I watched a video on the demise of the penny and its predicament was so succinctly explained: everyone gets pennies as change but few carry them around let alone spend them, so we are stuck producing ever more. One news outlet even did an "experiment" where they threw hundreds of pennies on the ground in a city on a busy morning and not one person stopped to pick any up.
> everyone gets pennies as change but few carry them around let alone spend them
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.
Another aspect of the idiotic "we don't know what your tax is going to be" system (they do know it, actually) is that prices will typically end with .99 and the tax will push it over the next dollar and cause a bunch of change to be returned, instead of a single penny.
It's amazing to me that people consider "saving time while paying money" to be a good thing.
I will never "tap" my debit card as long as I have any legal option. Everyone else can wait for me to exercise my consumer rights, by inputting my PIN, verifying the amount displayed on screen etc.
Courtesy may seem outdated to some, but it can occasionally come back to bite people. Being overly rude to waitstaff is something I’m concerned with around promotions because of how they might treat people inside the company. Without better information you extrapolate.
> It's amazing to me that people consider "saving time while paying money" to be a good thing.
If you’re checking it at a grocery store it’s likely there’s someone in line behind you waiting to pay, it’s a fairly common aspect of physical transactions. Waiting for you to count out your pennies is the kind of thing that evokes rage in people because it’s so rude.
> If you’re checking it at a grocery store it’s likely there’s someone in line behind you waiting to pay
I usually use the self check-out which is usually not at all busy when I get there.
> Waiting for you to count out your pennies
I was explicitly talking about using a debit card, and as I established repeatedly throughout the thread, my country hasn't used pennies for over a decade.
But on the occasions that I pay cash, I do try to make exact change, because that's courteous to the cashier (and also just satisfies my aesthetic sense). I'm quick about this, because being the sort of person who posts on Hacker News, my mental arithmetic is pretty good.
> is the kind of thing that evokes rage in people because it’s so rude.
I've had people in front of me "waste" far more time than that because they had to cancel items (and deliberate over what to send back), struggle to pull things out of their cart, etc. It doesn't bother me. If I urgently needed to be somewhere else I would have planned my trip for another time. It already takes quite a while because I walk both ways (which I also enjoy quite a bit by the way).
People ITT are talking about the value of time, but I can't reasonably value each second equally. Time is not nearly as fungible as money; ten seconds saved on an outing is just not going to translate into ten seconds spent on my projects. Nor can I make myself feel as though every moment not spent on acquiring capital is equally wasted.
And I deeply resent the implication that using XYZ technology to save time is a moral imperative.
For a cashier sorting a customers change and presumably multiple small denomination bills is more effort than the rote action of handing out change. Handing exact change is therefore significantly slower for everyone else.
> using SYZ technology to save time is a moral imperative
Saving other people’s time is the imperative, the technology bit is simply how that happens. People can for example fill most of a check out before they know the exact amount, but you rarely see it.
I've seen a pattern where people that value their own time at $0 unfortunately often value the time of others at $0. Worse is valuing others at $0 and your own at $lots (which is also common).
I don't know what to make of the idea that I'm "not valuing my time" by carefully considering my purchases and caring about security. Or that the seconds I take on this are so important to both myself and others, compared to the time spent browsing the store shelves, getting to and from the place, etc. Heaven forbid I choose the cashier instead of a self check-out this time, and try to strike up a conversation.
My threat model includes people stealing the card. I can have tap disabled on the card, and then thieves don't know my PIN. Yes, yes, that's like 13 bits of entropy. But it's not like they can use a computer to brute-force it.
I think your threat model is incomplete. You’re far more likely to have your card cloned and pin stolen through a fake terminal. I’ve actually had that happen to me vs 0 times have I had fraudulent transactions due to a stolen card.
Tap/dip payment is non cloneable even by a fake terminal. Outside the US tap+pin/dip+pin is even common but banks for some reason really are averse to requiring Americans to add a pin to credit cards.
... at the self-checkout of a major grocery store?
> Outside the US tap+pin/dip+pin is even common
As far as I can tell "dip + pin" is exactly what I do with a debit card. This is literally the first time I've ever heard the term "EMV", so I looked it up:
> EMV cards are smart cards, also called chip cards, integrated circuit cards (ICC), or IC cards, which store their data on integrated circuit chips, in addition to magnetic stripes for backward compatibility. These include cards that must be physically inserted or "dipped" into a reader
As far as I can tell, that exactly describes my debit card.
> but banks for some reason really are averse to requiring Americans to add a pin to credit cards.
Well, yes, the entire selling point of tapping the card is that you don't spend those precious seconds on entering a pin. And my point here is to reject that culture of hurrying up (at the potential expense of carelessness).
Tap (NFC, radio), dip (EMV, chip), or swipe (magnetic stripe).
The fake terminal concern that vlovich mentions above is real. Look up "credit card skimmers" (the same threat applies to debit cards and ATMs -- anything with a magstripe and keypad).
This is a big deal. It's happened to me three times in the last few years, twice within a week of each other (and likely from the same location).
There are some EMV skimmers in the wild too. They're called "shimmers" because the mechanism is very thin and inserted into the EMV dip slot. These need a separate mechanism to capture PIN input via keypad, so they remain a better choice (but keep reading).
NFC is the safest, and fastest. The cryptography between the card and reader is intact and not replayable etc. Apple Pay is equally good from a safety perspective, and better from many others. I don't know about Google Pay.
Other problems with using your debit card: credit card contracts offer better protections against fraud; and of course there is no immediate debit to your account, so you are never stuck fighting to recover already-stolen funds.
The entire point of EMV and NFC is increased card security. It's nice that they're also quicker, but that's quite secondary.
So, do as thou wilt, obviously. But your mudstickery may be putting you at additional risk. I don't estimate the time difference as meaningful for you or other customers.
You have still not explained why. You have only expanded the claim. What is different about how "the cryptography" etc. is implemented? Why would other physical interactions between the card and the reader not enable the same security? If it's possible, why doesn't it happen?
How pitiful are you to think "consumer rights" not only exist, but are worth "exercising"? What, do you have the right to spend money on marked-up garbage? The right to be sold to bigger "consumers"? You are just a "consumer" and not a citizen, apparently.
People are very lazy to do basic math. I always minimize the coins I am carrying by doing math on my head so that the combined value of a certain coin never exceeds the amount of the next available coin/bill, that way I never exceed the carrying capacity of my wallet.
Most people I know just pocket everything and put on a box at home for undetermined time.
It's not even just that. Coins are heavy, large and noisy. Bills are way more convenient and cards even more so. If we could solve privacy issues with cards I would say get rid of all bills. Maybe just keep a few $100s in my wallet in case my cards get declined for some reason.
I like using coins because I'm always looking for commemorative coins. It's an interesting investment: you can immediately double or triple your money. Unfortunately, you rarely find them.
Nowadays I pay for everything with my phone but back in the day I too hated using coins.
Having to calculate and fish out coins? Ain't nobody got time for that.
> Having to calculate and fish out coins? Ain't nobody got time for that.
It's not that hard or time consuming if you actually use your change instead of letting it accumulate. I typically have less than a dollar in coins on my person at any given time because I spent it.
If you're paying in cash, you either take time to count the change you're going to spend, or you take time waiting for the cashier to count the change you're going to get. Or you go cashless and avoid the whole thing
And on the occasions where I can only make (exact change + simple amount), I often get deer-in-headlights looks from cashiers who can't do mental arithmetic and apparently haven't learned how to get the machine to understand payments of more than one physical bill or coin.
The majority of the comment was spent on being disparaging towards people who work in retail.
(Entering a discussion about that kind of topic can be a pretty sure way to invoke Godwin's Law, so the most sane and civil option is to downvote and walk away.)
I always pick them up. Every penny buys enough pasta to keep you alive for another 15 minutes. So in case I ever go broke, I've staved off my eventual starvation by 15 minutes.
It was always just an estimate but today I verified it with a chatbot before I made any claim about the time. Caught it in a mistake too, which I untangled by reminding it that food calories are actually kilocalories.
I remember moving out of a place (decades ago). I was the last roommate out, and so was stuck with some of the cleanup (wanted to get that deposit back!).
One of the things we had was a ton of pennies (no idea why). I had no room in my car, so I spend a few minutes late at night flinging pennies out onto the sidewalk after a long day of cleaning the place.
Would it not have been better/easier for all involved to have just set a container of all the pennies on the street on your way out? If someone really could use them, you're kind of a dick for making them pick them up one at a time, but if they were all together...
Random anecdote: I go to a boulangerie almost daily (as one does here in France). There is one close to me that started charging 12 centimes for slicing the bread. I got annoyed with this and nowadays make a point to take lots of small change from the coin jar and use it. They don't seem to mind.
