For the SNAP law, could they just round down SNAP purchases in the same way to be compliant?

anticorporate 12 hours ago | parent | next [-]

The SNAP equal treatment rule requirement works in both directions: Prices cannot be higher or lower for SNAP recipients. As a retailer, there is an option to request a waiver, though.

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SkyPuncher 10 hours ago | parent | next [-]

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.

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anticorporate 9 hours ago | parent [-]

I work in admin for a retailer. We got a nastigram from USDA last week reminding us that we were in no circumstances to help SNAP recipients in any way. The current administration very much does not care what the intent of the law is, and is actively looking for trivial violations as an excuse to punish SNAP recipients and SNAP retailers. It would not surprise me at all to see a retailer banned from the program for how they round pennies.

	▲	SkyPuncher 5 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Again. Context matters. Last week, the government was in a shutdown and it was unclear if SNAP benefits were going to go out. That's not the same as rounding pennies.

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phantom784 12 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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?

	▲	rtkwe 10 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Anyone can have a coupon the law is about not special fees or discounts to SNAP recipients, and since EBT/SNAP cards are essentially debit cards them always being charged exact change could be litigated as differential pricing in theory, which in a country as big and sue happy as the US means someone will try it eventually.

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jkaplowitz 12 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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

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Uvix 12 hours ago | parent [-]

No, because they'd still be paying less/more than people paying with credit cards, debit cards, or checks.

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9 hours ago | parent | next [-]

[deleted]

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wat10000 11 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Round them all. Why is this so difficult?

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Uvix 9 hours ago | parent [-]

Retailers will reject ever rounding down because they lose money, and customers will reject ever rounding up because they lose money.

	▲	zamadatix 9 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Completely different discussion. Regardless, you skipped explaining why these options worked for Canadian Penny (just 12 years ago) at a time when their penny had more buying power than the current US penny, yet the exact same thing cannot ever possibly work for the US penny. Things don't just happen to cost *.99 today either, the market just has wiggle room for bullshit about values. With inflation, the coinage that corresponds to also inflates over time. The penny is long past its time. Furthermore: > Rounding to the closest nickel will cost consumers about $6 million a year, according to a July study by the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond. That is fairly modest, coming to about five cents each across 133 million American households. The US lost ~$85 million minting pennies in 2024 because they cost more to make than they are worth. That's over a 10x savings, not a loss. 5 cents is also less than 0.00006% of median household income in 2024. If people were actually that worried we'd have had laws about credit card transaction fees decades ago.

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11 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

[deleted]

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mattnewton 13 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

They probably will, but that means a POS software update on a tight deadline.

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wongarsu 12 hours ago | parent | next [-]

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

	▲	mattnewton 11 hours ago \| parent [-]
		There are a lot of solutions, as everyone has mentioned. The problem is not hard, it’s “what color to paint the bikeshed” territory. But we’re still having to solve a problem on a tight deadline based on a tweeted proclamation with no federal legislature specifying exactly what solutions are allowed and what solutions conflict with existing law.

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mrguyorama 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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.