If we figure two-fifths of cash transactions need to be rounded up and the store is losing an average of 1.5 cents each time, their expected losses would be around $2,000, yeah?
They're rounding all cash transactions down to the nearest nickel, so an average of 2 cents per transaction, 3.4 million customers, gives me $68,000 assuming each "customer" makes a single transaction per year. If they mean that there are 20 million unique customers, not 20m transactions, then the a long tail of customers who make frequent small transactions in cash could make their claim check out.
Edit: why disagree? Can't the write it off as a loss, uncollected account, or promotional? Maybe even goodwill
Without a write off, their income is $X (what they actually collected), with a write off, their income is $Z (what they should have collected) - $Y (what they didn't collect), but $X = $Z - $Y. There's no material difference between counting what they actual collect as income vs what they should have collected minus the goodwill discount. Unless there's some specific tax justification (maybe accounting differences could justify remitting less sales tax overall and retaining more of the funds, etc)
It won't be the same as what they would have collected without rounding, but it will be better than if you didn't write off anything.
They have about 878 stores, according to Wikipedia, so if it was transactions, each store would only see about 62 transactions per day, which is way too low.
This is the kind of article that should be written by AI (or not written, really.) If you completely fictionalized the empty interviews, nothing would be lost.
Maybe the "spokesman" has been told to angle for a government subsidy for the inconvenience of losing pennies? And from a gas station, which add that goofy fraction of a cent at the end of their pricing.
Assuming 3.4 million customers (cash users) and 2.5 cents average loss per transaction, it would only take one visit a month for them to cross a million dollars in losses.
Of course at that scale it's not like that million or two is really making a difference to their bottom line. Doing some quick Googling their annual revenue is estimated to be $6-7 billion.
Anyone have data on what percentage of the population visits convenience stores 500+ times per year? Sounds pretty inconvenient.
Whether that's convenient or not depends on location... If it's right off your route to work/home, a stop may only add a couple minutes to your drive.
A more reasonable assumption that half of transactions require rounding down cuts that in half, I suppose.
I suppose this makes some sense. In a worst case situation, if every customer makes 10-20 transactions per year, and they always round down the maximum possible amount, they would lose millions per year.