Abolishing the Cent: new developments

Just ask the cashier that’s asks you to round up if they will round down for you.

 

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My question has always been on the taxation end. State and local in particular. In PA, it's 6% so by their reasoning of rounding up I'd be paying ten percent. Twenty if I buy something in the county to the north. Good grief, didn't we fight a war over this at some point?

 

Do... do you always spend your money a single dollar at a time?

 

Think a little harder. The total sale will be rounded, not the tax rate.

 

And even then, only when paying cash. Credit/debit/check transactions can still be made out in cents. The overall effect of this will be minimal; I find it weird people are even still making this argument that it will have some major detrimental effect. It's been done in many other countries, and it's had negligible effect on actual commerce in those places. Especially since the use of cash is declining world-wide.

 

National Association of Convenience Stores

It's always been suspect accounting when the mint wants to complain about collector coins; more of the overhead seems to land on that side of the ledger. When the narrative is "eliminate the cent", more lands there...

The mint does have large fixed costs (multi-million-dollar presses, security) and difficult-to-apportion costs (e.g. electricity). Additionally, a significant portion of the information (including the costs of planchets) is proprietary and can't be disclosed.

 

No you would still price it at $2.99, then the taxes would be applied (here it is 7%) so it is now $0.21 for a total of $3.20 If it was 6% the total would be $3.17 which round DOWN to $3.15 If the rate was 8% the price would be $3.23 which would round UP to $3.25 The psychological $2.99 works just fine, no reason to drop back to $2.95. If rounding does have to occur (notice it didn't on the 7% rate) about half the time it will round up, and half the time it will round down and in the long run the up and the down will cancel out. There are only two ways you can set it so that it ALWAYS rounds up and that would be to set your prices and then never allow more than one item per transaction (because if you allow more than one item the final price will be back to a random amount that will sometimes round up and sometimes down) Or the taxes are included in the price on the shelf. If you do that then the tax paid rapidly adds up to MORE than you would have paid if you added up the prices and then applied the tax rate This is why, normally, including the tax in the price is not legal.

See my answer above. The tax in PA would still be 6%. Rounding is done to the price after the taxes are applied, rounding would NOT affect the tax RATE. And if they chose to change the tax rate there is no reason (other than outright greed) for them to change it from 6% to 10%, There is no reason they couldn't go from 6 to 7%.

 

Legally you can put any kind of rounding in place the idiots in the leg choose.

Rounding down (unpopular with merchants)

Rounding up (unpopular with consumers)

Then there are the half rounding methods and finally Banker's Rounding which will break most customer's brains

https://www.mathsisfun.com/numbers/rounding-methods.html