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Comment by 0des | Hacker News Reader

This was inevitable, but rather than maintain the status quo or even introducing shrinkflation, they should have made the jump to 2 dollars. 1.25 is maintenance, and effectively we are still getting what a dollar used to get. 2 dollars would get us a bit more time (inflation is not going to stop) and the ability to introduce a (relative) more premium product assortment. I only mention this premium product range because the dollar stores near me now sell things such as headphones and phone accessories.

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I think you're thinking of this from the wrong perspective. To me, an extra 75 cents don't really matter. I'd pay it without blinking.

But to many people in the US, going from $1 to $2 would literally double their expenses for the month and hurt an already tight budget.

"Kyle Dishman can’t afford to shop at the local grocery store anymore. Instead he goes to Dollar General, where he can make $40 stretch into a week’s worth of groceries and the occasional can of motor oil for his Chrysler 300."

If you went from $1 to $2, all of a sudden Kyle only gets to eat every other day. Half of all shoppers in the US buy groceries from a dollar store, and they aren't doing it because the Dollar General has the freshest produce in the area.

Sources:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2021/08/20/growing-n...

https://www.mashed.com/224027/think-twice-before-buying-food...

Are you aware that Dollar Tree and Dollar General are different stores with different business models?

Dollar General does not price all their items for $1. I don't believe they ever have.

And Dollar Tree does not sell groceries (at least not any I've ever been to).

Dollar Tree doesn't sell fresh groceries, but they certainly sell food.

https://www.nogettingoffthistrain.com/shopping/dollar-tree-g...

But even if you ignore food, the point applies to all sorts of things (cosmetics, clothing, pharmacy, etc) people go to both for at a low price point.

>And Dollar Tree does not sell groceries (at least not any I've ever been to).

May be regional, because all of them around here do. At least canned/dry goods and frozen foods. Teeny-tiny steaks. No fresh produce, obviously.

Dollar Tree sells nonperishable and frozen-foods.

You don't have to eat twice as much because the unit price doubled. I'm pretty sure the suggestion wasn't intended to mean that they should sell the same amount of product for $2 as they now do for $1.

> This was inevitable, but rather than maintain the status quo or even introducing shrinkflation, they should have made the jump to 2 dollars.

Yeah, there's Five Below, where everything is $5 or less, and the quality of the stuff that they supply is substantially higher quality, and as a result I find it more fun to walk around there nowadays than Dollar Tree.

Not to take it too far off-topic but Five Below's wordmark/logo is deeply unsettling.

> deeply unsettling

Care to elaborate? What about the logo makes you feel this way?

it's those beady little °s

Bingo.

The degree symbol is what drew me to the brand in the first place. It made it sound clever and novel. They might not need it anymore but I think it helped them become popular.

That's just keyboard elitism. You wouldn't be so bothered by them if they had a proper shift-key/fn-key press. Maybe you should step outside of your ASCII bubble an realize there's a whole world of Unicode to explore that can't be encompassed by a double key-stroke.

For the longest time I thought it was a winter coat store. It wasn't until I saw beach balls out front one day that I gave them a second look.

To me, it’s more that lower-case f.

Exactly right. Just like the US should get rid of all coins < $0.25.

But then how would the coin suppliers stay in business?

Offer $5 & $10 coins

This isn't a Chuck E. Cheese, paper notes are just fine. Nobody asked "what about the guy who makes the yokes" when John Deere took his first spin.

Paper notes are extremely expensive to maintain because they can't stay in circulation long before they're worn out and need to be replaced.

We really should be using $1, $2, $5 and $10 coins

Paper and linen are renewable materials that are made from easy low-impact resources to be extracted and processed, they can be remade and reissued many times for a fraction of the impact of a metal coin, not to mention the cost to transport any amount over pocket change.

And they're more convenient for the wallet

And I've never lost a paper bill, but I'm forever losing change.

There is very little in the world that is more recyclable than metal.

Canada's physical currency is pretty great:

No penny; typical nickles, dimes, and quarters; loonies and toonies ($1 and $2 coins); as well as very durable and fancily-secured polymer bills for $5, $10, $20, $50, and $100.

The only complaint might be that all the bills are the same size instead of on a log-scale like eu or aus, but I prefer it that way.

I wouldn't see much value in coins >$2, bills are far simpler to carry and don't make noise or scratch screens.

I live in New Zealand which has NZ$1 and NZ$2 coins: they truely suck because the value is enough to care about but the coins don’t fit well into your pocket. I also hate similar value coins in €, £, AUD. $1 notes are awesome.

2 NZD ~= 1.40 USD.

Note that NZ’s smallest coin is 10 cents - it is good not having pennys nor nickels.

The GAO actually did a study on this in 2019! They determined that for the first time since they started tracking the issue this is not true. Paper bills are overall cheaper than coinage now. I can't link right now but it's GAO report # GAO-19-300

Other countries saved money by getting ride of low denomination coins and swapping the highest used paper currencies to coin because it typically lasts longer.

Although recent studies have shown that since we finally improved paper currency's sturdiness the $1 bill is lasting long enough now to be worth keeping around.[1]

[1]https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-19-300

The "worth" of money is more than just the durability of the physical material. The #1 most important factor is its use in facilitating trade. We've introduced multiple Dollar coins into general circulation in the US and they've always failed because people culturally don't like using them, and businesses don't like wasting money accepting them.

This is America. Tons of industries exist because they became outmoded but instead lobbied for protective legislation to ensure that what happened to all the horseshoe makers and stable owners won't ever happen to their industry, like car what dealers have done to make sure Ford has to sell their cars through these sleezeball third parties.

All the zinc that goes into pennies is worth $9 million per year, based on a back of the envelope calculation. Last year, zinc suppliers/miners sold $17.3 billion of the metal, and will do even more this year.

$9 million is less than a rounding error there.

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