Uh Oh! Will The US Cent Go Bye-Bye As Well. OH The Horror!

I am sure that the Home Depot Canada decision was either encouraged or blessed by the guys in Georgia. If true, it should be assumed that they would have the same policy in the US. If Home Depot does it, so will Lowe's. I am certain that Walmart and every other big box retailer will do the same. It is just good business. The smaller shops, already being squeezed by the big boxes, would be foolish to do anything to upset their customers and drive them into the arms of their competitors.

I cannot say this enough, and I will keep saying it until everyone fully understands reality. For any retail business, losing one to four cents on a transaction (rounding down for their customer) is still better than what they lose to the banks for processing an electronic payment.

Take care of your customers or someone else will.

Conder, jbuck, you both have excellent points, but I'll rebut--if I may?

If most places choose to round up--and I think they would, because Earle also has an excellent point--then we wouldn't have much choice. HOWEVER . . . .

. . . I think the era of big-box stores is coming to an end. As they try to gain more of a political stranglehold on the country, people are becoming disillusioned and turning away, and then there's that great Leveler of the Playing Field--the Internet. (How many of y'all here sell coins for prices higher than you could get by going to a B&M, thanks to the Bay and similar places?) Thus, while they round up, local mom-n-pops would round down . . . gaining customers. I don't think this is a bad thing. A single HUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUGE corporation may employ more people than two smaller businesses, but if they're requiring working hours that allow you to have no life (including family time or, for stores that like to jag your hours around, a second job) outside their store, and not paying you a good wage, how good are those jobs, really? A return to entrepreneurship and small business is what we need, and this would be just one more step on the road to it.

I foresee lots of "rounding up to cover our costs, yah" when really it's just greed. BUT . . . I also see the local places seeing an edge, and rounding down.


Of course, this does raise the problem of how sales tax would be paid . . .

It's cheaper, but that doesn't mean they'll do it. Please allow me to demonstrate:

Circle K wanted to improve cashier efficiency. They had a certain amount set aside to do so. Here were their options:

a) Put us on a new operating system. Our system is very primitive, often slow, and frequently errors out.
b) Upgrade our credit/debit machines, many of which were purchased refurbished YEARS ago and often break down.
c) Upgrade our scanners, many of which ditto.
d) Use the money to pay for training for cashier efficiency.
e) Spend $200 per register to purchase coin-dispenser machines, refurbished, that will often break down or jam, get stolen in bad neighborhoods, and make it impossible to keep an accurate drawer count.


GUESS WHICH OPTION THEY PICKED.


If you picked any of the options that look like they make sense, please try again.

Think it was a fluke? Here's another one! The cost of the coffees we offered went up, and we had to decide to go to a new manufacturer or lose a couple of cents' profit (the cost went up by about .5 cents per bag of coffee; one bag makes one pot). Circle K:

a) Ate the couple of cents to keep customers happy with the range of flavor options
b) Asked for customer feedback before making a decision one way or the other
c) Completely without warning discontinued two of the most popular flavors and replaced them with totally dissimilar and relatively unpopular options, completely revamped the coffee line to save a few cents, then hurriedly went "wait, wait, WE LISTENED TO ALL YOUR ANGRY COMPLAINTS AND YOU CAN HAVE HAZELNUT BACK!" only to end up switching back to the first manufacturer to get back both hazelnut and cinnamon after losing thousands of dollars' worth of business from angry customers.


Again, if you picked either of the options that look like they make sense, please try again.


Big business is penny wise, pound foolish. They'll round up to get a few pennies and only change--maybe--when customers start leaving in droves.

This cynicism is rather depressing.

Here is my Two Cents worth (please excuse the pun!)

I like the idea near the beginning of this post of increasing the face value of the circulating coinage. But ONLY do it to the cent. Leave the dime alone; they are not losing money in the manufacture of that yet. Make the nickel of the same composition as the cent, except instead of plating it with copper do as the Canadians do and plate it with nickel. Create a new cent design (with Lincoln or without) and make them Two Cent Pieces. Change the face value of all existing cents to Two Cents, and keep the composition and weight the same. Yes, this will still mean that the "twent" (can't think of anything else to call it right now) will cost more that it's face to mint, but it will be a substantial savings over what they are losing right now. The nickel will still probably cost close to a nickel to mint, but that would also be a substantial savings. This will keep the zinc interests happy, (and the Congressional representatives of those interests) and also create a temporary boost to the economy when all of those jars full of $20 in pennies suddenly become $40. With this plan, the only consumer items that would no longer be able to be purchased would be things costing either one or Three Cents. Rounding up or down, and the chaos this might create, would not happen. Just my opinion.

On the subject of currency, my time spent overseas has given me much-welcomed insight.
In Europe for example, countries have changed denominations repeatedly for pragmatic reasons such as purchasing power and convenience, downgrading and eliminating denominations as needed. Really, does what made sense for commerce in 1870 make sense today? No, not really--including coins that were sized for precious metal content--which is completely absent today. I'm pretty sure if we got rid of coins with little intrinsic value, such as the cent and nickel, and sized down the rest--and got rid of paper $1 notes--people would simply adjust. It wouldn't kill the hobby--but make it more interesting to me. Well--that's my 10 cent opinion on the subject.

Earle, I have one correction to what you said. Having come through the public school system myself . . . it's not that they're more interested in politics, it's that they're more interested in money. We pay our teachers poorly while demanding that they teach to a stupid, one-size-fits-all test dreamed up by an administration that said stupid stuff like "Rarely is the question asked: is our children learning?" (Sorry, if you can't figure out what the two grammar mistakes in that sentence are, I don't want you setting educational standards for my children, get lost.) In my last three years of school I was routinely dragged out of normal classes for "test prep" classes and "test classes" (where instead of learning, you got to sit and fill in multiple-choice answers that didn't require you to think, just to vomit back facts). To this day I'm irked that I never did find out what actually happened at the Watergate Hotel because I had to go to a "remedial math test prep class" (it wasn't until I was in college that I read about Watergate--thanks, Mr. Bush and your Every Child Left Behind Act). And why do we demand this? Because the stupid, one-size-fits-all fact-vomit test determines how much money your school gets. As a result, do you know what classes get cut FIRST? The true essentials. Fine arts like music, drawing, and foreign language, all of which are shown to increase brain activity and ward off dementia (fact: the more languages you speak the less likely you are to develop Alzheimer's, which is why I'm still gamely trying to make German and Japanese my #3 and #4). Gym, which is especially vital for kids who live in the inner city where it may not be safe for them to go out and run around outside of school (and I don't mean "not safe" as in "oh no, Junior skinned his knee," I mean not safe as in "oh no, Junior just got shot") and often includes other components--my high school gym classes were taught half-and-half with health classes about proper nutrition, self-defense (for ladies), and a first-aid course after which we were all Red Cross certified.

English? No longer important, under Every Child Left Behind. When I was in college, in English 101, I remember my teacher handing back papers that were covered in red ink correcting sentences like these:

And then I told here that there car was broken but she did'nt listen, she said 'its ok I drove it yesterday".

He passed everybody's papers back, then held up mine. It had a single red mark on it--a spot where I missed a " mark. That was it--a single typo. He pointed at my paper, then at the class and said:

"You are wasting my time." That was it. We all stared up at him. He crossed his arms and kept going:

"The mistakes on your papers are almost unanimously things you should have learned in sixth grade or earlier. I can't believe I have to correct these things on college papers. At least two of those papers were peer-edited by someone who knows better. She's sitting in front of me. You ignored what she had to say because you thought you were so smart, so special, nobody could possibly know something you didn't. So if you want to sit here for fifteen weeks learning how to write a declarative sentence because you were too stupid to figure it out in middle school, tell me now. Because you are wasting your time, you are wasting my time, and more importantly--" He pointed at me, and I kind of tried to disappear into my chair. "You're wasting her time, and her money. She doesn't have a choice whether she's in this class or not. It's compulsory. And here she sits, paying to listen to me tell her things she already knows because you people can't wake up. Nina, you're excused. The next paper is on your syllabus and it's due in two weeks. Good job." And he handed me my paper and showed me the door. (And that is how I got out of taking an 8am class in my first semester.) I didn't attend class again until the final exam, which I aced. I got an A in the class. But I was lucky--my autism, my gift for language, saved me. I could have been one of those sheep writing those horrible, horrible sentences if I didn't love to read.


History? Not so much. I have peers who never learned about the Holocaust because it was considered more important to schedule test prep during that period. I know people for whom history was an elective class and you could choose between it and computer programming. (And on the flip side of that, both history and computer were required classes for me. Guess what--I couldn't take the computer class I really wanted to take because of Every Child Left Behind, which required me--someone already coding webpages and helping to run an e-business--to start with an entry-level class in order to complete the federal education requirements.)

If it's not science or math, it doesn't bring in money, so out it goes. Just like with everything else--no cash? Cash it out.

Posting a price at .99 or $19.99 is nothing more than a gimmick. It gives the illusion that something that costs $19.99 is a value compared to $20.00. Here in MI there is no tax on food or prescriptions.