News

Death to nickels!

Probably cause Canadians aren’t weird about their currency.

All Canadian bills keep getting redesigned.

half of them are still circulating in the U.S.

Make a 20¢ piece instead of the quarter and everything can go to the nearest 10¢. Then eventually we can get rid of the dime too and everything can go to the nearest 20¢.

Just scrap anything less than $1. Then make coins $1 $5 $10 $20 that look and feel similar to the penny, nickel, dime, & quarter but are really replacing these paper bills.

Here in Canada we got rid of the penny years ago.

When paying in cash, we round to the nearest 0.05 but with card payments it's still the exact price.

Also, the amount of money you'd lose by rounding in a cash transaction is pretty minimal.

Got a nickel for your thoughts?

I saw an interview with an economist years ago where he said that if we just followed the accepted rules of rounding (1-4 rounds to 0, 5-10 rounds to 10) then it would work out about the same. In reality I’m sure companies would just pocket the extra money

We follow normal rounding rules in Canada. 1, 2 round down to 0. 3, 4 round up to 5. 6, 7 round down to 5. 8, 9 round up to 10.

Can you game the system? Yes!

As a business, make sure all your prices (plus tax) come to a price ending in 3, 4, 8, or 9. When consumers buy a single item you'll get the rounding up (edit: if they pay cash) and make sweet, sweet profit. But if they buy more than one item, you're SOL on controlling the rounding.

As a consumer, you have way more control. First, pay with cash whenever the price will round down and you can probably "profit" 5 or so dollars a year. (Assuming you pay with cash on or two times a day, saving 1 to 2 cents each time.) Pay with credit or debit each time the price ~~will~~ would round up.

Second, you can get real fancy. You can learn tax rules in depth so you know what items will or won't be taxed and at what rate (we have federal and provincial taxes but they don't apply to everything and they don't follow the same rules on what is taxed.) But, you can use this info to always know what the final bill will be and always buy combinations of items that end in 2 or 7 (or 1 and 6 if you're lazy) and always pay cash. You can profit like $20 a year or something doing this.

In reality? No one gives a shit until that one rare time you're paying with cash and it rounds down. It's your lucky day and you do the Six Flags Man dance. It's like finding a penny and picking it up.

I'd answer this with 'we rebase the dollar when a coin can't buy a thing.' It should have happened decades ago. Here's my worked example.

A penny used to be a lot of money. You could buy actual things with a penny. I'm sure our oldest contributors can point to the day that a penny would get you a piece of candy. In my earliest days, I could get that same piece of candy with a nickel, but by my teens, that piece of candy would be a dime or even quarter. I remember when a bag of M&Ms cost $0.50, That became $1.00 around the 2000s, and is now $2.00.

A penny sitting on the ground was 'good luck' back in the day. I think that's because you could bend down, pick up that penny, head to the store, and plink that penny down and get something in exchange for it. Today, you can't plink down a single penny for anything. You can't even plink down 10 of these pennies or a dime and expect to get something today, with the cheapest things requiring 25 of these coins (or a single quarter). Not much luck if you need 25 of them to get a burst of sweetness.

If we did away with the penny, would anyone lose anything? That's 5 seconds at Federal Minimum Wage, and about 2 seconds at my city's minimum wage. It takes more time to reach down and pick up the penny than you'd earn working a minimum wage job, so arguments about 'Oh, prices will go higher if we eliminate the penny' ring hollow to me. There is functionally no difference between $7.99 and $8.00 pricewise. Even a hike of a $7.9 priced item to $8 isn't a bunch of money. We're almost to the point where you can't buy something with a single dollar bill. The time for the hundredth of that dollar bill passed a LONG time ago.

If they do it they way we did in Canada, that would round down to 95¢ and you’d get a nickel back

But Canadian money isn't real money