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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;benveniste, post: 1054262, member: 25547&quot;]At least where I buy gas, it&#039;s prices at $X.XX.9 cents a gallon, so I&#039;m getting a rounded off price 9/10th of the time as it is.</p><p>&nbsp;</p><p>The point behind bringing up that little bit of silliness is that rounding is always matter of granularity.&nbsp; The finer the granularity, the more precise the price, but that precision comes with administrative overhead.&nbsp; So any choice of minimum currency unit is going to be a compromise based on the perceived value of that precision.</p><p>&nbsp;</p><p>One of the first coinage choices the U.S. made was not to mint a farthing and limit granularities to 1/2 cent.&nbsp; Then the elimination of the half-cent upped the ante to 1 cent.&nbsp; Great Britain followed a different philosophy and kept farthings around for almost 100 years after the U.S. eliminated the half cent.</p><p>&nbsp;</p><p>Silently, inflation has made a 1-cent granularity finer and finer.&nbsp; While making buying power comparisons over long periods of time is suspect, I believe that a nickel has less buying power today than a half cent did in 1857.&nbsp; So my personal opinion is that cost of keeping around the cent isn&#039;t worth the benefit it provides, and after the next spate of inflation the nickel won&#039;t be worth keeping around either.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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