Reprogramming of cash registers.

Canadian here: we don't reprogram cash registers. They tell the exact amount and then we're charged either the exact amount (via card) or a rounded-off amount (if paying cash).

FWIW, 86% of "total payment volume" in Canada was digital, and 53% of transactions were contactless. If that's not the case in the US, it may be more of an adjustment.

Yea american POS systems will have to get the rounding off added because ultimately cashiers will get grilled if their registers are off at the end of day.

Registers are always off at the end of the day everywhere I've worked retail.

I even worked as a bank teller and it wasn't uncommon for drawers to be out small amounts.

From what I recall when I worked retail, nobody cared until the difference was something like 2% or so. Then someone might care, or might not.

It was always easy to keep a perfect running balance when the cashier can make change accurately and when there was a penny/nickel jar because customers might not have had exact change. It's only the normalization of sloppiness, or sometimes theft, of cashiers that causes shrinkage in reconciliation. It doesn't just magically happen and isn't a foregone conclusion.

It doesn't just magically happen, but it basically is a foregone conclusion. Nobody cares about a register that is off by 57 cents at the end of the day. You're going to waste WAY more money trying to hire "smart" cashiers at $5-$10 over the prevailing wage than you would just putting up with people who occasionally make errors in counting change.

Last time I worked retail was 1996-1997 and we meticulously had to count the register. If it was off then it was on us. This was pre touch screens and auto calculating registers. The same still applies in the latest modern world. You are off then you pay.

Sloppy managers and lax fiscal controls aren't pertinent to companies that actually do check.

The companies check, they just realize that humans are human. There are procedures for ensuring that cash handling errors are never made, but they are so wildly expensive and time consuming compared to the option of not hunting down a $.73 discrepancy that it isn't worth it. The procedures typically involve multiple employees counting (this is how the discrepancies are found at the end of the day), or counting all cash in triplicate (this is what bank tellers are doing when they give you the money, they are counting it out for their sake). It is a trade-off that competent management makes, you don't hire two cashiers for every register, and ask them to count everything in triplicate for the sake of a few pennies.

This isn't going to conform to your worldview, but even ATMs and automatic bill accepters make errors. There is a procedure for cash discrepancies even when you take the human out of the loop.

Doubtful. It's required to keep a running balance of net cash contained so that it can be manually counted and reconciled for creating that day's bank deposit. Percentage of money type is meaningless to this fact.

Not at all, some POS systems will account for rounding, but most don't. One only needs to look at your receipt to see if this is the case. Cash registers are nearly always out a dollar or two at the end of the day anyway, that's normal, and cash rounding doesn't change that much.

Also, in Canada, I have never seen those automatic change-making machines that are common in US convenience stores. Cashiers always count and handle cash by hand.

> Cash registers are nearly always out a dollar or two at the end of the day anyway, that's normal, and cash rounding doesn't change that much.

This is human error, not a software design error.

The point is that it doesn't matter, it all evens out in the end.

I'm not sure what you mean by that platitude.

The mental and physical cost of worrying about a few cents isn't worth it.

Well for one all prices along sales tax have to be rounded up or down to increments of $0.05 which is the profit margin for many things produced in high volume.

Rounding is generally done only for cash transactions (“cash rounding”). For all other payment types, the unrounded price is used.

I wrote code for this a long time ago when cash was still a major form of payment in a country that got rid of sub 0.05 coins. There were various rules to try to ensure neither the seller or buyer always benefited.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cash_rounding

The rounding up will be done by the merchant when he updstes the prices, and the buyer will always lose.

No code will save you here.

How? If you price something at $1.03 so that it rounds up to $1.05, someone who buys two will get it rounded down to $2.05

No the price will become 1.05 and when customer buys 2 it will be 2.10 not 2.05

I prefer if shops do that (or actually the more common €2 instead of the deceptive €1.99 or 1.95), but most shops don't round their prices.

I recall some major US chain (TJ Maxx? JC Penney? Target? Something?) that decided to start pitching some kind of 'honest pricing' scheme, where all their stuff was just rounded up, so instead of $24.99 it would be priced at $25 flat.

A noble goal, but it apparently backfired on them spectacularly because of the same reason why retailers did that in the first place.

It was JC Penney, however they went beyond merely rounding prices. They ditched sales and coupons, which are unfortunately very popular, and that is often cited as the reason the "fair and square" plan failed.

Did they replace the sales and coupons with simply lower prices across the board? Because that would make it more attractive to buy there. If not, it's a price increase.

Yes, but the lower prices across the board were close to the average selling price before, not the best price you used to be able to get using a coupon for an item on sale. Therefore deal hunters no longer wanted to shop there. The price-insensitive folks still did, but they were the ones who used to pay full price and subsidize the deal hunters, and now they were getting a lower price than before. Thus it was a money losing strategy for the company.

If you were already pricing in mils to be competitive, your customers will not accept an increase of 5c "because the country got rid of the penny."

It's basically impossible that your customer was paying you in cash at that point anyways.

> No the price will become 1.05 and when customer buys 2 it will be 2.10 not 2.05

That's quite literaly against the "various rules to try to ensure neither the seller or buyer always benefited" that the previous commenter was talking about writing software to handle.

No country that has cash rounding rules would allow 2*1.03 to be charged $2.10.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cash_rounding

(Unless you mean: the price of a single item is changed to $1.05, in which case sure; that's the business's perogative to raise prices but it's not taking advantage of the rounding system)

Since sales taxes are added at the time of purchase in North America, none of that ends up mattering because the randomness of someone's shopping cart plus the percentage of sales tax makes it impossible to price your inventory in such a way as to consistently benefit the retailer.

Worth mentioning that despite not having a one-cent denomination, products are still priced in cents - e.g. in Canada you still price something at $2.79 even though we have no pennies. It's only at the payment step, when cash is being used, that anything is rounded off.

I mean, retailers could certainly increase their shelf prices, but if they were going to do that they would do so anyway, and the $X.99 pricing pattern exists for a reason so there's not really anywhere to increase those prices by some small amount that wouldn't put people off anywa.

I think GP is saying that, when paying with cash, because there is no option for sub-5c prices, the only option is to round to the nearest 5c.

If price is $1.03 then for cash customers, the price has to become $1.05. If paying debit or credit card then the price can stay $1.03 because there is no cost for computing pennies.

The optics of the change is that it does cost more for the consumer if paying cash and if you have a society that wants to push more people to digital transactions then this is how you start to do it along with the optics and ramifications that go with it.

The general practice is to round up or down to the nearest unit when paying cash. That means if you only have nickels, you either round up or down to the nearest 5 cents. It should average out. Absolutely no one is getting rich off of this.

The entire world is already moving to digital currencies and even if you do everything with cash, rounding up and down to the nearest nickel - per total transaction is not going to make a dent in anyone’s budget - even the poorest people.

If you make 4 cash transactions a day and your total transactions are always rounded up, you’re going to be out of $3.60 a month and that’s the worse case.

I come from a country that has rounding. The unrounded price always shown on the shelf, and is what you pay unless it's cash.

If you do pay cash, it's not the item's price that's rounded, it's the total. That's important because the amount being rounded is essentially random, so the shop can't chose a price that would be rounded in one direction. In a $10 purchase using 0.05 rounding the maximum difference amounts to 0.4%, but is usually 0.2% or less. It's so small it could be used as an advertising gimmick, and consequently some retailers chose to always round down. The remainder went with rounding to the nearest with the lowest value winning in a tie.

I do not remember a single one always rounding up. That would be a customer relations disaster.

If you're rounding to 0.05, you don't even need to break ties - any price ending in an integer number of cents can be rounded fairly to the nearest 0.05, e.g.

  1.00       -> already round
  1.01, 1.02 -> round down to 1.00
  1.03, 1.04 -> round up to 1.05
  1.05       -> already round
  1.06, 1.07 -> round down to 1.05
  1.08, 1.09 -> round up to 1.10
  1.10       -> already round

We're talking about the US. We'll just round everything up because it's simpler and blame it on communists or the wokes or something.

This doesn't remove them from circulation. If it did, though, card transactions, versus cash, could still use smaller increments.

Most transactions aren’t cash

Take a penny, leave a penny

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Take_a_penny%2C_leave_a_penny

But we didn’t ban the penny, just stop making them for a while because plenty in circulation.

If I buy 10,000 $0.01 screws, they aren’t all the sudden going to charge $0.05 cents for a screw…

We should get rid of the Nickle as well.

It also costs 3x it's face value to produce, and is also effectively worthless. Many other countries have 10c or 20c as their smallest denomination.

And we aren't those countries.

Not sure what your point is. "Concepts that have been proven in other countries are irrelevant here"? Or just "We have nothing to learn from what others have done and should start every idea from scratch"?

Your snarky summaries are actually extremely close to the sentiment I hear a lot.

A shocking amount of "political" thinking in the us that I've been involved with STARTS with "we're the best at everything" and then explores things to do from there

We collectively have this fragile ego that would rather feel tough and "self made" rather than admit any kind of deficit compared to others, even at the expense of our own growth. It reminds me of a ceo I used to work for that I flippantly described as happier to feel like a big fish in a small pond than to put his ego to the side in exchange for the ability to improve and expand the business.

Maybe we should try, as a nation, to stop being so intensely stupid and close minded.

Presumably we could come up with a reformulated nickel that is much less costly to produce. It hasn't been changed outside of war issues in a long time.

The reformulated penny didn't take too long to be accepted. A new nickel would probably be accepted well too.

> The reformulated penny didn't take too long to be accepted. A new nickel would probably be accepted well too.

Part of the problem is with how vending machines detect valid currency

Story about when the dollar coin was updated https://www.oklahoman.com/story/news/2000/06/13/vending-chan...

Pennies aren't accepted by vending machines generally.

I can't imagine nickel fraud for snacks and beverages is particularly lucrative.

The issue isn't a much fraud for nickels as it would be failure to accept the coin, and just taking your money.

Easily the most sensible thing he's done. Lots of countries have done away with low value coins, and it's not like they're vital for payment. Nothing costs mere cents anymore.

Violating the constitution is not sensible. What the fuck is wrong with you?

Without someone telling me, I wouldn't have necessarily assumed this was unconstitutional.

I also wasn't aware that the constitution specified that pennies need to exist. I can totally understand if getting rid of pennies takes a bit more work than an edict by a president, but then that needs to be done. It's still a sensible thing to do.

I don’t think they are killing the penny just stop making them for a while.

In this case it would be the fact that the order is unconstitutional.

How is it unconstitutional?

The "coinage clause" of the Constitution.

https://constitution.findlaw.com/article1/annotation37.html

> Article I, Section 8, Clause 5 is known as the coinage clause. It gives Congress the exclusive power to coin money. The Supreme Court has also interpreted clause 5 as giving Congress the sole authority to regulate every aspect of United States currency.

That supreme court interpretation is from 1820 so it's both "settled law" and "an outdated ruling", depending on who you ask.

This doesn't eliminate the penny, just pausing production of it. If he had unilaterally declared the penny no longer valuable then that would be unconstitional and require an act of congress

The distinction you make is irrelevant since both are under Congress' responsibility. The president has no constitutional authority to determine which currency is minted and how much of it is minted.

Secretary of Treasury works for President.

https://uscode.house.gov/view.xhtml?path=/prelim@title31/sub...

This law does not mandate continuous minting. So I think you are wrong that the Secretary of Treasury does not have the ability to say how much of a coin is produced day to day.

Legal scholars, such as Laurence H. Tribe, have noted that U.S. law grants the Treasury Secretary the authority to determine the quantities of coinage necessary to meet the needs of the United States. Therefore, if the Secretary decides that the required amount for a particular coin is zero, they are within their legal rights to stop its production.

Doesnt that make the fed unconstitutional as well?

No, but only because it was officially created by act of Congress: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Reserve_Act

Congress does not mint coins, and this order does not coin new currency. They are separate concerns.

The Constitution doesn't say anything about denominations, metals, and so on. That's under Title 31 of the U.S. code, section 5111-5112, "Minting and issuing coins, medals, and numismatic items", which grants the Secretary of the Treasury control over how much to mint, and in the case of denominations, it says the Secretary "may" (not "must") mint them. The Secretary can simply decide to not mint any.

The change itself is ok. The issue is who can make the change, and that would be congress not the president.

Title 31 says the Secretary of the Treasure can. The Secretary cannot permanently cancel the penny, but they can stop making them.

That's mentioned in the article as a "might". Let's see in practice.