No more new pennies

[mgk920]

If the result is not a factor of five, round up...

So, exactly how sales tax already rounds off?

Sales tax in my city is 7.5%.  If I go to the gas station and buy a drink that costs $1.79, the tax I owe should be 13.425¢.  But, of course, that 0.425¢ gets rounded off.  The State sure doesn't want to eat that!

Now, your total bill is $1.92.  'After', it will be $1.90.  Pretty easy to figure out.

Mike

[kphoger]

So, exactly how sales tax already rounds off?

Sales tax in my city is 7.5%.  If I go to the gas station and buy a drink that costs $1.79, the tax I owe should be 13.425¢.  But, of course, that 0.425¢ gets rounded off.  The State sure doesn't want to eat that!

Now, your total bill is $1.92.  'After', it will be $1.90.  Pretty easy to figure out.

Yep.  And if that drink is $1.89 instead, then the theoretical tax due is currently 14.175¢.  Of course, that gets rounded off too.

Now, my total is $2.03.  'After', it will be $2.05.  Pretty easy to figure out.

Two cents down in one instance, two cents up in the other.

[Scott5114]

The bill (888-page .pdf warning) only prohibits redesigning the dollar bill.  It doesn't say they can't stop printing them or remove them from circulation.

The law in question far predates that—it was passed during the early 2000s in response to the Sacajawea dollar. (I've dug it up once before, but it was long enough ago I can't quote chapter and verse.)

Will you please explain how that would be bad?  I get that 45¢ would be one quarter and four nickels instead of one quarter and two dimes, but that doesn't really seem like a big deal to me—certainly no worse than 44¢ right now being seven coins.

Because a roll of coins contains either 40 or 50 pieces. (For nickels, it's 40.) So you only need ten transactions involving four nickels and you've run through a whole roll, which means you have to close the window to get more nickels, which means customers start screaming. So much screaming. I can still hear it when I drift off to sleep sometimes...

Most cash drawers have enough space for a roll or two of extra change, but not enough space to hold enough rolls of nickels to get you through an 8 hour shift if you're using 4 of them per transaction.

With the current coin system, you will never have a transaction where you give away more than one nickel, meaning that your worst case scenario is having to get nickels every 40 transactions. You will also never have a transaction where you give away more than two dimes, meaning that your worst case scenario is having to get dimes every 25 transactions (50 dimes to the roll).

[kphoger]

So, then...  is there any way in which nickels don't suck?

[Scott5114]

So, then...  is there any way in which nickels don't suck?

Nope. They were always my least favorite coin. (Which is sad, because I sort of like Thomas Jefferson.)

(In case you were wondering what my least favorite denomination of paper money is—and I know you're all on tenterhooks for that information—probably the $50, followed close by the $5, but the latter is entirely due to Fed mismanagement rather than anything inherently wrong with the denomination itself.)

[hotdogPi]

Make $1 a coin, ramp up production of $2 bills so western Massachusetts doesn't get mad, and you'll still have plenty of Jeffersons.

[Jim]

All of the arguments against killing the penny I've ever heard (not just this thread) only mention non-problems or very solvable problems.

I also wonder if I shouldn't have cashed in huge quantities of pennies, as I have done in recent months.

[kphoger]

I also wonder if I shouldn't have cashed in huge quantities of pennies

Why?

[Jim]

I also wonder if I shouldn't have cashed in huge quantities of pennies

Why?

They probably won't be, but maybe they'd be worth more than a 1 cent each at some point.  In any case, it probably isn't going to make or break my future financial security.

[oscar]

I also wonder if I shouldn't have cashed in huge quantities of pennies, as I have done in recent months.

Depends on how many of them were bronze (the only ones with a melt value higher than 1 cent). I have a non-huge quantity of bronze pennies, which I picked out of my pocket change as I acquired them largely to check whether I needed new glasses, then spent the zinc pennies (current melt value of only about 0.7 cent each) at self-serve checkouts. If you didn't do that, the mostly-zinc ones in your stash probably had an average melt value less than 1 cent.

Even that depends on whether the Treasury repeals its regulation against melting pennies, intended to maintain the supply of pennies in circulation, once it decides not to keep pennies in circulation.

[GaryV]

An interesting conundrum would be that if sales taxes need to round off, who would eat that? The State sure doesn't want to.

What does the bolded phrase mean?

Every item in your shopping cart could be priced to the nearest nickel (or dime or quarter if that's the smallest coin). But sales tax could very well add a non-nickel number of cents to the total bill. The total including tax is then rounded - who gets or doesn't get that rounded-off number of cents?

[1995hoo]

So, then...  is there any way in which nickels don't suck?

They don't have milled sides. The only other current US coins that don't have them are the penny and the dollar. Some sort of non-milled coin is nice for scraping things like scratch-and-lose lottery tickets or similar.

[MikeTheActuary]

Every item in your shopping cart could be priced to the nearest nickel (or dime or quarter if that's the smallest coin). But sales tax could very well add a non-nickel number of cents to the total bill. The total including tax is then rounded - who gets or doesn't get that rounded-off number of cents?

I assume the retailers simply submit a report of total pre-tax sales to the relevant tax police and cut a check for the relevant percentage to cover sales tax.

As long as they follow the standard mathematics rules of rounding, it should be a break-even proposition.

[kalvado]

I also wonder if I shouldn't have cashed in huge quantities of pennies

Why?

They probably won't be, but maybe they'd be worth more than a 1 cent each at some point.  In any case, it probably isn't going to make or break my future financial security.

Go to the bank and ask for a few rolls...

[Henry]

I wonder how we'll feel when we've spent up the last penny in our lives...

[kphoger]

Every item in your shopping cart could be priced to the nearest nickel cent. But sales tax could very well add a non-nickel non-cent number of cents mills to the total bill. The total including tax is then rounded - who gets or doesn't get that rounded-off number of cents mills?

So, yeah, just like how sales currently rounds off.

[MikeTheActuary]

I wonder how we'll feel when we've spent up the last penny in our lives...

The only times I recall having used American currency since pandemic lockdowns are:

• Tips (wheelchair pushers for my wife at the airport, valet parking, etc.)
• Lottery tickets
• "Green stamps" for requesting QSL cards for amateur radio contacts

I've been home from London for just over two weeks, and I still haven't bothered to swap the also-unnecessary Pound notes for American dollars in my wallet.  (I did make a point of making a couple of purchases with Pounds and Icelandic Kroná for the purpose of getting some coins as souvenirs...)

I do, however, expect to need to use cash occasionally when I visit Germany in a few weeks, although even there I understand that enough places have started accepting plastic/contactless in the past few years that I could do without but-for public pay toilets.