It's not just pennies, it's all coins. In a former life I worked in retail and almost nobody would fish around in their pockets for exact (or even near) change. They'd always hand me bills for their purchase even if they had just completed a transaction and had the coins in their pocket. That was in the 90's, and I still see it happening today, even though I'm no longer in the retail world.

> The government’s phasing out of the penny has been “a bit chaotic,” said Mark Weller, executive director of Americans for Common Cents. The pro-penny group is funded primarily by Artazn, the company that provides the blanks used to make pennies.

Credit card fees are 2-4%. Rounding to the nearest nickel costs at most $0.03.

It is cheaper to round to the nearest nickel for any transaction of one dollar or more, which is every transaction these days.

> (we have a $1 coin but nobody uses it)

Because they keep designing it in the stupidest way, making it easy to confuse with a quarter. I don't know why they do that.

That said, I do prefer paper $1 bills over coins. Paper is lighter and easier to carry. But I'd only slightly grumble if we replaced it with a reasonable coin.

I never understood the objections to the $1 coin, especially after the redesign to make it more distinct from a quarter. $1 coins are great for buying stuff out of vending machines since you don't have to fight with a dodgy bill acceptor or a mangled bill.

Gotta do something to make the $2 bill popular though, no idea how.

I suppose this makes some sense. In a worst case situation, if every customer makes 10-20 transactions per year, and they always round down the maximum possible amount, they would lose millions per year.

A more reasonable assumption that half of transactions require rounding down cuts that in half, I suppose.

They're rounding all cash transactions down to the nearest nickel, so an average of 2 cents per transaction, 3.4 million customers, gives me $68,000 assuming each "customer" makes a single transaction per year. If they mean that there are 20 million unique customers, not 20m transactions, then the a long tail of customers who make frequent small transactions in cash could make their claim check out.

They have about 878 stores, according to Wikipedia, so if it was transactions, each store would only see about 62 transactions per day, which is way too low.

This is the kind of article that should be written by AI (or not written, really.) If you completely fictionalized the empty interviews, nothing would be lost.

Maybe the "spokesman" has been told to angle for a government subsidy for the inconvenience of losing pennies? And from a gas station, which add that goofy fraction of a cent at the end of their pricing.

Personally, I think stores should just start setting prices to avoid the need for pennies, but that would be too easy, I guess.

Based on my experience with the universe, this ability of being able to find something whenever you need it, only happens until you start expecting it and when you really need it, you're not gonna be able to find it anywhere. Maybe "Murphy's law" isn't what I'm looking for but something similar? For when what you really need is no longer there, universe always works against you? Can't recall.

> Four states - Delaware, Connecticut, Michigan and Oregon - as well as numerous cities, including New York, Philadelphia, Miami and Washington, DC, require merchants to provide exact change.

Yeah, really bewildering, happiness inflated by inflation.