LogFAQs > #977264955

ParanoidObsessive posted...

The problem is you need to round off, and no one on either side of the deal wants to be the person who "loses" from the rounding

For the sake of quantifying it, I just took my 2019 books (I kinda fell off the bookkeeping wagon, that's my most recent file) and rounded every single transaction to the nearest nickel to represent what would have happened if all of those transactions had been cash (they're taken directly from my bank/credit statements, so aside from a couple instances of withdrawing/depositing cash, they were all electronic). In that year, I spent just shy of $51,000 dollars. If every single one of those transactions had hypothetically been made in cash and therefore rounded to the nearest nickel, the total difference would have been...

Drumroll please...

A loss of 50 cents for me. An increase of less than 0.001% in what I spent that year. I simply cannot abide such a crippling loss.

If the policy were instead to always round up (rare) or always round down (more common)? Rounding up would cost me an extra $6.50 for the year, rounding down would save me $6.75. Both extremes come in at 0.013% of that $51k, and in the latter case, businesses actually probably don't lose out by rounding down because they're generally already saving considerably more than the maximum loss of 4 cents per transaction by not having to pay debit/credit fees (and, in fact, many businesses offer discounts for people paying in cash for that exact reason).

ParanoidObsessive posted...

Americans are probably one of the most economically/consumer-obsessed cultures on Earth, it's not a shock that we'd be the most resistant to that sort of change.

And that obsession is idiotically blind to the reality of the numbers involved in this matter. Accepting "it's just the culture" instead of pointing out just how utterly trivial the difference is (even before considering the fact that actually using pennies requires enough extra labour to negate those few cents of savings) makes no sense and perpetuates a substantial amount of wasted government money. Resisting the abolition of the penny is stupid and should be called out as such every time somebody says "it adds up" and thinks that's the end of the thought that can be put into it. It adds up to a fart in the wind, and inflation means it's only getting windier.