A scam artist was asked to take over the capital city's rotten central bank, which contained the mint.
He made the point that these little coins cost more to make than they were worth, and what was the point? In this case they had a coin that was a tenth of a penny I think.
Turns out the point was when you didn't have a lot of money, these coins mattered. They could buy you a not so rotten apple core on the right street.
I think the point was; life is a lot different when you are poor, and that's when cents matter.
Now that I'm using US currency again the whole penny thing just seems pointless.
Note that the rounding is to the nearest nickel, neither up nor down. So it favours neither buyer nor seller; it all nets out about the same for all in the end.
We stopped minting pennies 10 years ago. They're still legal tender but rare to see since there's no need with 5-cent cash rounding conventions now. There were brief popular grumblings and misplaced arithmetic anxiety leading up to the death of the penny. I expect the same when we bury the nickel and I bet few will miss it either when its time comes. And then the dime.
Of course one can construct amusing temporary edge cases or arbitrage opportunities when buying specific quantities of specifically priced items in the presence of any new rounding rules. The market will respond.
The recommended guideline[0] is to round to the nearest 5¢.
This article from 2013 is my closest citation to "undefined behaviour"[1]
> These guidelines are only a suggestion though and there is currently no law that specifies how retailers must round.
I don't know since ~2013 if anything has been decided to make those guidelines "law". I couldn't find anything quickly in the SEO cesspool that is modern web search.
[0] https://www.canada.ca/en/revenue-agency/programs/about-canad... [1] https://cba.ca/phasing-out-the-penny-in-canada
But honestly, if it did happen,i doubt i would care.
The penny was phased out at the same time people stopped carrying cash, so it wasn't missed.
B) most items aren't an even dollar anyways
C) I've only once lived anywhere that sales tax was an integer percent
More specifically, you round to nearest quarter, just like we do now for pennies. In your case, the coffee would be a dollar, and if that was too rough on the coffee shop, they could raise prices by $0.10 and you'd pay a dollar and a quarter.
B) Correct, 99 cents would be more likely, which would make the problem worse.
I don't see "prices could go up" as a selling point either (I doubt they'd want to round down unless it let them out of sales tax). How would raising prices to make change differently benefit either of us when you can already pretend to live in your ideal world by just telling places to keep the small change?
It's really amazing how the dime is the smallest coin, when you think about it. What a basic design error.
From the beginning of US coinage to 1891, silver "half dimes" were issued for the 5c denomination. (There were also briefly silver 3c coins) The 5-gram base-metal nickel was introduced in the 1866 due to silver coins being hoarded amid post-wartime uncertainty, but eventually was preferred to the tiny silver coin.
... memory of the time I looked it up and did the calculation, not memory of the event, of course.