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Comment by phyzome | Hacker News Reader

If you get rid of the penny and the nickel, then you may have trouble making change with just 10 and 25 cent pieces.

I'd almost say if you were going to go down to 2 coins it might actually make more sense to have and $0.10 and $0.50 pieces. I.e. force all prices to a multiple of 0.1 instead of 0.01 but leave a larger coin to make larger totals or scrounging up more than a dollar when you don't have a bill go quicker.

Or even just go straight to quarters being the only change at all. A penny CPI adjusted from when they got rid of the half penny in the US (1857) is already worth $0.35 today.

This is a good idea. Rebasing on 10¢. I proposed dropping to a 25¢ smallest-coin standard elsewhere in the thread, but dropping the quarter and going 10¢/50¢/$1 is also a good plan.

Pennies and nickels definitely should go. They’re not even worth picking up off the ground.

> leave a larger coin to [...] go quicker

It'll go quicker, but it won't save space! Unless we make smaller half dollars, just as the gold colored dollar coins took over after the large dollar coins we had previously. Perhaps something with a diameter similar to a nickel but a thickness similar to a penny or quarter.

In Sweden, ~10 cents (1 Swedish crown) is now the smallest coin.

Swedish coin, year taken out of circulation:

  0.1 cents, 1972 
  0.2 cents, 1972 
  0.5 cents, 1985 
  1 cent (penny), 1992
  2.5 cents, 1985 
  5 cents (nickel), 2010

Is it possible to have a bank account or electric bill for a fraction of a crown?

In the distant past when I still named computers, I'd always make sure to have a zloty and a kopek somewhere in the zoo; typically they'd be NIS servers or recursive DNS servers or other similarly important task trivially serviced by an antiquated server I had fondness for and wanted an excuse to not retire. "You can't turn off those SLCs; they're the NIS servers for the statistics department..."

Yes, 0.01 crowns are still used for bills in Sweden.

The sender can elect to round them to the nearest crown, but that is optional.

The joke about two coins adding up to fifty-five cents and one of them not being a nickel will go the way of the dodo.

The dime has got to go

Nah, it's the only one that makes sense.

Cash based commerce should just be rounded to the 1/10th dollar not the 1/100th dollar; there's just no need for such precision.

I'd just announce that while still legal tender, the penny, nickle, and quarter won't be minted any longer except in low volumes for collectors, and that cash transactions may be rounded down to the nearest 10th dollar if proper change is not available.

IE a cup of coffee costing $4.17 would cost $4.10 if paying cash. I suspect vendors would just update the cost of everything to land on the 1/10th increment.

I guess you may need to worry about people playing arbitrage games with metered things like gasoline, but even there it's probably just a marginal problem.

Dime is a weird word; it doesn't convey that it's a tenth of a dollar, does it?

[edited to add examples and digression on gasoline]

Gasoline isn’t a digression, it’s a great example of why removing precision from prices is a bad idea.

Imagine you own a gas station. Your actual cost to fill your tanks is some multiple of the price you can charge per gallon. Requiring 10 cent-rounded prices kneecaps your ability to efficiently price your product.

Flipping it around, if you think $1/10 increments are good enough for a gas station owner, why aren’t they good enough for Microsoft when its shares are traded? Decimalization in equity markets has been widely seen as a success because more precise prices communicate information about the relative interests of buyers and sellers more accurately.

Given the predominance of digital transactions, it’s hard to argue that the transactional efficiency gains of less precise prices are worth the downsides.

Well, my statement was for _cash_ transactions, and why I mentioned arbitrage.

We could as easily add a 1/1000th unit to the dollar, and mandate that for cash transactions round to the 1/10th but for credit and other electronic transactions they'd be to the "iota" or some other charming term for the millidollar. I'm pretty sure that aeons ago there were half pennies, so it isn't completely absurd.

Also, I'm pretty sure that in the not so distant past stocks used some weird fraction of dollars not decimals[1].

[1] https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/why-nyse-switch-fra...

[edited to add example of fractionally denominated stock prices]

[edit2: ah, sorry you mentioned the fractional stock issue with the observation "precise values are good" which they are. I still retain my position that, for retail cash based commerce, precise values are less valuable than the time invested in the transaction. ]

Gas stations denominate in thousandths of a dollar, for which there is no coinage.

> Imagine you own a gas station. Your actual cost to fill your tanks is some multiple of the price you can charge per gallon. Requiring 10 cent-rounded prices kneecaps your ability to efficiently price your product.

This is… already the situation?

Most gas stations where I am are pricing their product in thousands of a cent and rounding the total off to the nearest cent when it’s time to pay.

We got rid of the penny a decade ago in Canada. It just means that for cash transactions the gas station rounds off to the nearest five cents instead. The most they can “lose” is two cents _on the total transaction_. Hardly seems different than losing several tenths of a cent on some transactions (as they already were) in aggregate.

also strangely missing from this discussion about the supposed outrages of pricing when you round, and losing 0.1 or 0.2% in cash payments, is that credit card companies will charge that gas station is a bit over 2%. So no matter what coin you abolish, the gas station comes out on top on the cash payment, even if it's the quarter. It'd still come out on top if it was the dollar bill/coin for bills under $200, so, pretty much always.

It's more "already handled" than missing. Gas stations already often advertise a cash price and paying by credit gives you a higher price which includes the markup. It's perhaps the most commonly used type of business that bothers to do this because the margins are so thin.

re: arbitrage games with metered things like gasoline, we got rid of pennies in Canada a decade ago so I can tell you how it affected getting gas. Initially, some people switched games from the classic "try to get a whole number of dollars exactly" to "try to get two cents above a whole number of dollars", as that gets rounded down when you pay cash. However, that was also around the time that paying with cards for everything became the norm, so it stopped mattering because credit/debit card transactions don't get rounded. Worth noting, in response to the sibling comment, that if you buy $20.02 of gas for $20, you get a 0.1% discount, which I doubt throws off the owners' books. This would be 0.2% max if the nickel was also eliminated.

There were also jokes about buying one grape at a time so the whole bag got rounded to 0, but I worked at a grocery store for two years and never saw anyone try to exploit the rounding, even to a lesser extent :)

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