It’s a self-service gas station. Refuse…yourself? You pumped the gas before paying.

You could always refuse service, I guess.

IMO, this is a strawman that is either going to be ignored or fixed easily.

The law did not account for every possible situation. Removal of the penny from national currency is clear a situation where minor variations on otherwise normal transactions would not be in violation of the intent of the law.

It'd be like TSA griping that your 100ml bottle of mouthwash was overfilled by .1ml because of slight variations in the filling process. Nobody cares.

How does this work with coupons, discount for loyalty card holders, etc.?

Presumably that's fine because a SNAP recipient has access to those same discounts. So wouldn't this be the same - the "cash rounding" discount is available to SNAP and people paying cash?

So, that sounds like a yes, they could round up or down SNAP purchases just like cash purchases.

It's not like pennies just cease existing. You just can't buy them from the mint anymore.

I bet if you give customers an easy and free way to deposit change or to turn it into larger denominations you easily get enough pennies to delay ther update a couple years

Or, in reality, most commodity POS systems are actually able to support various countries and tax regimes, and is plenty ready to be configured a variety of ways and work perfectly fine in changing systems.

For example, the exact same physical hardware in American supermarkets for self checkout is also used in countries like Australia that have more coins than the US, and the machines literally do not have enough coin slots for every coin, so they just don't dispense certain coins in that place.

The POS market is rather robust and has been around the block for quite a while and has no problem managing quite literally arbitrary fees. Businesses in our city added a "cost of living" fee to all bills (just raise prices FFS, so dumb) and they didn't have to go out and buy new POS systems, because POS systems are very configurable.

Like, other industries that have been selling software products for decades are actually kind of good at their jobs and it's really just software as a service that reliably makes garbage. POS software can handle all sorts of things you probably don't even realize.

Go lookup all the functionality that Square advertises their POS systems have, and understand that they are new entrants to the market and do not have all the features that legacy vendors have built up over decades. The functionality has been so thoroughly figured out for so long and so straightforward, that a POS you bought in the 90s is likely still fit for service today.

Meanwhile, retailers are actually open to improving and modernizing their POS infrastructure regularly. They added those coupon printers to existing stacks and didn't have to do anything special because POS systems are absolute legends of interoperability. They use extremely standardized ports, including a special supplementary power version of USB, and are very tolerant to mix and match hardware. POS vendors even sell their hardware without forcing you to buy their software. The system is very open.

It's just American custom to exclude some taxes from the posted price. Many countries include all taxes in the price, something I've always wished we would do in America. After that, I'd love to see the elimination of the custom of always ending fuel cost per gallon in 9/10 of a cent.

> State and local taxes make this infeasible

I don’t see why that would be the case? In my country, most prices with VAT (which is what you’re charged) are nice, round numbers, but not the price without VAT.

I suppose the stores set a target price, and then adjust it a bit to make the price + VAT a “nice” number.

Is there a reason that couldn’t be done to make all prices + VAT multiples of 5c?

Retailers don't, like, have to add sales tax on top of listed prices.

They just have to pay it.

Just show the price including tax. (half-sarcastic, because obviously that would be an unpopular change for sellers because it makes the visible number go up, but it would solve two problmes...)

They could still set the post-tax price to something that results in round numbers, at downside of the pre-tax price having more decimals.

Well I'm guessing that's about to change isn't it? unless you always pay by card, and I don't think that is the intent of this law. I assume they will always just round up and make citizens suck it up, because laws general favor the business and corporate classes, at least the recent ones.

So, lobby for changes to the structure of those taxes so that's not a problem. Tthe simple solution is changing them from surcharges adding a percent onto posted prices to making them a percentage taken out of the posted price; so that coin availability is only an issue in the improbable event that you are paying your sales tax bill in cash.

Of course, retailers don't want tax-inclusive posted prices, but... ::shrug::

It's the same way with the penny.

Tax on a 0.99 item isn't coming out to an exact penny multiple.

So stores are already dealing with this situation

Oh no, a made up problem that's easily solved by changing the price slightly in any direction, whatever will we do.

You can price as a multiple of nickels and round the tax separately. It’s the same thing as with sub-penny rounding.

With some 5th grade algebra, one can adjust the total of a transaction to result in a round number after taxes.

Besides that, the law (at least where I live) is that the tax must be paid, but it does not specify by whom. It's completely feasible for a retailer to pay the 2 cent difference in the tax and charge the customer a round number.

Is this really the state of American education where a percentage calculation makes a very simple situation literally impossible? You can think of no other way to overcome the complicated calculations of checks notes x times 1.06?