CGP Grey is a youtuber who made a video years ago about stopping printing the penny. when trump announced ending printing the penny, he made basically the same video about stopping printing the nickel, and the dime.
Due to Inflation.
The same reason that Bernie sanders pushed for a $15/h minimum wage, which should itself be inflated from its 2016 amount to 22 bucks an hour.
While I think both of you are making reasonable arguments, I wanted to make fun of the situation.
Sure, I mean, I’m also all for raising the minimum wage, as it’s wildly stagnated against inflation. You can be for that and for getting rid of the penny?
Idk, I just don’t understand how I’m “moving the goalposts”? Or perhaps I’ve just misunderstood the point of your comment.
I actually have seen that CGP Grey video before though, and it’s only gotten more relevant as time has gone on, lol. It doesn’t make it bad policy just because Trump is the one doing it.
It’s not bad policy because Trump is doing it. The rationale is sound. The bad part of it is zero guidance was given on how cash businesses (virtually all brick and mortar business) are expected to handle the inability to make exact change in the absence of available pennies, leaving them all to figure it out for themselves.
Sure, but does there need to be top down guidance? It seems fairly obvious on its face that you would just round to the nearest 5¢. Or floor/ceil any overage to the nearest 5¢. Those are really the only options, and I’m fine to leave it to businesses to handle which way they want to go on that.
It’s not like the prices a business charges are set in stone by God. They can charge whatever they want. If milk is $1, and bread is $2, but they want everyone who buys milk and bread at the same time to pay $4, they can do that. It’d be a weird and unwise decision, but it’s certainly allowed. So in the same way if they want to charge you $1.50 even though your “actual total” came out to $1.48, that’s absolutely their prerogative, even without the penny going away.
It’ll probably require some changes to PoS systems, and getting that rolled out might be the harder part, to your point. But the PoS guys have until all the pennies exit circulation to figure it out, so that’ll be the better part of half a decade at minimum.
You have to remember, they’re not going out and stealing all the pennies. They’re just not making more. Businesses have a lot of time to prepare for this. This isn’t an overnight process.
You can’t just round to the nearest 5¢. Round up, and you end up pissing people off for overcharging them. Round down, and you end up losing money on every sale, which adds up over time with hundreds or thousands of transactions a day.
The grocery stores around me put up signs a month ago asking people to pay in exact change when using cash due to the penny shortage. Without stores able to get more pennies from the banks, this will become a problem in months, not years.
Businesses already round to the nearest cent all the time. Any time an odd number is part of a 50% off sale, or any time you charge sales tax. The fractions of a cent are too small to matter, and we’ve gotten to the point where the pennies are too small to matter.
You say people will be pissed if you round up, but stores have been slowly increasing prices by dollars for the past few years and haven’t lost a customer over it. A few cents of rounding isn’t going to drive your customer base away. Especially if all the other stores are doing it too.
And just think for a moment. Let’s say the store starts losing 4¢/transaction. The truly worst case where they always floor in favor of the customer. First, they could offset this by just blanket raising the base price of everything by 5¢ and no one would bat an eye, but let’s set that aside for now.
Let’s say a store does 10k transactions a day. Feels like a good average for a large sized store. That’s a theoretical max loss of $400 a day. If the average grocery store customer is spending around $50, that’s $500k of revenue per day for the store that just lost $400. I think that’s pretty safely in the slush. Hell, they probably lose more than that per day on shrinkage alone. And they saved way more than that when they replaced all the cashier’s with kiosks, and I didn’t see any of those savings passed on to me.
No business is gonna fold over a 4¢/transaction loss. It’s a negligible impact on your overall overhead. And even if it wasn’t, the small bump in base price you would need to cover it is so small as to not register with your customer base.
Idk, I just don’t understand how I’m “moving the goalposts”? Or perhaps I’ve just misunderstood the point of your comment.
CGP Grey made the video for “get rid of the penny”. When they got rid of the penny, he made the video “get rid of the nickel, and the dime.” When the original goal as getting rid of the penny, once that was achieved, he moved the goalposts to get rid of the nickel.
Your statement is in line with CGP Grey’s (correct) viewpoint.
Pointing this out in a facetious manner is meant to be humorous.
CGP Grey is a youtuber who made a video years ago about stopping printing the penny. when trump announced ending printing the penny, he made basically the same video about stopping printing the nickel, and the dime.
Due to Inflation.
The same reason that Bernie sanders pushed for a $15/h minimum wage, which should itself be inflated from its 2016 amount to 22 bucks an hour.
While I think both of you are making reasonable arguments, I wanted to make fun of the situation.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=58SrtQNt4YE < kill nickels
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y5UT04p5f7U < Kill pennies
Sure, I mean, I’m also all for raising the minimum wage, as it’s wildly stagnated against inflation. You can be for that and for getting rid of the penny?
Idk, I just don’t understand how I’m “moving the goalposts”? Or perhaps I’ve just misunderstood the point of your comment.
I actually have seen that CGP Grey video before though, and it’s only gotten more relevant as time has gone on, lol. It doesn’t make it bad policy just because Trump is the one doing it.
It’s not bad policy because Trump is doing it. The rationale is sound. The bad part of it is zero guidance was given on how cash businesses (virtually all brick and mortar business) are expected to handle the inability to make exact change in the absence of available pennies, leaving them all to figure it out for themselves.
Sure, but does there need to be top down guidance? It seems fairly obvious on its face that you would just round to the nearest 5¢. Or floor/ceil any overage to the nearest 5¢. Those are really the only options, and I’m fine to leave it to businesses to handle which way they want to go on that.
It’s not like the prices a business charges are set in stone by God. They can charge whatever they want. If milk is $1, and bread is $2, but they want everyone who buys milk and bread at the same time to pay $4, they can do that. It’d be a weird and unwise decision, but it’s certainly allowed. So in the same way if they want to charge you $1.50 even though your “actual total” came out to $1.48, that’s absolutely their prerogative, even without the penny going away.
It’ll probably require some changes to PoS systems, and getting that rolled out might be the harder part, to your point. But the PoS guys have until all the pennies exit circulation to figure it out, so that’ll be the better part of half a decade at minimum.
You have to remember, they’re not going out and stealing all the pennies. They’re just not making more. Businesses have a lot of time to prepare for this. This isn’t an overnight process.
You can’t just round to the nearest 5¢. Round up, and you end up pissing people off for overcharging them. Round down, and you end up losing money on every sale, which adds up over time with hundreds or thousands of transactions a day.
The grocery stores around me put up signs a month ago asking people to pay in exact change when using cash due to the penny shortage. Without stores able to get more pennies from the banks, this will become a problem in months, not years.
Businesses already round to the nearest cent all the time. Any time an odd number is part of a 50% off sale, or any time you charge sales tax. The fractions of a cent are too small to matter, and we’ve gotten to the point where the pennies are too small to matter.
You say people will be pissed if you round up, but stores have been slowly increasing prices by dollars for the past few years and haven’t lost a customer over it. A few cents of rounding isn’t going to drive your customer base away. Especially if all the other stores are doing it too.
And just think for a moment. Let’s say the store starts losing 4¢/transaction. The truly worst case where they always floor in favor of the customer. First, they could offset this by just blanket raising the base price of everything by 5¢ and no one would bat an eye, but let’s set that aside for now.
Let’s say a store does 10k transactions a day. Feels like a good average for a large sized store. That’s a theoretical max loss of $400 a day. If the average grocery store customer is spending around $50, that’s $500k of revenue per day for the store that just lost $400. I think that’s pretty safely in the slush. Hell, they probably lose more than that per day on shrinkage alone. And they saved way more than that when they replaced all the cashier’s with kiosks, and I didn’t see any of those savings passed on to me.
No business is gonna fold over a 4¢/transaction loss. It’s a negligible impact on your overall overhead. And even if it wasn’t, the small bump in base price you would need to cover it is so small as to not register with your customer base.
CGP Grey made the video for “get rid of the penny”. When they got rid of the penny, he made the video “get rid of the nickel, and the dime.” When the original goal as getting rid of the penny, once that was achieved, he moved the goalposts to get rid of the nickel.
Your statement is in line with CGP Grey’s (correct) viewpoint.
Pointing this out in a facetious manner is meant to be humorous.