They did it again!

[Rich Greenberg]

Actually there is no reason whatsoever to change any of the marked prices of individual items. Where the rounding will take place is at the checkout, where the prices are added up, sales tax applied, and then that total is rounded up or down IF you are paying cash. If you are writing a check or using plastic, the total in odd cents goes in and then shows up on your statement.

Just because there are no longer any pennies in circulation doesn't restrict anyone from paying an amount not an even 5 cent multiple unless you are paying cash. Then its rounded.

[Do your worst. Flame shield in place.] :-)

[<aemeijers]

Even if the feds and banks expend the labor to pull them from circulation, there are probably 50 years worth of pennies sitting in sock drawers and coffee cans all over the US.

Of course, people would probably avoid spending them unless they had to, since they would now be &#39;collectible&#39;.

Screw rounding- I&#39;ll leave the stuff on the counter and walk out if they try that, unless it is in my favor.

aem sends...

aem sends...

[Nate Nagel]

Get a grip... let&#39;s say hypothetically that you make $25 an hour. If it takes you more than 1.44 seconds to pick up a penny, it&#39;s not worth your time.

I&#39;m obviously not allowing for taxes etc. but you get the idea. It&#39;s not going to get any better in the future, either.

nate

[davesvideo]

Not that it really makes much difference, but, rounding by fives seems more fair than decimal rounding. In decimal there is a middle (number 5,) and there has to be a convention wether to round it up or down. Between 5 and 10 cents there are an even number, so 6 and 7 are rounded down to 5 and 8 an 9 are rounded up.

Dave

[Tim Smith]

I don&#39;t think it has to be a regular interval. E.g., "round to the nearest power of two" would be a perfectly well-defined and acceptable request. Or "round to the nearest prime number".

[gfretwell]

Great point. We have been buying gas priced to the 1/10h of a cent for the best part of a century and there are not any "mil" coins.

[Jim Yanik]

[e-mail] wrote in news: [e-mail]:

Yes.After reading his very sensible post,I had to smack my forehead and ask myself "why didn&#39;t*I* think of that?". DUH....

[YouDontNeedToKnow]

Instead of hauling around a wad of tattered bills, if you lived in Europe you&#39;d be hauling around a batch of HEAVY pocket-busting coinage. (Think Seinfeld where Kramer tries to pay for a pizza (calzone) with his accumulated small change.) The Europeans are pretty smart about lots of things but this isn&#39;t one of them.

As to the penny, if people really wanted to eliminate it they&#39;d have done so already. It&#39;s quite feasible for the merchants to round up or down or even to round always in the customer&#39;s favor thereby not incurring any complaints but they don&#39;t. I only have one place, a fish store, where the merchant effectively lops off the last digit and sometimes even more. I&#39;ve had totals of (say) $24.37 and he has asked for $24.00. But this is a rarity. And the fish store is an upscale super-expensive establishment.

Try it yourself. Go to the supermarket and spend (say) $3.51. Tender $4.00 and watch while the cashier gives you exactly 49 cents change. If they don&#39;t have enough pennies they&#39;ll sometimes ask you if you have one cent. No just giving you two quarters. So contrary to the "put &#39;em in a big jar" crowd I find it highly advantageous (not to mention less lazy) to try and pay the exact amount of the bill which necessitates carrying and using change. After all that&#39;s what it&#39;s for.

For those who say the "change jar" is a way of saving I suggest they look into the concept of "present value".

[John Gilmer]

I suspect that the Feds will quickly tell banks to NOT cut checks for other that multiples of $.05.

I do have some D.R.I.P.s that carry the number of shares to 5 decimal points. BUT they always round to the $.01 when the dividend is calculated. That&#39;s the number that&#39;s reported to the I.R.S.

Un huh. But the transaction is rounded UP to the nearest $.01. Likewise when you buy ONE of something that&#39;s 3/$1.00 it&#39;s rounded UP.

When the government mandates that bank accounts be rounded, that calculation may well used "standard rules the 1,2 rounding down and 3,4 rounding up.

[gfretwell]

The only time they ever have to do any rounding at all is if you are getting change in cash.

[John Gilmer]

You can say that all you want, but the banking system doesn&#39;t permit transfers of a fractions of a cent. The system now works down to one cent.

Were the feds to want to get rid of the $.01 coin, they would also require the banks to bar transfers measured smaller than $.05.

If you think some "wise guy" banker would refuse to go along, you don&#39;t understand the banking system.

[Usenet2007]

Huh? I live in a country where the one and two cent coins were eliminated a long time ago. And last year, the five cent coins were eliminated. Those changes resulted in rounding for CASH payments.

However, if I pay by cheque or bank card, it is done at the exact amount.

For example, supermarket checkouts display an exact price, to the cent. Paying cash results in a rounded price. Paying by cheque or card results in the exact price.

I am perfectly free to do cheque or electronic transactions with the last digit lower than the smallest coin (ten cents.) The banks are perfectly free to, say, pay me interest with the last digit of less than ten cents, to my savings account.

[Tockk]

I read (somewhere) that the penny is worth about 1.2 cents in material. If material costs continue to rise, they&#39;re gonna have to find something else to manufacture it out of (plastic?) or else discontinue it. Either way, you might want to start stockpiling all your pennies now, in the eventuality that you&#39;ll be able to sell them for a profit.

[Bob]

I read (somewhere) that the penny is worth about 1.2 cents in material. If material costs continue to rise, they&#39;re gonna have to find something else to manufacture it out of (plastic?) or else discontinue it. Either way, you might want to start stockpiling all your pennies now, in the eventuality that you&#39;ll be able to sell them for a profit.

According to comments on the coin collecting ng, there is a recent law making it ilegal to melt pennys, I guess due to the expense of making new ones.

Bob

[John Gilmer]

What can I say. In the US you just can&#39;t write a check for $10.005 and expect it to clear as written. Most likely it would be taken as $10.

(Believe it or not, the commercial code permits modification of the amount under certain circumstances.)

Well, good for you. Frankly, I think your bank regulators made a mistake.

>

[Rich Greenberg]

John, Wake up and smell the roses. Nobody except you has suggested that you can make a transaction for a fraction of a cent. What everybody else agrees on is that even with no pennies in circulation, you can still write a check or make a credit/debit card transaction for an integer number of cents which is not a multiple of 5 cents.

[John Gilmer]

You miss the point.

The government can set rules about what the smallest increment may be transferred. Right now it is $.01. The government would simply change that to $.05.

Well, "everybody else" is wrong. If you permit checks to be cut for $10.03 then folks will expect to cash them for $10.03. That alone will maintain the demand for the $.01 piece. And that&#39;s why any rational approach to getting rid of the $.01 piece would require that the banks stop accepting checks to the nearest $.01 and that the banks start keeping accounts to the nearest $.05.

[Doug Miller]

Certainly they *could*. That they *would* is nothing more than an unsupported assertion on your part.

[Rich Greenberg]

Sure, they could, but IMHO it is very unlikely they would do so.

We have the examples posted here that in other countries where the smallest coin had been removed that non-cash transactions are still done and processed in multiples of that coin&#39;s value.

[John Gilmer]

Well, sport, if they didn&#39;t the demand for the $.01 coin would continue and the withdrawal of the $.01 would not stick.

Like it or not, if the government wants folks to change their currency habits they have to eliminate both the demand and the supply for the "old ways."

That&#39;s how the UK did it over 20 years ago.

With TWO false starts with the $1 coin, I suspect the US will think a little harder.

If the government let&#39;s the banking system continue with the $.01 they will not get rid of the $.01 coin. Perhaps private persons may produce them (if a $.01 isn&#39;t formally "legal" then it can&#39;t be illegal to make $.01 sized tokens.)