Old Days Of Spending 50 Cents And 1.00 Coins?

From the Mint website:


It's a pretty open statement, if a store chooses to round everything then effectively they are not using pennies

I assume like australia is. Credit/debit the price will be charged to the penny. But if cash, the price is 5.00 5.01 5.02 it will be $5, 5.03 5.04 5.05 5.06 5.07 it will be 5.05. Quite convenient actually. I don't know if its because they use 20 and 50 cents instead of quarters but even with the giant coins here, I never seem to have a huge pocketful of coins compared to back home...I also like that the price you see on the tag is what you pay, no need to guess or add up tax and fiddle more in the lineup.

1) You see a few halves, if you know where to look. Ask at a bank, the tellers tend to put them asside.

2) I am pretty sure a business will have to take pennies, to the max of 25 per purchase.

Also, a store will not be allowed to use swiss rounding to avoid taking them. This would mean the store is making 1-2 cents per transaction half the time. All stores be be required to take exact change in lieu of rounding if the customer so desires.

It's up to the laws of Canada - not the customer or the business. The Currency Act has not been amended and therefore it still applies. Businesses will be required by law to accept up to 25 pennies as legal tender.

"Currency Act
R.S.C., 1985, c. C-52
(2) A payment in coins referred to in subsection (1) is a legal tender for no more than the following amounts for the following denominations of coins:

(a) forty dollars if the denomination is two dollars or greater but does not exceed ten dollars;
(b) twenty-five dollars if the denomination is one dollar;
(c) ten dollars if the denomination is ten cents or greater but less than one dollar;
(d) five dollars if the denomination is five cents; and
(e) twenty-five cents if the denomination is one cent."

bolding added for emphasis.

It's going to be a few more years before you can find a business that doesn't know what a penny is.

But to your point, ignorance is rampant and likely why someone posed the question of which business would be the first to refuse to accept a penny.

Agreed. Laws are laws but not always reality.

But if I were a customer at your business and your refused to accept pennies, I'd walk away

It will be interesting to see what happens when that happens because it will. Someone will try to pay $1.83 for a coffee and the business will demand $1.85. As it is now, the law is on the side of the consumer to pay 1.83 if they so choose.

At the risk of . (I know, it's too late)

I understand that you're just spit-balling but I think your premise is wrong. The government is not taking a side; they are soft selling guidelines.

Businesses are not going to open on Feb 4 and suddenly tell customers that they won't accept pennies and then point them to a budget document. If they do, they are going to be out of business pretty quickly because people will simply avoid them.

The government is targeting to collect some 6 billion pennies in the next few years. The majority of those will be via transactions between consumers and businesses. People are going to continue to spend pennies and businesses are going to continue to accept them for a long time.

But, it will be in the news sometime in early February that someone tried to use a penny at Tim Hortons or the local convenience store and they were refused because some cashier heard that pennies are no longer money or some such nonsense. To paraphrase the great philosopher Ron White, you can't legislate stupid.