> Kwik Trip, a family-owned convenience store chain that operates in the Midwest, decided to round down cash purchases in stores where it hasn’t been able to find pennies.

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.

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velcrovan 14 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Whatever the total ends up being, it's basically a marketing expense that they're electing to make. Probably they do it for a year and then switch to rounding to the nearest nickel, which is what everyone else will be doing.

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pants2 10 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Certianly the costs in employee time making change in pennies and stocking / transporting / changing pennies is way higher

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giantg2 13 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I would bet they have a way to write it off.

Edit: why disagree? Can't the write it off as a loss, uncollected account, or promotional? Maybe even goodwill

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toast0 11 hours ago | parent [-]

Writing it off as a loss isn't useful.

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)

	▲	giantg2 10 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Why wouldn't the write off be useful? I think your formual needs to add "+ ($Y x .3)" for tax deduction if you frame as promotional or other tax write off strategies. 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.