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.
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.
im more wondering about banks. what happens if I want to withdraw a dollar and one cent. businesses can just adjust their pricing.