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

Yes, there are reasons that can't be done.

We don't have VAT in the States; we instead [usually] have sales tax.

And therein: We have something like twelve thousand different sales tax districts, all set at different percentages by combinations of states, counties and municipalities.

Some cities have multiple sales tax rates even within their bounds. My own tiny little city is at the intersection of 3 different counties, and has 3 different sales tax rates: A store on one side of the road has a different tax rate than a store on the other side, and one down the block a ways has yet a third rate.

This reality doesn't have to be ideal. It doesn't have to make sense. This is what we have whether it is awesome or terrible or some combination of both.

It would take a monumental amount of effort to unwind all of that and turn it into something nationally-unified like VAT. This process would take a very long time (perhaps decades), in part because some states don't have sales tax at all and introducing a uniform VAT would represent a very different way for them to go about the ways in which they conduct both commerce and taxation.

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Of course, there's other ways to inject something sane and predictable in the decommissioning of the penny, and there's a number of of them mentioned elsewhere in other comments. But using any of them would have required utilizing an ounce of planning or forethought, and we didn't do "planning" or "forethought" here.

The decision to stop producing came from On High, and was presented in the form of a social media post[1] from the President that declared that it simply would be this way. There was no public planning or discourse involved.

We can talk about whether that's an awesome or terrible way to enact policies, but it doesn't really matter because that business has already been concluded -- with all of the swiftness and grace of eating a ham sandwich.

[1]: https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/posts/1139772249337...