Monetary units (was: Types of numerals)

Nik Taylor wrote:
>
>Tristan McLeay wrote:
> >> There are recurring mumbles over here about abolishing the penny and
> >> rounding everything to the nearest nickel ($0.05)...
> >
> > Just don't let it make you think you'll finally see the end of stupid >
>"$29.99" pricing. Instead, they become $29.95 and are just as annoying.
Not necessarily. We did just that in Finland (abolished the 1 and 2
euro-cent coins) and I think I've seen much less ".9X" prices after that.
XX9.00 prices are still commonplace, tho.

There's a word for this phenomenon in "The Meaning of Liff" but I've only
read the Finnish version...


>I've never understood the hostility towards pennies, though. Like any
>other denomination of coin, if you use them, they're not a problem.
I dunno about hostility, but I can understand the annoyance. Imagine if you
had one-thousandth coins instead; would you agree that minting those would
be a complete waste of material and effort? You'd need dozens before you
could spend them on anything.
Now, with pennies, the only difference is that you'll need a ten times
smaller pile before they're worth anything. A single penny is still
essentially government-produced scrap metal by itself... except maybe to
little children, who might be happy to find one on the ground and be able to
go buy one gummibear.


>Changing $29.99 to $30.00 wouldn't eliminate the use for pennies, though,
>thanks to sales tax.  Where I live, for example, $30.00 would come out to
>$32.26 after tax (ironically, $29.99 would be $32.25, no need for pennies!)
Hm, here in Finland all displayed prices include the sales tax, so that
problem doesn't exist.

John Vertical

Reply