Yeah but think of the added security you have Gillian.

Have you ever seen somebody smacked with a cloth sack full of coins? Its really quite effective. Turns them off like a switch. Try that with a wallet or creditcard.

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They're not. Ever since 1983 they've been only 2.5% copper and the rest zinc. Before they were 95% copper, but they changed the formula because copper was getting expensive.

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Everything I need to know I learned through Googling.

He meant the dollar coins at Ren Faire, To Seek. Which (as far as I know) are actually solid copper. Then again, I don't really know, because I don't make the things.

BigDon, the problem with using them for extra security is that they're generally in my belt pouch; I'd have to take off my belt, which takes time. But I do carry a very large stick.

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Gillian

"Now everyone was giving her that kind of look UFOlogists get when they suddenly say, 'Hey, if you shade your eyes you can see it is just a flock of geese after all.'"

"You can't erase icing."

"I can't believe it doesn't work! I found it on the internet, man!"

If you value your time at 20 dollars an hour, then you lose more than a penny each time you spend two seconds fiddleing with the annoying things.

Australia got rid of its one and two cent coins a long time ago. No problems resulted that I can think of. Prices didn't change, the final total is just rounded up or down if you pay with cash, or you pay the exact amount if you use a debit card.

Ron, is that US dollars or AUS dollars?

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Gimme a minute to read through Jay's latest observations...

Well, 20 dollars is 2,000 cents. There are 3,600 seconds in an hour, so each second is costing you 0.55555 etc. cents. The currency doesn't really matter.

Is the rounding mandated, or are some places rounding down out of the goodness of their hearts? That would be the one issue I have with removing the penny, not that it would add up too quick.

In a related note, a local mega-store that I visited once did something that kind of irritated me. I don't know if it was because of the complexities in taxable/non-taxable nature of being a discount store/grocery store, or if it was just greed. But, when I looked at my reciept, I noticed that tax was computed on each taxable item INDIVIDUALLY, and not on the total of taxables. Now, that only adds up to a few cents on the normal checkout, but for the store, it might amount to quite a bit (that is if they pay sales tax on a lump sum total)

Now, the problem with the penny in my mind is that they can not be spent the same way as other coins and they tend to build up. Most machines don't take them. Recently, I haven't had that problem since our grocery opened the self-checkouts which do take pennies. I just unload as many I can when I make a small purchase.

The dollar coin? Absolutely. Think about how you spend money. Here's how it ends up with me...Anything around $5 and up is usually paid with larger bills with change of less than $5 expected. Smaller amounts are usually paid with "dollars and change." I think with the one dollar coin, you would see more transactions with one or the other but not both.

If not, then how would you get your change? If I buy a non-taxable product for $9.99 and hand the cashier a ten, do I get no change or a coin of the smallest value? I don't think that stores are willingly going to put themselves in a position in which every time they owe someone a penny, they have to hand over a dime.

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The ether of general relativity therefore differs from that of classical mechanics or the special theory of relativity respectively, in so far as it is not 'absolute', but is determined in its locally variable properties by ponderable matter.

Albert Einstein, "On the Ether", 1924

Well technically, they are copper coated zinc, not an alloy as this seems to imply.

I don't agree that the removal of the penny will get rid of the $9.99 style pricing either. That's a marketing ploy. 9.99 sounds like a lot less than 10 to the average person. This is also why stores will mark things 10 for $10 rather thana dollar. You would be amazed at how many peole thing they have to buy all 10 to get that price. Our store used to run items 3 for $5, which the average person (sadly) was unable to work out to be about 1.67 each, so they'd just buy 3 to not deal with the math.

When I ran the toy counter at a tournament once, I noticed that for items under $5, we could actually sell more if they were priced bu 'bucks'. a $1 item at $1 or 99c didn't sell as well as the same item for 'just a buck'.

I think if pennies and nickles went away, that $10 item would come down to 9.90 for the above marketing reason. I also think that it would be harder to eliminate cash in the US than it would to get us fully metric. There are far too many people here that would see the removal of cash as just another government action to spy on them. Plus, there are certain forms of mostly legal entertainment that basically require cash. As Dave Atell said, 'Use $2 bills. In the dark they look like $20s and even if they notice, a $2 bill is still kinda cool.' (or something similar).

I doubt it would much effect on crime overall, since there will always be something of value that can be used to barter for drugs, or guns, but it will leave a better paper trail, assuming they can get a better handle on fraud and ID theft.

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I'm not evil.
An evil person would do the things I think up.

I have no idea if it's mandated. I never bothered to check what they did before I read this thread.

So the next smallest coin in the U.S. is a ten cent coin? Okay I can see how that would make getting rid of pennies a bigger step than in Australia where we have a five cent coin. But it still doesn't seem like a big problem. Just round to the nearest ten on the total price of purchases at the checkout when paying cash. No one has to change their prices and anyone who tries to buy items so they can save four cents is just weird.

Mind you, in Australia, sales tax (GST) is included in the final purchase price so no one has to do maths in their head to work out what they have to pay. This makes life easier and allows us to dedicate our surplus brain power to vital tasks such as dodging magpie attacks.

No, we have a five-cent coin (the nickel) as well. (Side peeve: no US coin is marked with its numeric value.)

Yeah, that's another peeve here in the US: calculating sales tax, particularly when it's on the state level and is different depending on where you go. Delaware has no sales tax, Pennsylvania's is 6%, Maryland's is 5%, Virginia's is (or was) 4.5% (try calculating that in your head).

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Everything I need to know I learned through Googling.

First of all, may I point out that single-item, non-taxable, cash purchases would hardly constitute "every time"? They wouldn't even constitute a significant minority of the time.

As has been stated, in areas that have already eliminated the penny, the rounding goes up in this situation. You'd be paying $10 for it anyway.

So why wouldn't they just mark it $10 instead of $9.99? For the same reason they don't do it now - they sell significantly more of them at a $9.99 price tag than they do at a $10 price tag.

And even if they did round down to $9.95 in those cases, I bet the additional sales they'd get by keeping the price tag below $10 would more than make up for that occassional 4-cent loss.

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SeanF

"Ask to understand, but don't challenge unless you have the knowledge."--NEOWatcher

The contents of this post are ©2009 by SeanF and may not be copied or retransmitted in any form without the express written consent of SeanF

That's nothing. Our combined city and state sales tax is 5.92%.

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SeanF

"Ask to understand, but don't challenge unless you have the knowledge."--NEOWatcher

The contents of this post are ©2009 by SeanF and may not be copied or retransmitted in any form without the express written consent of SeanF

In Denmark, where the smallest coin has for a while been 25 øre, the rounding is defined by law, so *.12 rounds down to *.00, *.13 rounds up to *.25, and so on. The rounding's normally handled automatically by the cash register.

As for taxes, the price listed is required (by fair marketing laws) to be the price including tax so people see what they have to pay.
Or rather, if the price does not clearly state that it is without tax, then the customer can assume it is included and refuse to pay the additional amount.

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Heh. You people whining about sales tax think you have it bad? In Washington State, sales taxes are set by the county! (I think there's a base level set by the state, but I know the counties get at least some money out of it.) This means that, should I go to Seattle or visit my daughter in Port Townsend, the sales tax is different, and I haven't even left the state.

And none of my close friends can realistically value their time at $20 an hour, since none of their employers value it at more than $10. (Well, Graham's day job does, but he's not there these days.)

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Gillian

"Now everyone was giving her that kind of look UFOlogists get when they suddenly say, 'Hey, if you shade your eyes you can see it is just a flock of geese after all.'"

"You can't erase icing."

"I can't believe it doesn't work! I found it on the internet, man!"

That does sound dreadful. Once my wife and I were having dinner in Lynchburg, VA, at a Pizza Hut just inside the city limits. When the bill came, there was something like a 13% tax on it. I inquired about this: apparently Lynchburg has an 8% amusement tax that includes restaurant food. But if we'd eaten someplace a hundred yards away we would have saved over a dollar on our meal.

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Everything I need to know I learned through Googling.

I've never been to South Dakota Sean, but around here folks pay 8.5% on everything except food, and they even requalified what constitutes "food". You would assume that would be anything you could eat that doesn't qualify as being afflicted with pica.(A compulsion to eat non-food items like clay and such) Not so. They subdivided the food category. Entertaining food, junk foods, beverages, so its really, really hard to make a single item, non-taxible, purchase around here.

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Gimme a minute to read through Jay's latest observations...

Unless they were really enthusiastic workers.

"I value my job so much I would gladly not only do it for free, but I'd be willing to pay $10 an hour for the privilage of doing it!"

Gillianren, it's similar here but it's the municipalities that enact additional sales tax rather than the counties.

There's a Lewis Drug just down the street from where I live and another just down the street from where I work, and the tax rates are different because I live in Sioux Falls but work in Brandon.

BigDon, we pay 5.92% on pretty much everything (food and clothing included), but there's an additional 1% "entertainment tax" that applies to restaurant food. 4.92% of that is state, and the additional 1% (plus 1% entertainment tax) are city.

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SeanF

"Ask to understand, but don't challenge unless you have the knowledge."--NEOWatcher

The contents of this post are ©2009 by SeanF and may not be copied or retransmitted in any form without the express written consent of SeanF