Friday, May 23, 2014

Montreal man calculated how much the penny's abolition affected him

Roger Guitar (yes, that's his actual name) kept all the receipts for the cash transactions he'd made since February 4th, 2013, when the Canadian government abolished the penny, all 365 of them. He then calculated how much he won or lost through the rounding to the nearest five cents that became the norm. The end result? He's 89 cents richer than he would've been had the copper-coated crap stayed around. Yeesh, 89 cents over fifteen months. I make that much in less than four minutes at work.

So if anyone south of the border is still concerned about getting rid of their own penny for any reason other than the whole Lincoln thing (and let's be frank, do you really think Lincoln would like being associated with worthlessness incarnate?), there you go. Not to mention, there's no rounding going on in transactions done using debit or credit cards (other than to the nearest cent, of course) to start with.

11 comments:

  1. Also, we still have Lincoln on the five dollar bill.

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  2. It makes no sense, but everyone I talk to seems to have an irrational attachment to pennies. After asking around, I haven't found anyone over here who cares that Lincoln is on the penny. It seems to be a combination of being afraid that prices will round up, and that they are afraid of things changing in general. The former point is very hard to believe, since apparently inflation isn't a thing that happens anyway, and I would suspect that prices like $19.99 would tend to round down rather than up for psychological reasons (not to mention Roger Guitar's actual evidence). As for the second point, maybe it's just that people somehow think that all changes would automatically make life more complicated? I honestly have no idea. Maybe Americans just like seeing that coppery color interspersed with the coins with more worth. There may also be a feeling that Congress always has better things to do, like them doing that one thing any particular person is an activist about. Congress approval ratings are so abysmal nowadays that even if pennies were stopped being minted, people would rag on Congress for that anyways because that is the cool thing to do.

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  3. I think here in the states, the fear is that prices will ALWAYS round up and we'd get ripped off. Here that's actually not an irrational fear these days..

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    1. I don't even see it as that bad, I mean, whoopdeedoo, all those "Ass Seen on TV" items are now 20$ It's a fucking Festivus miracle! At worst it will be 499.50 items being rounded to 500.00.

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    2. Yeah, even if they DO get rounded up, would anyone really notice four cents max on every transaction?

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    3. They'd round it up on every item here; you multiply it by every unit of item, you'd be surprised how that sums per person per year. Now I understand if they rounded the TOTAL to nearest nickel then there's no issue because it would balance out. I'm just saying, here they'd scheme otherwise, or at least consider it. I pay almost everything electronically so paying exact means nothing to me. Nor would it affect me much personally otherwise, I'm simply stating the rationale.

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    4. Then just have the law force everyone to round the prices per transaction instead of per item. Works just fine here.

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  4. You guys don't get it at all. We need pennies because of the good luck. If we can't pick up pennies off the ground anymore, where would our luck come from?

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    1. It's not luck. It's a fetish. Advertisers get off on ending the prices of everything with a 9...

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    2. That would explain why $19.99 and $29.99 are such common prices.

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    3. $19.99 is so attractive because it's LESS than $20.00! That's why we need pennies!

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