average loss per transaction, it would only take one visit a month for them to cross a million dollars in losses.
Of course at that scale it's not like that million or two is really making a difference to their bottom line. Doing some quick Googling their annual revenue is estimated to be $6-7 billion.
>visit every day, some probably multiple times a day
Anyone have data on what percentage of the population visits convenience stores 500+ times per year? Sounds pretty inconvenient.
Plenty of people stop somewhere to get hot breakfast and coffee every day. If you also need something that can't set in your car all day (e.g. milk) that would be a second trip in a day.
Whether that's convenient or not depends on location... If it's right off your route to work/home, a stop may only add a couple minutes to your drive.
Like many people, I throw my change into a jar when I get home. One time I only kept pennies and used an old apple cider jug. Turns out that a gallon of pennies is worth almost $55 [0]. And that carrying a heavy glass jug filled with pennies to the Coinstar machine is very anxiety inducing.
Speaking of which - the Coinstar machines near me will give you several options for redemption. Some of which have been Amazon and Home Depot e-gift codes that have no redemption fee.
[0] A potential worthless interview question...
You probably could have made $150 if you had melted the coins and sold the copper instead.
A penny is less than 3% copper (since 1982).
Copper pennies weigh 3.11 grams. Copper is currently US$10987 per tonne https://www.metal.com/en/prices/LME_CA_3M so a copper penny is worth 3.4¢. This is a surprisingly low number to me; I would have expected it to be closer to 10¢ or 20¢, since presumably it was about 1¢ of copper when it was still copper.
By comparison, a silver dime (90% silver, 10% copper) is 2.268 grams, and silver is US$1486.77/kg https://www.metal.com/en/prices/201102250392, so the dime contains about US$3.03 worth of silver. From the point of view of an 18th- or 19th-century person, for whom the purpose of the mint was to certify the value of the precious metal in the coin by stamping it, the dollar has lost 29/30 (97%) of its value since minting of silver coins ended.
> From the point of view of an 18th- or 19th-century person, for whom the purpose of the mint was to certify the value of the precious metal in the coin by stamping it
Was that the purpose of the mint? That would imply that the relative value of silver vs. copper was static.
It was, yes. The varying relative values of metals was in fact a huge problem for mints for many centuries. The problem was sometimes resolved by refusing to mint any but the priciest metal, and at other times by the values of different coins such as shillings and sovereigns varying relative to one another.
Ok, but the US mint in the 18th and 19th centuries?
Pennies are not 100% copper any more. Mostly zinc.
I know. The non-copper pennies also don't weigh 3.11 grams. Dimes aren't silver anymore either.
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