It's Time To Kill The Penny: Fmr US Mint Director

Drop the cent and everyone will just turn on the "round to the .05" setting that is already programmed into their cash register.

If you don't and you try to always round up manually,you are going to find yourself having to explain to nearly every customer why you are charging them MORE than what the cash register shows. It will cause delays (angry customers), you will be telling them you are deliberately overcharging them (ANGRY customers), and your competitor down the street who lets the machine round will be faster and in the long run his customers bills will be lower. Which store would you shop at? (loss of customers)

This is always implied when I say kill the cent. I would love to see them stay NIFC.


Sales tax is already rounded. Do not confuse cents with percents. Also, Charleston has an 8.5% sales tax and it works out just fine with out a Half Cent in the mix.

You know, fellow CCF members, you must realize that it doesn't matter what a former mint director or the whole lot of us think. It is in the hands of the US government, and it does not seem that they are pushing anywhere in that direction.

In Canada and the Netherlands, they've dropped the 1c for years. Everybody rounds and nobody cares. Let Hollywood continue to make movies about people accumulating millions in rounding errors. Nobody still cares.

All the money the gov't wastes I think the cent is not going to solve the national debt. If they can pay 1 time Senators and congressmen Life time retirement checks they can certainly keep the cent for collectors and especially young coin collectors!

But payments made digitally (e.g. credit card) wouldn't be rounded. It's only tangible cash payments that would be because there would be no cent coins.

Business owners would most likely pay their tax to the state digitally, by direct transfer or by check. None of those would be rounded. Even if they were to pay with cash, I'd expect that they would total the tax amounts for all of their transactions and round that.

You are way off. Every Walmart price ends in 8 and K-mart (remember them?) ends in 7.

I get what you are saying on the rounding of less than 1%.

I get that anything 1 and 2 would round down and 3 and 4 would round up. It is simple, agreed.

I understand how it would work.

The only thing I am saying is that I believe over time there would be upward pressure on the rounding for convenience sake. I've seen Lombra's studies (paraphrased) and I've seen summaries of arguments against his studies. I think that most Americans would be suspicious of the move still as likely being regressive those that tend to pay cash for most transactions.