Featured Opinion/Editorial - United States Coinage Needs Overhaul Now!!!

We tell the cash register what to do and if the 1c and 5c are removed no advantage to the consumer price

 

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It isn't possible to always round up unless you do away with the cash register. There is no way to price your products so that no matter how many or what combination of items your customers select the total after taxes are applied will always round up.

So if you use a cash register and you have the rounding function set it will round up and down automatically. If you don't have it set then the only way you can always round up is to ring up the sale, then look your customer right in the eye and demand more money than the register (and the printed tape) says you owe. Then you get to explain to them WHY you are charging them extra. Sounds like a great way to run off customers and go out of business. (Especially if your competitors aren't doing it.) So that leaves scrapping the cash register and totaling up all your sales by hand (so there are no records for the customer to know what you are doing.).

Cents and five cent pieces are not a necessary part of our economy, merely a convenience.

 

You will round up if there is no 1c and 5c coins and who is at a lost the consumer. Business will not take the lost

 

Wow, both grammar and mathematics are taking a big hit in this thread.

 

All the secretaries are at lunch

 

If a item cost now a $1.05 then it will cost a $1.10 who is at loss.
There is a loss you don't want to see it?
Why do you think we still have 1c and 5c coins for fun don't think so

 

Well if cost $1.05, after tax (Where I live) it costs $1.12 rounds to $1.10 and the consumer wins.

Of course at your business you could round the price to $1.10 then after tax it would be $1.18 you'd round to $1.20, Of course I'm selling it to them for 10 cents less so I get your customers and you go out of business. Customers win, I have more business so I win. Only losers are your business and the employees that lose their jobs.

One common misconception is that if you eliminate cents that items can no longer be priced in odd amounts of cents and that isn't true. Another misconception is that sales tax increases would have to be in five percent increments. This is also untrue. There are currently many places that have sales tax rates of 8.5% or 8.25% even though we have no half cents or farthings.

Another thing I think people are mistaken on is when they tell us that the rounding will only occur for those that pay cash but those that pay by check/debit/or credit card will pay the unrounded amount. I don't think that will happen because you would have to ask the customer before ringing them up what form of payment they would be using and then have to keep switching the register back and forth between rounding and non-rounding modes. And it they change their minds after you ring them up you'd have to clear the sale switch modes and ring them up all over again. Considering the difference between the rounded and unrounded modes would never be more than 2 cents, and over time they would even out with the up and down rounding, it would make more sense just to leave it set for rounding and charge everyone the same no matter what form of payment they use.

 

I don't know where you live, but I don't see a business losing 2c on every sale. And I don't think you quite understand how business works. The rounding up would be for everyone around. You'd have to do it because you cannot round down, you would lose money. Then you'll be out of business and I will have all of your customers.

Of course everyone will be charged the same. In some cases, people get charged extra for using their credit card. You don't have to be switching modes on your cash register to do these things. There's a button that does it.

The rounding up will occur if we lose the 1 and 5 cent coins. It's a no brainer. Everything will have to be rounded and the only place is up.

There are currently many places that have sales tax rates of 8.5% or 8.25% even though we have no half cents or farthings.Then if you have a sale of $1.00 before tax how much would you pay ?

 

Wow, this calls for a ten banger...

 

I'll round that up to 100.











Threads like this one are why I have a huge flat forehead.

 

Did you round up come on round down take the loss

 

First of all, if I advertised an item at $4.79 and end up charging you $4.80 it's false advertisement, I would get a fine. Plain and simple. You would not be able to use any of the numbers (example: $4.01 - $4.09 per item) because there's no way you can sell it for that price if there's no 1 and 5 cents. As for your theory on the equal parts up and down, does not work in business. No one can run a business not knowing what they're going to make on each item. It's impossible. Yes, there are businesses that sell items at a loss to attract new customers and other reasons but this cannot be used in this example. The laws of mathematics do not work itself out in this situation. You're basing it on a theory not on facts.

 

PLEASE can someone explain to me how the Swiss manage to do this fairly and we supposedly can't or won't? Are we THAT greedy or ignorant? In Switzerland, there is no coin below 5 rappen, and even the 5 is very rarely seen. The smallest coin in heavy use is the 10 rappen. It's roughly a U.S. dollar parity currency, so that means they are talking about a dime value coin as the low end. They work fine. All FINAL TRANSACTION amounts ending in 1,2,3,4, or 5 get rounded DOWN. All ending in 6,7,8, and 9 get rounded UP. Simple. No "theory", just FACTS! Now, if someone has a 5 rappen (rare), the rounding gets wrapped around the 5 instead of the 10. [1,2,6,7 down; 3,4,8,9 up.]

I refuse to believe we are incapable of doing this! Unless being a pain in the backside American trumps everything else. Of course, this slick exotic Swiss thingy does rely on retail businesspeople giving someone at their cash register an even break, and yes, for some, that might be asking an awful lot, but jeepers creepers, this is not rocket science. We don't need Swiss for that, only old dead Germans.

Hey, even the Canadians did this eliminating the cent. I guess they're smarter than us too. Or maybe just less ignorant.

 

Though others more able have failed, I cannot resist the temptation...

John, if you flip a coin 100 times, you're going to get close to 50 heads and 50 tails, right?

Flip it 1000 times, and the split will get even closer to 50/50, right?

Right. It's the law of statistical probability at work.

If a store loses a few cents on one transaction, they may very well make a few extra cents on the next one.

And if a customer loses a few cents on one transaction, they may very well make a few extra cents on the next one.

And over the course of hundreds or thousands of transactions, losing a few cents here, gaining a few there, the ultimate difference is going to be negligible, right?

Right! That's how rounding works. No winners, no losers.

I'll just get this out of the way now:

 

Ahhhh, but what if John supplied the coin? NOW how much would you pay? What's my point? Only that the distribution of heads or tails presupposes a fair coin. Maybe some people have a harder time imagining a fair coin (substitute: system) than others do. Maybe it's not in some people's DNA.

Where I live, there is no municipal police department, and people leave their doors unlocked routinely. 15 miles away is a gritty city that can't keep peace with hundreds of cops. Same difference.

Some people live assuming somebody has to be the chump. Some people don't.

 

Sally michem once mentioned this very same problem in a lecture. She talked about a statistics professor who used this problem as a warm up exercise. She divided the class up into two groups. One group was told to flip a coin some n number of times and record the number of times it came up head/tails. The other group was asked to imagine that they were flipping a coin and write down a n-length sequence of heads and tails. She would leave the room while they were doing this so that there was no way for her to figure out which person was in which group. After collecting all the papers she would effortlessly divide the papers into two groups. How? Because the people who were faking it were invariably too careful not to include long runs of heads and tails. The truly random data invariably contained several long runs of the same type.

 

And it has a name - the run length test for randomness. It falls out as an amazingly simple formula.