Australia's rules for how to round are summed up in four dot points here in a single page of info, with another two short paragraphs about how electronic/credit card and cheque transactions are handled (they are not rounded): https://www.accc.gov.au/media-release/rounding-and-eftpos-tr...

When the removal of one and two cent pieces actually happened in Australia (1991), all the details were distributed in a pamphlet of just four pages. That amount of information is probably about all people need, literally just a document with some guidelines!

Many issues probably don't need the lengthy deliberative processes that stall or delay change. But the problems with the penny have been apparent for years, maybe even decades. There was plenty of time to study the issue, observe how other economies have made similar transitions and figure out how to make it work in an orderly fashion. Instead, we have a change by executive decree, with no apparent planning. Will the mint start making pennies again in the next administration or the next year? It's certainly possible.

In some states, there's legal uncertainty for retailers that operate without pennies. Planning and forwarning likely would have encouraged states to amend laws to provide for penniless retailers. Uniform nationwide rounding could have been an option, interstate commerce and all that.

Some sort of plan for the pennies themselves might be nice, although maybe some sort of plan could have helped pennies circulate more, reducing the need to mint several billion pennies every year.

Technically, it would have been better for the government to hand a tax on gross business revenue less labor costs, in order to give the Fed a lever to lower price levels inflation and raise household spending power so that the loss of pennies was of as little significance to households as it was to the Mint. Obviously, that would have required years of unpalatable and unsexy planning work that can’t be converted into political capital, but the outcome would have been that pennies become more relevant by lower prices and/or that pennies become less relevant by higher spending power. Oh well.

Discontinuing the penny is obviously an important thing (otherwise, we'd have been done talking about it by now).

It is always best that important government moves are done in public, with processes that are replete with discourse and understanding, instead of with surprises and confusion.

Ideally, the government would had resolved the (present-day, recently-introduced, inevitable, foreseeable) conflict with SNAP benefits and come up with a single-page, large-print summary that uniformly defined how rounding at the checkout counter works in ways that regular people conducting regular transactions would be able to comprehend and follow.

These details certainly all need to be figured out at some point, and sooner would be better than later: We should have started figuring it out years (perhaps even a decade) ago.

Unfortunately, we did not take that path.

Discontinuing the penny could have been a very orderly nothingburger wherein everyone (on all sides of the cash register) knew exactly what to expect, and exactly when to expect it. But but we didn't do it that way.

So instead, we now we have an element of surprise and confusion instead of simplicity.

For anyone who might point out that this lack of planning may lead to incredibly minor price rises for everyone, i'll add that this can be balanced by the very minor inconvenience that will no longer exist. This is inherently unquantifiable, but as people here love pointing out that doesn't mean it's not worth something.