| ▲ | hrimfaxi 15 hours ago |
| I watched a video on the demise of the penny and its predicament was so succinctly explained: everyone gets pennies as change but few carry them around let alone spend them, so we are stuck producing ever more. One news outlet even did an "experiment" where they threw hundreds of pennies on the ground in a city on a busy morning and not one person stopped to pick any up. |
|
| ▲ | basscomm 14 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| > everyone gets pennies as change but few carry them around let alone spend them It's not just pennies, it's all coins. In a former life I worked in retail and almost nobody would fish around in their pockets for exact (or even near) change. They'd always hand me bills for their purchase even if they had just completed a transaction and had the coins in their pocket. That was in the 90's, and I still see it happening today, even though I'm no longer in the retail world. |
| |
| ▲ | Retric 14 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | I’d regularly use quarters in vending machines, but not waste time during a retail transaction. | | |
| ▲ | Symbiote 13 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | In most other countries, since prices are shown including all taxes you can often have the money ready while waiting in line etc. | | |
| ▲ | guntars 13 hours ago | parent [-] | | Another aspect of the idiotic "we don't know what your tax is going to be" system (they do know it, actually) is that prices will typically end with .99 and the tax will push it over the next dollar and cause a bunch of change to be returned, instead of a single penny. |
| |
| ▲ | dylan604 12 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > but not waste time during a retail transaction. we could just go back to writing checks while we're at it. | |
| ▲ | zahlman 11 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | It's amazing to me that people consider "saving time while paying money" to be a good thing. I will never "tap" my debit card as long as I have any legal option. Everyone else can wait for me to exercise my consumer rights, by inputting my PIN, verifying the amount displayed on screen etc. | | |
| ▲ | quesera 5 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Entering your PIN and using a debit card is the least secure/safe version of electronic payment. Tapping (NFC) or dipping (EMV) are safer and faster for everyone. | | |
| ▲ | zahlman 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | How do you figure? My threat model includes people stealing the card. I can have tap disabled on the card, and then thieves don't know my PIN. Yes, yes, that's like 13 bits of entropy. But it's not like they can use a computer to brute-force it. |
| |
| ▲ | Retric 11 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Wasting people’s time is rude here not illegal. Courtesy may seem outdated to some, but it can occasionally come back to bite people. Being overly rude to waitstaff is something I’m concerned with around promotions because of how they might treat people inside the company. Without better information you extrapolate. | | | |
| ▲ | robocat 9 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | I've seen a pattern where people that value their own time at $0 unfortunately often value the time of others at $0. Worse is valuing others at $0 and your own at $lots (which is also common). | | |
| ▲ | zahlman 6 hours ago | parent [-] | | Interesting. I don't know what to make of the idea that I'm "not valuing my time" by carefully considering my purchases and caring about security. Or that the seconds I take on this are so important to both myself and others, compared to the time spent browsing the store shelves, getting to and from the place, etc. Heaven forbid I choose the cashier instead of a self check-out this time, and try to strike up a conversation. |
|
| |
| ▲ | ocdtrekkie 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | I used to do this for vending machines but now it’s common to need more than eight of them per transaction so it's kinda silly. |
| |
| ▲ | forinti 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I like using coins because I'm always looking for commemorative coins. It's an interesting investment: you can immediately double or triple your money. Unfortunately, you rarely find them. I also keep the obvious fakes. | |
| ▲ | 14 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | [deleted] | |
| ▲ | expedition32 12 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Nowadays I pay for everything with my phone but back in the day I too hated using coins.
Having to calculate and fish out coins? Ain't nobody got time for that. | | |
| ▲ | basscomm 12 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | > Having to calculate and fish out coins? Ain't nobody got time for that. It's not that hard or time consuming if you actually use your change instead of letting it accumulate. I typically have less than a dollar in coins on my person at any given time because I spent it. If you're paying in cash, you either take time to count the change you're going to spend, or you take time waiting for the cashier to count the change you're going to get. Or you go cashless and avoid the whole thing | |
| ▲ | zahlman 11 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | It's amazing to me that there are people with this mindset. I enjoy the process. |
| |
| ▲ | triceratops 13 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | That's incredibly bizarre. If I have coins my first instinct is to spend them ASAP so I don't have to carry them around. | |
| ▲ | zahlman 11 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | I pay exact change whenever I can. And on the occasions where I can only make (exact change + simple amount), I often get deer-in-headlights looks from cashiers who can't do mental arithmetic and apparently haven't learned how to get the machine to understand payments of more than one physical bill or coin. | | |
| ▲ | zahlman 6 hours ago | parent [-] | | I legitimately don't understand why people object to this strongly enough to downvote it without comment. |
|
|
|
| ▲ | MarkLowenstein 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I always pick them up. Every penny buys enough pasta to keep you alive for another 15 minutes. So in case I ever go broke, I've staved off my eventual starvation by 15 minutes. |
| |
|
| ▲ | SkyPuncher 9 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Only place I've ever noticed them is the $0.01 pony ride that's been sitting at my grocery store for 30 years. Even they've gotten the hint and simply leave a tray of pennies next to it so people can actually use it. |
|
| ▲ | mooreds 13 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I remember moving out of a place (decades ago). I was the last roommate out, and so was stuck with some of the cleanup (wanted to get that deposit back!). One of the things we had was a ton of pennies (no idea why). I had no room in my car, so I spend a few minutes late at night flinging pennies out onto the sidewalk after a long day of cleaning the place. |
| |
| ▲ | dylan604 12 hours ago | parent [-] | | Would it not have been better/easier for all involved to have just set a container of all the pennies on the street on your way out? If someone really could use them, you're kind of a dick for making them pick them up one at a time, but if they were all together... |
|
|
| ▲ | gniv 12 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Random anecdote: I go to a boulangerie almost daily (as one does here in France). There is one close to me that started charging 12 centimes for slicing the bread. I got annoyed with this and nowadays make a point to take lots of small change from the coin jar and use it. They don't seem to mind. |
|
| ▲ | kristopolous 13 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I actually do that for numismatic reasons now. After today they will only increase in scarcity. Not that I imagine they'll ever be valuable mind you... I should really just go and get $5 worth somewhere. That would satiate my desires |
|
| ▲ | dmd 12 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > not one person stopped to pick any up. Isn't that the old joke about the economist? |
|
| ▲ | m463 12 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| I use quarters in parking meters sometimes. |
