Great point.
Not to nitpick, but does anybody really know what time it is? Does anybody really care?
Yea, I was wrong, and admittedly missed the entire point of your post.
But I do agree with your position that the “no need to keep less than 10 coins” argument is only of theoretical value.
Many people would be willing to pay the $10.31, or for that matter $20.31 or $100.31, since any of those scenarios would work to reduce the amount of coins received in change. The reasons it doesn’t always work in practice have mostly been mentioned already–impatient people behind you in line, rooting for a penny and nickel through a pocket which also contains other coins, keys, etc., and so on. But really, when something costs $9.31 the amount of coins you’d use is less than 4% of that. And in all but the most unusual circumstances, very few people would offer a dollar or more in change, because if you need to count out more than a dollar in quarters and smaller coins to pay somebody $9.31, then you’re probably not in a very spendy mood to begin with. For “spending coins as you go” to work, the coins themselves have to be worth a significant part of the purchase price, instead of an only incremental bit of it.
That doesn’t make any sense. By your logic, people are more willing to use coins for cash purchases under $5 than for cash purchases over $20. Is there any evidence that that is true?
I’m not sure I understand where I implied that $5 was the upper limit of what most Americans would routinely pay in coins. That’s 20 quarters or half a roll, after all. But that’s about the lower limit of an inexpensive lunch or a pint of good beer in a pub.
Let’s say rather that the cutoff is $2 or less, unless you want to look like Woody Allen in Take The Money And Run, when he takes his girlfriend out to dinner and pays for it with a huge pile of change, from when he robbed a parking meter earlier in the day. And that
This thread points out a HUGE difference between Canadian cash spenders and US cash spenders. The thought of just continuing to accumulate change without spending it in Canada is, and always has been, ludicrous. If I went through the week only spending notes I could end up with … $30(?) in change by the end of the week. And we haven’t yet introduced the $5 coin due out in a couple of years.
You said the coins have to be worth “a significant part of the purchase price” in order to be used. Assuming the coins total less than a dollar, 50ȼ is 10% of $5 and 1% of $50, and I was skeptical that people’s coin-use habits changed based on the amount of purchase. My apologies if I misunderstood your original point.
I accumulate change in a bunch of plastic glasses that I keep on my kitchen countertop. When it becomes worth the effort I roll them and take the rolls to the bank (can you do that in the US? Can’t point to a specific message, but comments on SDMB make me suspect USAians can’t do that). The amount I drag to the bank at one time varies wildly, but is somewhere in the very rough vicinity of $100.
That’s the way he phrased it, but I think his point was rather that they need to be worth some significant amount of purchasing power. Otherwise, you’re fiddling with coins for no practical benefit.
A $2 coin is worth something, a 2 cent coin is not. It may be the exact same amount of time or hassle or whatever to keep up with the coins, do the math, fish them out of the pocket, whatever, but the expectation value is significantly different, which affects the willingness to fiddle with it.
I pull out a $1, pay, get my 33 cents. Next transaction, I pull out a $1, pay, get my 11 cents. Whatever. It’s still easier than fishing for the pile in my pocket, rooting through that to count up the numbers, handing it to the cashier, who then has to sort them to put them in the bins. He’s got a machine that does the math, and sometimes an automatic dispenser that kicks out the right bits - no time consuming fishing them out of the drawers and counting that you have the right number of dimes or whatever.
Yeah, in theory they should pull the most valuable first and work down, but then they’re short of ones, or they’re almost out of quarters, or whatever. Or they have to get out the roll and break it open.
Like has been explained, the expectation is that coins aren’t worth much, they can buy very little on their own and it takes a lot to be worth anything, so why fiddle with it?
Hey, I actually do use coins and carry them, I’m just explaining the mentality. I also find myself using plastic more than I used to. I used to not use the credit card that often, only for sizeable purchases (over $20). Now I’ve bought a coke and candy bar at a convenience store and used plastic.
In my experience at Citibank, the bank will accept rolled coins for deposit to my account. Other banks have self-service coin counting machines. And there are Coinstar vending machines in supermarkets. (They charge a commission of about nine percent to convert coins to a voucher but you can get 100% of the value in the form of gift certificates to places like Amazon.)