You mean taking an item that is displayed as being priced at $1, adding 6% tax then charging me $1.10 for it? Then repeating that for the next 100 of those items I buy?
There’s a word for that, and it’s not “legal”.
Most likely, if pennies are legal tender and just in short supply, retailers will display the total price in rounded pennies, like they do today, and short themselves the change if they don’t have the right coins. They lose 0-4 cents per customer transaction. not ideal, but better than paying for a lawyer for the inevitable suit.
Or better yet, publicize that they will always round the total down and get a lot of nice marketing good will. Since a large percentage of their customers are using cards anyway, it’s a small thing overall
I don’t use change, period. I pay mostly by credit card or app. When I do use cash, it’s usually to go in on something, and I just round up to the nearest dollar and leave it at that.
This was discussed thoroughly upthread. If pennies just slowly disappear from circulation, we’ll have the Wild West.
If instead we have a law abolishing the penny, the law will (probably) require fair rounding of a cash purchase total; not of individual prices. This isn’t difficult unless you have an orangutan in charge. Oh … wait … Shit!
I used eight pennies a couple of weeks ago. I forgot to buy washers when I was at the hardware store, so I made washers out of pennies. They were significantly cheaper than buying actual washers.
ETA: I save all of my change, roll it up, and deposit it into the credit union.
No, I mean changing the price of the individual items. Anything priced ending in x8¢ or x9¢ you’d expect to round up but something ending in x6¢ you’d expect to round down to the nearest nickel; however, stores are free to set they’re own prices & the cost of stuff goes up so I’d be that they round those x6¢ items up to (x+1)0¢ & not down to x5¢.
Convenience stores charge more than the regular grocery store for the same item. Even the regular grocery store charges more per unit for smaller quantities; a quart of milk is more that 50% the cost of a half gallon, which is also more that 50% the cost of a gallon.
Chicken prices change regularly; on the weeks where it’s buy-one-get-one the price per pound is always more than the weeks where it’s not. I’m guessing that’s not so legal either as it’s not really a 50% sale, it’s deceptive advertising. I know those weeks it’s a couple of dollars more per pound than the non-sale weeks but I doubt I’d ever catch that they raised it by 2¢. I’m sure there’s a few people out there but I doubt most people would know if they rounded the price up to the nearest nickel rather than down.
I wasn’t raised during the Depression, but I was raised by those who experienced it, and to them, it was a huge sacrilege to be careless with pennies…or with any money for that matter. But money was worth more, and even when I was a child, a penny could purchase some very fascinating candy…
So I use them, but only bc that has been pounded into my brain from childhood. I am careful to pay what is due bc I fear cheating someone, too. Another Depression era anxiety. My reasonable self knows it is silly and wasteful of others’ time, and mostly I avoid being that old lady.
I did find an Indian head penny recently, and I have wheaties, too, so I find coins interesting. If they retire the penny, I am fine with it.
I possess some dollar coins from the 1800s, they are heavy bc they were made of real metals. I also find them beautiful, and I wonder if Mark Twain or Louise May Alcott might have used them to pay for things.
[quote=“knavette57, post:188, topic:1013421”] Oh dear, so you and I shop at the same places!
I wasn’t raised during the Depression, but I was raised by those who experienced it, and to them, it was a huge sacrilege to be careless with pennies…or with any money for that matter.
I shouldn’t have singled-out “old ladies,” since I’m an old guy. It just seems that the elderly seem to do this more often. (I’ve also been referred to as “elderly,” which always makes me laugh.) Like you, I always put wheat pennies away. I don’t know why.
My parents were young adults during the Depression, and they lived every day after that like it was still going on. Pennies were always placed into a large jar. When added-up, they paid for occasional nice things. Their attitude toward money was sometimes frustrating. Oftentimes my friends had much younger parents, and their houses had more luxuries, like color TVs and such. But when we got something special, it was really special, and appreciated as such.
Referring to that as rounding up or down causes confusion , since rounding up or down generally refers to a total . If I buy one item at $6.99, the store might round it up to $7 - but if I buy 6 of them for a total of $41.94 it’s rounded down to $41.90. This is also known as cash rounding if it is done only for cash payments. . Setting the price at $7 is just that- setting the price. There’s no objective price to round up or down - no one can say you should have rounded the quart of milk down from $1.42 to $1.40 rather than up from $1.42 to $1.45 or $1.50 because you never set the price at $1.42 to begin with.
(Just to be more confusing price rounding apparently refers to the practice of setting the price to end with a specific digit or digits such as $4.99 or $5.69 or whole dollars)
Has anyone here ever been a cashier in a retail establishment?
I was under the impression it was important to match the amount of cash in the cash drawer with what the cash register tapes said there should be at the end of each shift. While of course occasionally the results didn’t match; under Cheesesteak’s proposal they would never match.
Very true, though under my scenario it is already impossible for them to match, as it assumes correct change is unavailable.
I was a cashier at an A&P, back before those fancy laser scanners all the kids are using these days, and you bet my 15 year old ass never had a perfectly matching drawer. I was not a particularly good cashier.
I have in restaurants - first of all, they almost never match exactly. How important that is depends upon the owner/manager - but being short an average of .02 per transaction for 200 transactions is $4. It wouldn’t be an average of .02 short for each transaction because some of those transactions won’t require any pennies in change. And of course if the store is telling the cahiers to always round down, they would have more tolerance regarding shortages.
I have been in restaurant operations for 25ish years. That entire time at the end of the day we always rounded down if it was 50 cents or less or up if the report said 51 cents or up. It was never an issue when we balanced at the end of the week. I’ve even worked places where the lowest denomination coin on hand was a quarter.
Honestly these days there are very few cash transactions at the wine bars/restaurants I oversee. We only keep $100 in the till and often we will go a few weeks without having to make change.
No one EVER wants pennies and most don’t want coins of any type.
We old ladies and old men are a study in history, really. I was never deprived in my young years, but as you, my parents did not spend on luxuries. However, they were both born in 36, but my dad grew up in a St Louis tenement, and as for my mom, her parents were tenant farmers. My grandparents were part of the circle that instilled my values, since they worked very hard to rise above their past (and did so).
They had penny kinds of sayings: “Take care of your pennies, and your dollars will be there,” and “watch your pennies, they add up,” and well, they did, bc a dollar bought so much more.
My grandad had this weird saying, “He was as happy as a pig with a mouthful of pennies…” I never quite knew why this would fill a pig with contentment…I think that a pig would much prefer a mouthful of slops. They all grew up on farms, though, and my grandad’s family was quite affluent, so perhaps their pigs were fed with pennies…haha
I have mixed feelings. In terms of believing they’re not worth the fuss, I pick up a lot of pennies but mostly corroded ones. If they were not so easily pitted, defaced or had more viable circulation, they could continue with them. I know these are the change that people ignore.
On the other hand, I have picked up enough of this change to help defray expenses. I probably have spent it all on food from our dollar stores but it has helped a little bit.
Obviously the importance of a penny depends greatly on whether your monthly budget is $100, $200, 500, 1,000, 2,000, 5,000, 10K, 20K, or 50K.
We have people of all those flavors here. One of the cool features of the Dope is just how far we span the SES spectrum.
Most of don’t have IRL friends or acquaintances more than 1 notch higher or lower than ourselves on that monthly budgetary scale. Here it’s all over the map.