The last time the US deprecated a coin denomination was the half cent in 1857. Due to inflation!
Yes, that means new coins, but the coins the way they are are less and less useful every year. At some point we'll have to make a change.
Still too granular IMO. If a penny is worth 1/31th of what it used to be, we should drop it and go to quarters.
Just slowly collect all the old coins, until only some collectors have it.
The quarter idea isn't as good because you are still doing math to 2 digits (for example sales tax would have to be calculated, then some kind of rounding). Switching to a single digit is simpler.
Here in Denmark, where the smallest coin is 0.50kr, and a single bag of sugar is 9.95kr, I'll pay 10kr at the till. If I buy 6 bags of sugar, which is 59.70kr, then in cash I'd pay 59.50kr.
When paying by card, the exact amount is paid.
For the USA, a reasonable first step would be rounding to the nearest 5¢.
Someone so poor that 10¢ matters can game the system with careful purchases. The shop won't care, since handling the 1¢ coins is just a hassle for them.
These days it's common to find pennies on the ground because they aren't worth the effort to bend over to pick them up. I pick them up anyway, because I still remember a time when they mattered.
All this pales in comparison to the 1%+ markup due to people using credit cards and charging the same price for credit cards as cash, though.
Even in 1857 $0.005 was worth way way more than even a quarter is today. Probably more than a dollar. (Actual inflation gets a bit hard to track going back that far).
On a more typical $10 purchase it wouldn't have much effect.
There are standard rounding rules (applies to the total, not the line item) that result in rounding up and down with equal frequency.
I think the rule is usually round up $x.x3, but round down $0.08.
But there will be more 3s than 8s: Benford’s Law:
And Benford's law applies to leading digits, not the least significant digit. It's right there in the first line of your link.
But Benford's law extends to less significant digits, just decreasingly so. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benford%27s_law#Generalization... That's why the link says "leading digits", not "most significant digit".
edit: okay, downvoters, what did i get wrong factually? I'm just basing this statement on dozens of general, food, and discount retail 10-K filings and analysis over longer than a decade of following them.
If the rounding becomes 5cents rather than 1cent it doesn't change a lot.
I'm reminded of a comedy skit from childhood based on Australia removing 1 and 2 cent pieces. A guy buys 2 cents of petrol at a time repeatedly pushing his car from pump to pump at a service station. It went on for a while and eventually the owner at the counter, who was down a whole 10 cents at this point, just shook his head and laughed while exclaiming "Dickhead!".