Anything measured by weight is already rounding prices to the nearest cent. If something is $1/lb and I have 0.995 lbs of it, I get charged $1.00 not 99.5 cents. Presumably just rounding to the nearest 5 cents isn't that different.

Of course we don't expect anyone to be charged fractional cents because our currency doesn't support it. So just changing our smallest currency unit from 1 cent to 5 cents.

The easy thing for stores to do then seems to be apply the cash rounding to EBT and card transactions.

Additionally, having baked-in taxes à la Japan would change how advertising works, since we don't have a uniform sales tax (unlike Japan). For example, I live in San Ramon, CA, which has a sales tax rate of 9.75%. If I drive just two miles north to Danville, the sales tax goes down to 8.75%. If I drive a few miles south to Dublin, the sales tax goes up to 10.25%. The reason is because California has a base statewide sales tax of 7.25% (with 1% of it going to local governments), and city and county governments are free to add up to 4% for local sales taxes.

By comparison, in Japan the consumption tax is 10% for most items (8% for groceries and takeout), and it's the same nationwide.

In addition, there are sometimes fees that are prohibited by law from being baked in. For example, California has a statewide ban on free "single-use" bags in grocery stores and some other businesses. These businesses are required to charge their customers for bags, and they are not allowed to bake it into the price. Some municipalities have extended this to disposable cups as part of an effort to discourage them in favor of reusable cups. For example, Santa Cruz mandates a 25 cent fee on disposable cups. The Costco $1.50 hot dog + drink combo is normally $1.50 + sales tax, but in Santa Cruz it's $1.50 + $.25 mandatory cup fee + sales tax (yes, the cup is taxable). I have yet to see someone bring a disposable cup to Costco or to other places where paper cups are sold, however.

Having baked-in taxes will require big changes about how taxes and fees work in America, the land of extra sales taxes, extra fees, surcharges, and tipping.

It's because technically the dollar is divided into Dimes, Cents, and Mil. (this is why dimes say 'One Dime' on them instead of 'Ten Cents'.

So while the mil isn't really used anywhere else that regular people see any more due to inflation, it is a valid division of the dollar and that's why they are able to get away with it.

Actually, I'd say by all means, allow them to price things $9.99̅ so we can all agree it's equal to $10 and be done with it.

of course 9.99...(repeating) is mathematically 10, so I have a hard time being against allowing that.

Turns out the station charges you a round number of cents per gallon. Then there are federal taxes, which are, IIRC, 24.5 cents per gallon. And then there's state tax, which varies from state to state but seems to always be x.4 cents per gallon.

So I don't think it's just "evil retailer tricks".

Is the amount rounded before or after taxes? Must be after or you have to round again. So who eats or gains the rounding? The merchant or the tax collector?

“change will be provided via Venmo” sign at the entrance :)

I happen to live in one of the few districts in CA that has a republican representative. I was looking forward to voting him out but then CA got gerrymandered and now we'll likely have a Democrat representative next term.

I didn't like our republican representative but it seems kinda shitty that the folks who did like him and voted for him suddenly didn't get a say in who their representative ought to be. I mean, sure they probably voted No on 50 but most of the yes votes came from outside of our district.

Edit: I strongly hate gerrymandering but I also acknowledge the need for the democrats to play dirty because the Republicans are, and "being the better person" doesn't seem to be a viable political strategy anymore.

> If they're easily solvable then why do you need planning?

Easily solvable problems still need coordination. Do you want to go to one store and have your change rounded up then go to another and have it rounded down?

I usually want to cut pies into 14 pieces. Some might want 11 or 13. (17 is just too many.) I demand that we implement a system where a circle is 2 * 3 * 4 * 5 * 7 * 3 * 11 * 13 = 360360 degrees, so that we can cut pies evenly at anywhere from 2 to 15 slices. If my baker cuts a slice at 25739 degrees, I want a refund! (I'll keep the pie, because the pie is obviously useless.)

(720720 might be OK too so we can cut 16 pieces, but honestly, if you're cutting 16 pieces, you're not going to measure. You're just going to divide pieces in half until you have 16. 360360 is the future.)

It makes sense when you think of coins in terms of the commodities they were pegged to - a sliver of copper and nickel to pay for a loaf of bread.

$70!? How big are these lawns? Hell, I'd mow lawns for $70 each.

I wouldn't pay more than $5 for someone to mow my lawn, but then again, it's tiny at like 20x15 feet. I spend more time getting the mower out and putting it back away than actually mowing. Probably gonna replace it with just a bunch of wildflowers next spring.

Nitpicking over words isn't profitable either, and if you're trying to appear sophisticated you've missed the mark with me.

I would love to see an analysis of the benefits of crime to the government accounts.

I interpret "redeemed" as meaning "spent on a good or service".

Since the government can just print money, it can spend whatever it wants, but doing so creates inflation because of the higher money supply.

Dollars that disappear (ie, they get eaten by rats) push that inflation back down by removing money from the supply.

Individual stores generally only have to deal with one. Set the prices at the store, and make them tax-inclusive while you're at it. This isn't rocket science.

Companies serve billions of web pages per second. We can't handle 12,000 tax calculations?

That’s illegal in a lot of places.

I doubt that most people in the US know the local sales tax. Let alone any change that may occur due to laws changing or traveling. I'd like to see the out the door price listed but that throws the 99 cent game off retailers like. Also I don't shop very often but Aldi US is the only place I've seen the eink price displays, the rest still have paper.

If its a wide region ad (can even be just across a metro area) showcasing a price then yes, they wouldn't know the price at a given store because the tax rates can change in less than a kilometer.

If there's a TV ad for a medium pizza for $10 at a chain they can't possibly know the tax rates for whatever actual store I'm going to go order from.

And the listing on a website won't know until I actually put in my shipping information.

Hi from Argentina! Here we unofficially deprecated the AR$10, AR$20 and AR$50 bill, so the smallest one is the AR$100 bill (~US$0.07). Every price include taxes.

What are they selling? Candies one by one? Inside the candy store everything is rounded to a multiple of AR$100. A single candy is AR$100. You many get an offer of 3 candies for AR$200, or 2 small candies for AR$100, or other fancy candies in packages of 13 for AR$1000. Everything else is more expensive, like AR$700 or more, but all multiples of AR$100.

The photocopy shop near my home has a copy for AR$120. They usually sell many copies, so a 20% is relevant. They have a stash of AR$20, but it's probably the only shop nearby. I also collect the AR$20 just to pay the photocopies, just to be nice to avoid finishing their stash and also because I don't know what to do with the AR$20.

I guess a single apple is probably a problem. It cost like AR$400-AR$500 depending on the weight. Someone very smart can learn to choose and apple with the exact weight to get a AR$499 apple and pay AR$400 :) Luckily inflation changes the price so it's difficult to learn. Also AR$499 will be illegaly rounded to AR$500. And most people will buy more than 1 apple, let's say that the total is AR$10,000 and AR$100 is only a 1% that is lower than the spoilage of rotten fruit.

Ok, but if the cashier is stealing they could just have change in their pocket?

I'm skeptical that preventing theft is the reason for these prices rather than the psychological trick of looking cheaper.

A large volume business isn't doing 10k transactions.

What's even to say anything will be rounded down? If Walmart says "we're going to round anything from $0.01 to $0.04 up to $0.05," do you think the free market would put them out of business out of principle, or would they get away with it? I think they'd get away with it.

Nobody has to round down. There's no government rule.

I would expect many businesses to implement ceil()-flavored rounding.

> Where’s the law preventing someone from doing this right now? I don’t think this cynicism is justified.

You don't think businesses take advantage of situations for more profit?

Take this year's tariffs as an example. As you may've heard, UPS is charging customs brokerage fees of dozens or hundreds of dollars on top of the actual tariff payment; identical shipments sent via FedEx or DHL are only charged a few dollars for the service of customs brokerage, so we know UPS's actual costs for providing that service aren't that high. They saw a situation where consumers would be confused about prices and took advantage of it to make a lot more money by simply charging a lot more than they need to.

"But where's the law saying they couldn't have just raised their prices by hundreds of dollars without tariffs? Where's the law?!" There wasn't one, they could've raised their prices for international shipments before the tariffs happened. But consumers would have noticed a lot more and accepted it a lot less. They took advantage of the situation because the situation allowed them to get away with it.

> Similarly, if places are willing to price stuff at $1.03 for the few extra cents they’ll collect some of the time, then they can just raise prices on 99c items right now to $1 to collect the extra cent, which they don’t do because such prices have a psychological effect on the consumer that outweighs the small gain.

I'm not sure what you're arguing here. You admitted the $0.99 number has a psychological effect that outweighs the $0.01 gain of charging the extra cent. That would be the reason they don't do that. It's not super relevant to the discussion of whether rounding can/will be gamed.

>These problems can't be legislated away

Yes, they can.

> because the authority to do so is highly decentralized.

So are the problems. And the places where the problems are localized to are the ones with the power to legislate them away. An abrupt elimination of the penny, such as them being immediately banned for use or withdrawn from circulation, would present a problem, sure, but stopping minting them while leaving them in circulation provides a combination of time to find a solution and urgency to implement it; and the problems aren't difficult to solve, there are lots of easy solutions (there's no fundamental difference in the challenges of the quantum of cash being $0.05 that are different from it being $0.01, there's just a few options in how to handle the transition) and all that is necessary is for each jurisdiction to pick one.

> Pretending that these problems don't exist because they don't exist elsewhere is not helpful.

Pretend that’s everything in the US is globally unique to us also is not helpful. “No one else has sales tax like us” is likely not true but also not super relevant. Tax collecting agencies in 50 states and however many territories could issue guidance tomorrow for how to deal with this and it would have the force of law until/unless legislatures see fit to define different rules.

> for every complex problem there is a solution that is simple, obvious, and wrong.

Sure, but for every simple problem there is a small army of people online pretending it’s insurmountable.

Can you explain further? Canada has sales tax and successfully phased out the penny.

>The legal structure of sales taxes in the US present some unique challenges

Nothing about sales tax in the US is unique at all. It is not special. It is not hard. It is not a complex problem. It is basically a lookup, and computerized POS systems have managed it just fine since the dawn of computerized POS systems.

In fact, when those sales taxes were first implemented, there was problems relating to how to manage sales that resulted in fractions of a cent worth of sales tax to account for. Several states created sales tax tokens worth fractions of a cent and had to insist that it didn't technically count as money because states can't mint money legally.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sales_tax_token

Nobody went to jail. It was a minor nuisance for consumers and was quickly replaced with law changes to just have explicit rules for the edge case, which is the entire reason we have legislatures. If you don't want retailers to respond to this change in a certain way, have your legislatures say that.

>This is very much a case of the Mencken quote that for every complex problem there is a solution that is simple, obvious, and wrong.

Just stop already. The US is not special. The US regularly insists it cannot do the same things everyone else does and it is just wrong. We literally have textbooks full of examples from our own country. We've already phased out coinage before.

The UK went from it's absurd money system to reasonable and decimalized money within living memory! 15 February 1971. Sweden had a day where they switched from left hand roads to right hand roads! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dagen_H Most of Europe switched to Euros in living memory as well!

Stop insisting reasonable societal problems are too hard to solve, because that's the only actual reason they are hard to solve

>These problems can't be legislated away because the authority to do so is highly decentralized.

It isn't at all. It's in the Federal government, and it's in your local state government, and it's in your local-er governments, and that is just like a lot of other countries. A couple layers isn't "very decentralized".

It is only in the past 50 or so years that a singular political party has insisted that the same political party that did all sorts of speedy and useful lawmaking for a hundred years suddenly cannot adapt quickly. Meanwhile, 48 state governments continue to function mostly fine, with few problems adapting to local specific problems in a timely manner. If your state cannot adapt to this quickly and easily and without serious issues, consider electing different people.

1) DMV is state-run, not federal govt. 2) Why can't we at least spend 5 minutes studying how it went in Canada, and learn that govt guidance was helpful to the transition, so do that too? 3) Sure. And even more because, even when he DOES pick up on a good idea (I support elimination of the penny), he does so in a haphazard / slipshod way that the end result is often worse than if nothing had been done.

> 3) I bet you $100 You don’t like Trump.

I actually like Trump (or at least his presidency) a lot more than I think most Hacker News browsers do. I like Trump's presidency more than most of my co-workers and many of my friends do. My arguments in this thread are entirely my own, not the product of some political allegiance.

> As someone else’s already pointed out, they could just do this today if they believe their customers will accept it. Did you forget that stores can just raise prices?

As I already pointed out, customers would be more likely to accept it if there's an excuse for it (pennies are being phased out) than just randomly. The discussion's about what rounding may cause, not about what stores have the legal ability to do.

> It’s nonsense because stores aren’t actually going to do it, but also because we’re talking about pennies. Oh, no. The store ripped me off for 2 cents. How will I survive?

So this argument is just "you may be right, but I don't care." That's not an argument, imo.

Pizza chains have delivery fees that aren't paid to delivery drivers. Restaurants have service fees for cooking food and convenience fees for placing orders (even if paying, in cash, when you pick up), on top of the sticker price of the food itself, which used to just be the price.

Some people in this thread have talked about stores having signs saying they'll round change up to the dollar if you pay in cash, and advising to pay by card if you want exact change. I've personally seen businesses have signs on their cash registers that say "our cash register is easily hacked, we strongly recommend paying by cash instead instead of card" (I'm assuming so they can cheat on their taxes).

Businesses will do anything they can get away with to make more money, and they can usually get away with tiny fees like this. It's only a few cents, right? Except for them, it adds up.

There's not as much incentive to right now, because I don't have an excuse to round up prices, and customers don't have a case for rounding down prices. This discussion's about the possible effects of rounding, not about whether businesses are in control of their prices.

If the store is e.g. Walmart, then their scale's already large enough that I don't think this is going to put them under. And if every store's doing it, then there'll be nowhere to turn to.