LogFAQs > #977275981

ParanoidObsessive posted...

Oh, I don't disagree with you.

But the problem is, in life, what's actually true rarely matters when compared to what people perceive as true. Which is part of why emotional arguments are almost always more effective than rational ones.

Humans are feeling creatures who actually figured out how to think, but we don't do all that well with the thinking a lot of the time.

This is a very easy emotional argument to shoot down, though. Most people will leave it at "it adds up" even if they agree with abolishing the penny because they haven't done any concrete work to prove what they believe to be intuitively true. I have, and the conclusion is that in the absolute worst case scenario of me doing every single transaction in cash and the policy being to round up in every case, that would end up costing me an extra ten thousandth of what I spent across ~400 transactions in a year (or about 12.5 minutes of work, assuming 52, 40-hour weeks). And that worst case scenario is all but impossible (as far as I know, everyone that's abolished the penny either rounds normally or rounds down in every case), with slightly more realistic hypotheticals either being an order of magnitude more trivial, or being trivially beneficial to consumers and notably beneficial to businesses because it encourages cash payments.

Sure, people will still stuff their fingers in their ears and act like their opinions matter even when indisputable math proves that they don't, but there's no reason to tolerate that when the math is this straightforward. Those rounded pennies simply don't add up, so if somebody tries to insist that they do, don't accept that.

Out of curiosity, I just did the same exercise for normal rounding to the nearest dime or quarter to simulate abolishing the nickel and dime, respectively. That gave a total annual loss of $1.20 for abolishing nickels and $2.45 for abolishing dimes, for a respective 0.0024% and 0.0048% of my total expenditures (assuming 100% cash transactions). I think there's a legitimate case to be made for getting rid of all small change, though in that case it would pretty much have to be normal rounding because the automatic round down option would probably exceed what businesses save with cash transactions (especially businesses selling a lot of <$5 items). There might even be a case for ditching cents entirely (a gain of $8.30 or 0.0163% for me), but I think that's probably too far because businesses that deal in smaller transactions rely on more granularity than that in pricing their stuff, plus on smaller transactions that rounding could wipe out sales tax entirely.