In my part of the US, you don’t have to put coins in them at all.
I mostly use a debit card, so I don’t get much coin. When I do have coins, I throw them into a dish on my dresser till it starts to overflow and coins fall on the floor, then I take them to the coin counter and get a gift card (actually slip of paper) for Amazon, which I then enter into my Amazon account.
I never heard of a coin deposit being required for shopping carts. For luggage carts at an airport, though, I’ve seen this kind of system.
It’s been this way for a very long time, too. Prices were a lot lower in 1978, but even then you wouldn’t have thought of paying for a sit-down restaurant meal with just coins; if the bill came to $10 you would have had to count out a minimum of forty coins not including the tip. How different this was from what I experienced in Germany, where I paid the waiter with two DM5 coins, and got change back.
This could be another German memory of yours, since this is common practice throughout Germany. The idea is to provide an incentive to people to return the carts to specified points (or at least, even though this may sound cynical, to have homeless people do so if the customer who took out the cart doesn’t bother to return it).
My personal take on this is that coins are very much money. When my wallet gets too bulky, I either try to pay precisely down to cents, or overpay to by an amount that will give me a larger denomination in change (so that, for instance, with a total of €4.27 and I don’t have twenty cents, I would pay €5.07 to get rid of the coins below ten cents and get eighty cents in change). I find it somewhat decadent to disregard coins which are, after all, money. This is a purely personal thing as far as I myself am concerned, though, and I would, of course, not base any moral judgment of others on this. I don’t think it’s too much of a European thing, though, even regarding the fact that we do have high-value coins in Europe (€1 and €2 as regular coins, even up to €10 if you include the commemorative coins which are legal tender but hardly ever used for cash transactions); I know other people here who take a more American approach to this.
I have to use a quarter to get a shopping cart at Aldi’s, a grocery store which, I think, has a German origin. Other than that, it’s rare in the US as far as my experience goes.
Yes, Aldi is the one here in the US that uses coins for their carts. You never see a loose Aldi cart roaming around the parking lot, they get snapped up instantly because, despite that some here don’t consider coins to be real money, there is always someone out there who will happily scavenge quarters from abandoned carts.
No, I think you have me confused with Colophon or Lord Feldon. I wasn’t using a car when I was in Germany, so I never bought enough at one time to need a shopping cart.
One grocery store near me is always short on carts, so I do wish there could be such an incentive in place. Increasingly, stores have an invisible electronic perimeter around the parking area, usually marked by a wide yellow stripe, beyond which the wheels of the cart will lock. That stops them from wandering off site but it still doesn’t force customers to push them back to the store or one of the other collection points. With most people this isn’t a problem, but you know how it is. There always are a few who don’t care.
I think Switzerland is your local champion for high value coins these days seeing as they do have the 5CF coin.
While in Germany I found it interesting that even the very small 1- and 2-Pf coins, in spite of their low denominations, did not accumulate in my pockets nearly as much as I was already accustomed to seeing with American pennies and nickels. When you can use coins for just about all your day-to-day incidental purchases, it’s a lot easier to use up the small coins seeing as they’re all in the same pocket anyway.
I typically use coins for vending machines and parking meters. Actually, make that overwhelming used.
As long as there is sales tax, there will be a need for coins and especially pennies.
I should say, sales tax calculated at the cash register, not VAT.
We have two bowls for change - one for pennies and the other for “silver”.
Once a year or so, we roll the pennines and take them to the bank. The silver piles up and eventually we will take it to the bank’s counting machine and end up with a couple hundred bucks.
I was at an Aldi two days ago, and the shopping carts didn’t require coin deposits, just like at any other supermarket.
Canada has sales taxes calculated at the register, but it turned out to not need pennies at all.
Taxes added at the register are actually good proof of why we don’t need pennies. They show rounding of trivial amounts to be a completely invisible process to the consumer.
Yes. We abolished pennies in Canada last February, and nobody misses them. About a month ago I asked the cashier at Dairy Queen when was the last time she’d seen a penny come over the counter, and she had to stop and think about it, and even then wasn’t sure.
They’re gone.
Cash transactions get rounded, usually to the nearest 5c, although the discount grocery store NoFrills makes a point of always rounding down.