It doesn’t matter. I think the fear of many opponents of eliminating the penny is that all prices ending between the nickels would usually or always be rounded up; in that scenario .96 and .97 would both be rounded up to a dollar.
Praise for division of the Euro has to be tempered by the fact that a decision was made to create a new, divisible currency at par with the ECU (based on a basket of inflation-shrunken currencies) in the first place. IMO, it would have made more sense to set it at some fraction of an ECU and leave it at that. I.e., just do away with fractions entirely.
Of course, there would have been riots…
My point there has to do with the relationship between denominations. It would be exactly the same, mathematically, if the denominations were 1, 2, 5, 10, 20, 50, 100, 200, 500, 1000, 2000, 5000, 10000, 20000, 50000.
Really? Didn’t know that.
I know you’re a word guy, what are the best theories for the origin of Dixie?
British coinage is now 1p, 2p, 5p, 10p, 20p, 50p, £1, and £2, with (occasionally) £5, £10, £20, and £100. (The original decimalization coinage included ½p, but that was withdrawn in the 80s.)
See post #50.
I see $50s and $2s frequently. If you work in retail and especially if you have state lottery machines, you will see a fair number of $50s and $100s go by. Twos I buy from the bank to give as tips. Unlike $100s and $50, they rarely come from customers.
Actually they’d just as soon not do X.99 pricing. But they’ve found that they lose sales if they don’t. Cecil did a column on it, but only discussed the origin, not why it’s nearly universal.
They deliberately set the Euro to be just over the value of the US dollar at the time. It was a psychological thing, but for the bankers. I don’t think they cared what the average person on the street thought. After all, many of the currencies it replaced were valued at less than a dollar.
That’s not how it works anywhere that has eliminated cents, AFAIK. 96 and 97 cents would both round down.
And if you say “Ah ha, they’ll set the price of widgets at 98 cents and round up!”, well, you can beat them at their own game and buy two widgets at $1.96. 
I think it’s crazy that we have basically the same set of coins (in the UK) that we had over 30 years ago, apart from the addition of the £2 coin. They’ve made some of them smaller, but the values are the same.
We don’t have state lottery machines. Participating merchants pony up the small winnings…in twenties, of course.
True, it is a bit of a pain, though computerized inventory/POS systems have made it a lot less so. I suppose a better way to put it is, “Retailers really hate losing sales.”
Well, the ECU. The Euro just took over (at parity) in 1999.
They would have been the ones leading the riots. They’d been dealing in ECUs for almost twenty years (24 years, if you count the EUA).