Rounding Pennies

[robnisch]

of course they will accept pennys, as long as they're around. Why piss off customers.

Because the boss says so.

Handling withdrawn currency will rapidly become a massive PITA for retailers; Very few will want to do it - and even if they do accept them, they won't allow them as an alternative to rounding up; If the total comes to $1.03, they will expect $1.05, and will not accept a dollar bill and three pennies. They might take a dollar bill and five pennies, if the owner of the store permits it, but what employee is going to risk getting fired for having a short till over this issue?

If you own a store, you can do as you please. You could just accept $1 in payment for $1.03 worth of your stock - that's entirely up to you. You could choose to accept 50¢, or to just give the stuff away, too. But if you are an employee, you do as the boss directs.

My last job was in retail. I never got anal about a few cents. There was usually enough in the "leave a penny take a penny tray".
Most people just left pennies and nickels for the next person.

 

[Bronzeage]

Exactly. And similarly the penny will remain legal tender at 1¢, although no longer exchangeable for goods or services.

This isn't hard. Nor new. We have been doing it for 34 years.

Although US Federal law does not require private businesses to accept cash in any denomination, the definition of legal tender is any form of payment that must be accepted debts, taxes, fees, etc. This includes all US coins and currency. There are an estimated $300 billion pennies in circulation. That's at least enough to build an AI data center.

 

[unapologetic]

Because the boss says so.

Most bosses I've met have more respect for customers than employees. Employees are expected to go out of their way to service coustomers.
Why should handeling pennys be any more hassel than handeling coupons? No problem at all for the suit in the office.
Nobody complains about accepting dollor coins or $2 bills. Which are rarely seen.
Giving pennys as change could become a problem, no problem to accept them.

 

[unapologetic]

Handling withdrawn currency will rapidly become a massive PITA for retailers; Very few will want to do it - and even if they do accept them, they won't allow them as an alternative to rounding up; If the total comes to $1.03, they will expect $1.05, and will not accept a dollar bill and three pennies. They might take a dollar bill and five pennies, if the owner of the store permits it, but what employee is going to risk getting fired for having a short till over this issue?

If the register says $1.03, DEMANDING $1.05 is fraud. Rounding is for convience. Rounding can not be demanded if you have the exact change. And would ANGER customers.
If they can accept a bill and 5 pennys, they can accept the bill and 3 pennys. Anyway, accepting 2 extra pennys will not short the till.

Pennys are not 'withdrawn'. They just ain't making them anymore. They will get scarcer, but businesses can always deposit them in their bank. So why wouldn't they accept them? No more hassel than any other change.

 

[unapologetic]

@robnisch
How did you get change for your store? In rolls from the bank, right?
Did you ever have a surplus at the end of the day? Did you deposit/return change to the bank?
Was the process any trouble?

​

 

[robnisch]

@robnisch
How did you get change for your store? In rolls from the bank, right?
Did you ever have a surplus at the end of the day? Did you deposit/return change to the bank?
Was the process any trouble?

​

We had a safe that had a running balance of I think was $1000. It was stocked with change that could be used to keep the tills well stocked.
The owners would go to the bank get change as needed.

 

[unapologetic]

Thanks.
Follow-up question.
Did you ever have a surplus of change at the end of the day? Did you deposit/return change to the bank?
Was the process any trouble?

 

[Swammerdami]

... obsolete coins ...
Prohibiting the impossible is unnecessary; The smallest legal coin in their till will be 5¢, so returning 3¢ would entail the use of something other than US currency. Perhaps they might persuade some customers to accept shirt buttons...

I tend to interpret words too literally. I assumed that "obsolete coins" referred to obsolete coins. I assumed that "smallest legal coin" referred to the lowest denomination of legal coin. Great consternation followed. I apologize.

Cashier's tills are designed with bins for coins. Perhaps the extremal bin will be used for shirt buttons as bilby suggests. I find it more likely, at least for the early years of this Great Change, that some retailers will cater to customers by accepting pennies and placing them into the "shirt-button bin!"

There are, after all, as many as $3 billion in legal tender pennies outstanding. Americans are not a particularly smart people and many will flock to stores that return 2 pennies from a $9.98 purchase, rather than "stealing" the customer's hard-earned money!

There are an estimated $300 billion pennies in circulation. That's at least enough to build an AI data center.

I believe a divide-by-100 was elided here. 300 billion pennies would be enough only for a small $3 billion center.

A single 1-gigawatt (GW) AI data center capacity can cost roughly $35–$60 billion, according to industry analysts.

 

[steve_bank]

'A penny saved is a penny earned'

 

[Tigers!]

BTW, Australian 1¢ and 2¢ coins are still legal tender.

As an aside I found a 2c coin in 2024 in the carpark of the nearest train station. Had not seen one in the wild for about 3 decades. Have no idea how it got there. Showed it to my daughter, she was born 7 years after they were withdrawn. She had never held one.

 

[Spacetime Inhabitant]

"The price tag says $1.03, so I will only accept $1.05 in currently circulating US notes and coins,

More likly stores will just price their goods at the nearist 5c. and round the sales tax.
On the other hand ... Gas stations still price gas at 9/10 of a cent. And we've never had 1/10 cent coins.

The store simply won't have any, and very likely neither will you. If you do, the store won't accept it.

of course they will accept pennys, as long as they're around. Why piss off customers.
Just take the pennys and deposit them in the bank at the end of the day, as usual. Either banks or collecters will retire them.
Stores may not accept more yhan 100 pennys. But banks will accept any amount. (but make you roll them.)

Handling withdrawn currency will rapidly become a massive PITA for retailers; Very few will want to do it - and even if they do accept them, they won't allow them as an alternative to rounding up; If the total comes to $1.03, they will expect $1.05, and will not accept a dollar bill and three pennies. They might take a dollar bill and five pennies, if the owner of the store permits it, but what employee is going to risk getting fired for having a short till over this issue?

If the register says $1.03, DEMANDING $1.05 is fraud. Rounding is for convience. Rounding can not be demanded if you have the exact change. And would ANGER customers.
If they can accept a bill and 5 pennys, they can accept the bill and 3 pennys. Anyway, accepting 2 extra pennys will not short the till.

Pennys are not 'withdrawn'. They just ain't making them anymore. They will get scarcer, but businesses can always deposit them in their bank. So why wouldn't they accept them? No more hassel than any other change.

In Australia one still gets prices that are like $1.03, and naturally prices that end with 9 such as .99 or .49 are common. Looking at some of my recent supermarket receipts, most prices end in 0, with occasional one ending in 5. It is generally items on specia,l or fruit and vegetables after weighing, that can produce a price ending in other amounts. For instance, my receipt from today has two items on special reduced price at 2.64 each, and nectarines at 2.01.With supermarket total bill, if paying with a card will be charged the exact price, and if paying cash that price will be rounded up or down. No one uses 1 and 2 cent coins anymore.

 

[Tharmas]

I don’t carry cash, although I should probably carry a little, not only for charity, but for cash tips, like for a parking valet. My wife on the other hand carries lots of cash and likes to pay for items to the penny. She is sometimes frustrated by clerks, who seem to be mostly young, when she buys an item costing $3.29 and hands the clerk $5.29. The clerk freezes and becomes confused. And they can’t make change anymore. The machine does that for them.

 

[robnisch]

Thanks.
Follow-up question.
Did you ever have a surplus of change at the end of the day? Did you deposit/return change to the bank?
Was the process any trouble?

Extra change was sold to the "safe". Change was almost never deposited. some banks charge a fee to deposit change.

 

[southernhybrid]

I don’t carry cash, although I should probably carry a little, not only for charity, but for cash tips, like for a parking valet. My wife on the other hand carries lots of cash and likes to pay for items to the penny. She is sometimes frustrated by clerks, who seem to be mostly young, when she buys an item costing $3.29 and hands the clerk $5.29. The clerk freezes and becomes confused. And they can’t make change anymore. The machine does that for them.

I do the same thing. Today I bought a few treats for the residents where I volunteer and it came to 5.17 and I had exact change, but I know what you mean about the young cashiers. We've failed at teaching basic math and English. I include English because when I was still working, I had to sign off on the aides notes and very few of them could write a complete sentence. I'm not talking about misspelled words or even grammar so much. Their notes rarely made any sense. That was back in the day when medical notes were hand written.

My first job was in retail back when we had to know how to make correct change without any help. Sad, what's happened since those days. But, no worries. AI will take care of it all for us.

 

[ideologyhunter]

I don’t carry cash, although I should probably carry a little, not only for charity, but for cash tips, like for a parking valet. My wife on the other hand carries lots of cash and likes to pay for items to the penny. She is sometimes frustrated by clerks, who seem to be mostly young, when she buys an item costing $3.29 and hands the clerk $5.29. The clerk freezes and becomes confused. And they can’t make change anymore. The machine does that for them.

I love it when they pull out their smart phone to use the calculator feature to figure the change. When my total is, say, $15.50, I'll pay with $21, just to get a five back and not a mess of nasty-looking ones. I always say, "I'll make it out of $21," and the young set who are new on the job often give me looks like I'm out of my mind. That's when the smart phone really comes out. (They have often already rung me up on the dollar amount they assume I'll use -- which is, yep, one dollar less than what I give them. But gotta have that phone.)
Related phenom: the pool director at the Y told me that some of her lifeguards cannot tell time from an analog clock. Holy Christ, I am getting old.

 

[steve_bank]

I had no idea pennies could be so controversial.

 

[Elixir]

I don’t carry cash, although I should probably carry a little, not only for charity, but for cash tips, like for a parking valet. My wife on the other hand carries lots of cash and likes to pay for items to the penny. She is sometimes frustrated by clerks, who seem to be mostly young, when she buys an item costing $3.29 and hands the clerk $5.29. The clerk freezes and becomes confused. And they can’t make change anymore. The machine does that for them.

I love it when they pull out their smart phone to use the calculator feature to figure the change. When my total is, say, $15.50, I'll pay with $21, just to get a five back and not a mess of nasty-looking ones. I always say, "I'll make it out of $21," and the young set who are new on the job often give me looks like I'm out of my mind. That's when the smart phone really comes out. (They have often already rung me up on the dollar amount they assume I'll use -- which is, yep, one dollar less than what I give them. But gotta have that phone.)
Related phenom: the pool director at the Y told me that some of her lifeguards cannot tell time from an analog clock. Holy Christ, I am getting old.

Most of our guards are ex-competitive swimmers. So they can at least read the sweep hand.

 

[Swammerdami]

Thailand has six denominations of coin:
* 10 baht -- aluminum bronze center, cupronickel ring
* 5 baht -- cupronickel (silver colored)
* 2 baht -- aluminum bronze (gold colored)
* 1 baht -- cupronickel (silver colored)
* 0.50 baht -- copper-plated steel (copper colored)
* 0.25 baht -- copper-plated steel (copper colored)

(The early 2 baht coins were cupronickel and hard to distinguish from the slightly smaller 1 baht coins. I've not noticed any for a while. The easiest way to distinguish them was that some commoner wrote "2" on the coin with a marking pen.)

The two small coins, worth respectively slightly more and slightly less than a U.S. penny, are seldom seen. Post offices sell small envelopes for 1½ baht each: I always bought an even number lest I be cheated out of ½ baht. (I never thought to bring a ½-baht coin along to see if they'd accept it.) While you'll only see whole numbers in most venues, big chains like 7-Eleven do have unrounded prices. If your purchase comes to ฿100.25 and you don't have exact change, you're expected to come up with ฿101. And then do NOT expect any change if the teller has no tiny coins in her till. Occasionally the up-country 7-Eleven which I visited regularly waived the ฿0.25 with the receipt containing some blurb extolling 7-Eleven's generosity!

These days, most payments are made by pointing one's phone at a QR-code. Such payments are not limited by coin availability. As an experiment I confirmed that I can send someone ฿0.01 (about 300 microdollars U.S.) with no service charge.

Thailand has a 7% VAT, but you almost^* never need worry about that. The price you're quoted -- usually a round number -- INCLUDES the VAT. On the receipt the VAT is shown as 6.542% (.07/1.07) of the quoted total price.

* - Exceptions include some of the most expensive restaurants and hotels. I guess they figure their customers won't notice or care about taxes and service charges added on here and there.

More likly stores will just price their goods at the nearist 5c. and round the sales tax.

That's difficult to do in California. If you're selling goods from a van, the tax rate will change when you enter or leave a district which needs to pay off its library or sewage bonds, and a third rate may apply if you deliver to an address a few blocks away. Whether an orange drink is taxed may depend on the precise amount of its fruit content.

 

[robnisch]

I heard on NPR that many states are looking at bills to deal with the PENNY problem. WTF!
Can't us Mericans do something simple?
In the voice of the late great Sam Kinison " It's a Fucking Penny".

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

Pennies are legal tender. Of course, it might be cheaper for a store to just throw the coins in the trash.

Yes, in the United States, a private business can generally refuse to accept pennies (and cash in general) for transactions. While U.S. coins are "legal tender," no federal law requires a private business to accept them, allowing businesses to set their own payment policies, such as rounding cash transactions to the nearest five cents

From a search about 4% of Americans are 'unbaked' without a bank.

I carry cash because some places do not take plastic

It is weird how some places insist on cash (Northfield Casino/Theater) and others don't (Playhouse Square). If I want to get a shirt for my daughter when go to a concert, I'm uncertain which payment options to bring. Often, I'll have a cow with me to barter just in case. I used to take out cash when going to the road course for races, but now everything is card.

I heard on NPR that many states are looking at bills to deal with the PENNY problem. WTF!
Can't us Mericans do something simple?
In the voice of the late great Sam Kinison " It's a Fucking Penny".

Dude, we couldn't manage going to a measuring system that was easier than the one we had in place.