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Comment by akeck | Hacker News Reader

According to Marketplace.org, pennies are treasure for some businesses now because the regional Feds aren't distributing them.

https://www.marketplace.org/story/2025/11/13/businesses-face...

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I've been listening to Marketplace less because of stories like this. The half cent went away, the penny went away, other countries have discontinued currencies. You keep accepting pennies and you round when people pay in cash. At some point, your register will do the rounding for you. There isn't really a story here.

The register might already do the rounding if it was designed to work in Canada, which got rid of the penny over a decade ago.

There's a bunch of regulations that need tweaking. AIUI, it's illegal to charge SNAP more than other customers. someone who paid cash and gets rounded down technically pays less than what the government got charged. It's only on the order of pennies, I don't think the law cares about that at all.

I don't buy the SNAP argument because there's already rounding when taxes are applied, and half cents are still legal tender, so you could go into a store, tell them they should have charged half a cent less, and then they'd be in a similar trivial violation of SNAP.

Yeah this is the kind of objection dreamed up by an engineer, who thinks that law is mechanically applied. In reality, if there are no other factors this spends two seconds in front of a judge, who then throws it out with prejudice for wasting the court’s time.

Is that a federal law or state law? Whichever jurisdiction it is, surely you'd only need a one-clause amendment to add an exception for rounding cash transactions by up to two cents to account for the discontinuation of pennies... I just can't imagine that taking more than a few weeks to resolve, surely your political systems in the US haven't become that dysfunctional where this couldn't be fixed that quickly?

> surely your political systems in the US haven't become that dysfunctional where this couldn't be fixed that quickly?

In America this can be done - by 2028 or thereabouts :)

That one is easy without regulatory changes: just round the SNAP transactions. The SNAP equal treatment rule only requires charging SNAP customers the same price as cash purchases, not the same price as credit or debit card purchases.

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