Word! When I signed up years ago as an AMEX merchant I opted for a flat rate of $5/month instead of a percentage plus fees. There are some months when I get no AMEX sales at all, but overall I pay less than 1 percent on AMEX sales. If your car salesmen opted for the flat rate it cost him $5 to make an instant $11,400, and that's assuming no other AMEX sales all month! That's why merchants accept cards - they increase sales. Also, they don't bounce!
You must have been paying way too much for that truck. Every time I have tried to use one of my rebate cards at a car dealer after I negotiated a price they wanted to renegotiate the deal.
A question was posted: "What do people who can't afford cell phones do?"
I'm A civilian employee for A large midwestern police dept. and when "street people" are busted for outstanding warrants etc. about the first thing that comes out of there pocket when our officers shake them down is the cell phone. And what makes you think that there are no poor people in Finland or Japan?
H.R.
I remember a news item from NPR about the way coin purses have been rediscovered by young Italians since they converted to more coins from printed money.
Huh? Plenty of vending machines around NY/NJ take dollar coins. Particularly the transit TVM (ticket vending machines).
Atlanta's airport has a very high tech Coca-Cola vending machine (not surprising since Atlanta is CocaCola's HQ).
- credit card payment, even the new contactless cards
- large flat video screen playing Coke commercials
A NJ highway rest stop had credit card payments on the ice cream machine with instructions for how to buy more than one item on the same transaction.
So it's here already.
They ought to do away with all coins and make all money as bills. Even pennies. :-)
The seller with the lower price will sell more merchandise. That's simply the way the market works. If Seller A's prices are consistently $.05 higher than Seller B's prices, Seller B will sell more stuff. If that were not the case, then how do you account for the razor thin margins of grocery stores?
Saving *who* money? No matter how much money the gov't supposedly *saves* it never give the
*savings* back to whom its been stolen.
Think of it as preventing an expenditure that need not be incurred.
It's not uncommon for a dealer to want to renegotiate even if you offer to pay cash. There's profit in financing.
But I think HeyBub's point was that a dealer knows that the odds of someone returning with a check in that kind of scenario are not high. Better to sell the car for $11,400 on the spot rather than risk not selling it at all.
All else being equal, the lower price gets the sale. Obviously, if one store offers a better deal in terms of location, ambience, etc, etc, etc, then the equation changes. The buying experience is part of what you're buying. The consumer may feel that he's getting a better 'product' at one store even though the widgets, themselves, are identical. But that's a whole 'nuther discussion.
The place where a couple cents either way will make a difference is in a mass retailer like a grocery store and you can bet they will round some products up and others down, making roughly the same amount of money and offering enough price points to get you in the store. I do all the grocery shopping at our house and seeing the prices between stores is an eye opener. If you were willing to go to two or three stores, only catching the sales you can save money but if you shop at any single store it is a wash.
So?
Rounding UP makes the calculations easier for everyone. At worse, it will cost comsumers $.04 per item.
Add it up if you will. The most lazy and stupid consumer might pay an extra $50 the first year. After a year things will sort out.
>
??? That's a new one on me. How is rounding UP any easier or less difficult than rounding DOWN?
For reasons of sanity, the law should not dictate *anything* with regard to prices except that pennies will no longer be produced. The retailers will then round up, down, or whatever other direction the consumers decide to support. Many of us are old enough to remember the disaster created by the government pricing laws of the 1970's.
Recommendations that anything be "rounded" up OR down to the nearest nickel tells me somebody skipped class the day rounding was taught. Rounding is to the NEAREST DECIMAL POSITION, not to the nearest half decimal position! If you eliminate the penny you must eliminate the nickel - it resides in the same decimal position as the penny. Or are you going to tell me all the accounting systems out there already know how to "round" to the nearest nickel without having to be modified? I think somebody needs to dust off their 5th grade arithmetic book - the topic doesn't even rise to the level of math.
"things will sort out" - WHAT could that ever mean?
But if we DID eliminate the penny and nickel:
Having programmed accounting systems in a past life I can see a wonderful world of opportunity opening up for crooks. The rounding/truncating to the nearest decimal position of $.1 in a multi-million transaction a day, or even hour, system could feed enormous wealth to a hidden slush fund. You sometimes hear about schemes where the fraction of pennies truncated are accumulated in a hidden account? Well think 10 times that in terms of what would be truncated in a $.10 system. Fortunately we can rest assured no one would be that dishonest...
What we have works, sort of. If anything needs to be changed I would think backing up the currency with something of real value rather than promises would be a good start.
Yep -- and methinks it was you.
Not true. Rounding can be to any arbitrary regular interval: the nearest dime, nearest nickel, nearest quarter, whatever.
Absolute nonsense.
And how many accounting systems do you suppose are capable of rounding to the nearest *dime* without being modified?
I quite agree; you certainly do.
I usually tell cashiers "no pennies" and they sometimes round up and sometimes round down.
Don't make no steenkin' difference to me.
Alan Moorman
Don't be foolishly argumentative!
When a cashier round up or down to accommodate the "No pennies" request, they ALWAYS round to the nearest nickel.
Simple.
No sweat.
No steenkin' "DECIMAL POINT" math.
Alan Moorman
The only real answer would be to revalue the dollar. Increase its value by a factor of ten. Essentially, push the decimal point one position to the left on all prices - overnight. A penny now buys what a dime bought yesterday, a dime now buys what a dollar bought. A 50 cent candy bar is now a nickel. Gasoline is 23.9 cents per gallon, a gallon of milk, a loaf of bread, and a lb of butter are 20 cents each, a McDonald's burger is a dime, large fries about 15 cents, minimum wage is 62 cents an hour, a newspaper is a nickel, a lb of ground beef is about a quarter, a haircut is a buck and a half, a barrel of crude is about $5, the median price of a single family home is about $20,000, a new car about $2,000, cross country airfare about $50, a movie ticket is 75 cents, etc, etc, etc.
Best of all - we keep the penny!
A few years ago, when much of Europe switched to a unified currency (the euro) they researched the issue and concluded that it would save printing costs if they eliminated the smaller bills. I think the smallest bill they issue is the 5euro (about equivalent to 5 dollars) and everything smaller is coinage. It seems to work well for them, and I'd just as soon not be hauling around a wad of tattered ones, that probably last about 12 months before needing to be replaced.
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