I don’t see why that would be the case? In my country, most prices with VAT (which is what you’re charged) are nice, round numbers, but not the price without VAT.
I suppose the stores set a target price, and then adjust it a bit to make the price + VAT a “nice” number.
Is there a reason that couldn’t be done to make all prices + VAT multiples of 5c?
The local tax is set by multiple independent tax authorities that change their taxes independently, the tax you see is the aggregate of those independent authorities computed separately, which do not coordinate with each other.
Some of these taxes are conditional at point-of-sale, late-binding the taxes, such that different customers are subject to different rates across these tax authorities such that it is unlikely to round to exactly 5c.
It is widely illegal to not display the true price and taxes paid separately. Trying to retcon a price and taxes for rounding purposes that is also strictly consistent across customers so as to not violate the law is not trivial.
And on top of all of this, the Federal government does not have the authority to regulate the way States and various locales structure their sales taxes. It is a herding cats problem.
> It is widely illegal to not display the true price and taxes paid separately. Trying to retcon a price and taxes for rounding purposes that is also strictly consistent across customers so as to not violate the law is not trivial.
Having lived in Europe, this should be changed. It makes it infeasible to keep track of your total bill as you shop. The amount without tax should be printed on the receipt, if you care to reference it.
The issue is that the legal change would have to be made independently across thousands of decentralized tax authorities. Herding that many cats is infeasible so it can't be part of a plausible solution. In some jurisdictions, the legal process required to make the changes have effectively insurmountable voting thresholds.
It may not be convenient but any realistic solution has to recognize the hard facts that shape the nature of problem.
Having lived in Europe and New Hampshire, I much prefer New Hampshire's solution to the problem. Just abolish sales tax! Its annoying for everyone involved. The state can get enough money from income tax. There's no need to double-dip.
I think that's what has to happen here. Things will be priced in such a way that the final price is a multiple of 5. That's a pretty easy thing for an inventory pricing system can figure out. We already do it for fractions of a penny, not sure why it would be a big deal for a fraction of a nickel
Lots of localities total taxes aren't whole percentages so it potentially gets tricky making prices work in those systems such that you can make whole 5 cent tax included prices with whole cent base prices. Do most POS systems support arbitrary precision item prices?
> Is there a reason that couldn’t be done to make all prices + VAT multiples of 5c?
Yes, there are reasons that can't be done.
We don't have VAT in the States; we instead [usually] have sales tax.
And therein: We have something like twelve thousand different sales tax districts, all set at different percentages by combinations of states, counties and municipalities.
Some cities have multiple sales tax rates even within their bounds. My own tiny little city is at the intersection of 3 different counties, and has 3 different sales tax rates: A store on one side of the road has a different tax rate than a store on the other side, and one down the block a ways has yet a third rate.
This reality doesn't have to be ideal. It doesn't have to make sense. This is what we have whether it is awesome or terrible or some combination of both.
It would take a monumental amount of effort to unwind all of that and turn it into something nationally-unified like VAT. This process would take a very long time (perhaps decades), in part because some states don't have sales tax at all and introducing a uniform VAT would represent a very different way for them to go about the ways in which they conduct both commerce and taxation.
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Of course, there's other ways to inject something sane and predictable in the decommissioning of the penny, and there's a number of of them mentioned elsewhere in other comments. But using any of them would have required utilizing an ounce of planning or forethought, and we didn't do "planning" or "forethought" here.
The decision to stop producing came from On High, and was presented in the form of a social media post[1] from the President that declared that it simply would be this way. There was no public planning or discourse involved.
We can talk about whether that's an awesome or terrible way to enact policies, but it doesn't really matter because that business has already been concluded -- with all of the swiftness and grace of eating a ham sandwich.
I don’t see why that would be the case? In my country, most prices with VAT (which is what you’re charged) are nice, round numbers, but not the price without VAT.
I suppose the stores set a target price, and then adjust it a bit to make the price + VAT a “nice” number.
Is there a reason that couldn’t be done to make all prices + VAT multiples of 5c?