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Comment by jjcm | Hacker News Reader

> the stores can adjust the prices to match the expected rounding of prices

Not necessarily. Anything measured by weight will still be subject to this issue.

Anything measured by weight is already rounding prices to the nearest cent. If something is $1/lb and I have 0.995 lbs of it, I get charged $1.00 not 99.5 cents. Presumably just rounding to the nearest 5 cents isn't that different.

Of course we don't expect anyone to be charged fractional cents because our currency doesn't support it. So just changing our smallest currency unit from 1 cent to 5 cents.

> Presumably just rounding to the nearest 5 cents isn't that different

The above context was that rounding to 5 cents might be illegal due to laws regarding SNAP debit prices being different than cash prices.

Round it for SNAP debit cards too.

Yea but I guess my thinking is that all totals would just be rounded to the nearest 5 cents, like how they're currently rounded to the nearest 1 cent. So would be the same price whether debit or cash. We already round percentage based taxes to nearest cent, even though it's feasible you could charge someone fractional cents on a debit card.

Really state laws just should be amended to include something like "costs must be the same or as close as possible using the currently available denominations of currency"

That's why it should be rounded for everything. No pennies should probably mean that any final transaction totals are rounded to the nearest nickel. Whether they pay with cash, credit, debit, snap, gift card, etc...

IMO, rounding for cash purchases only sounds worse than keeping the pennies.

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