Seems reasonable. What’s the downside other than someone losing a zinc contract?
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That supreme court interpretation is from 1820 so it's both "settled law" and "an outdated ruling", depending on who you ask.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
No code will save you here.
A noble goal, but it apparently backfired on them spectacularly because of the same reason why retailers did that in the first place.
It's basically impossible that your customer was paying you in cash at that point anyways.
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)
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.
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 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.
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.
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 roundFWIW, 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.
I even worked as a bank teller and it wasn't uncommon for drawers to be out small amounts.
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.
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.
This is human error, not a software design error.