If, with taxes the total is $XXX.58, will the store give the customer the three cents and eat the loss or will they charge the customer the extra two cents and let them have a credit or suck it up?
If the answer is that people use plastic more than cash, what does that do to the unbanked who do not have accounts with financial institutions that issue debit cards? Will there be "Penny cards" that will just be used for penny transactions. A person would pay the $XXX.55 in cash at the register, as listed in the above example, and then slide their "Penny card" for the balance or pay $XXX.60 and have the balance ($0.02) go to their "Penny card"?
Either the customer eats the pennies or the store does. Does anyone remember the Superman movie with Richard Pryor as the accountant(?) at Social Security or other organization that paid people on a regular basis based on a formula. He wrote a script to have all the partial payments beyond the second space after the decimal credited to his account. (A person's pay may be $1,285.12, but it was really $1285.123875, so the $0.003875 was put in the accountant's account based on the script he wrote. His paycheck was huge.)
I think we need to think this through before we dump the penny. Maybe work on the unbanked part by having the post office cash checks and issue government debit cards. Make sure they're readable by those scanners at stores that allow people to check balances of gift cards and item prices in the stores. This might also put check cashing places that charge a percent of the check to cash the check out of business...that wouldn't be a bad thing. They're just a step or two away from payday lenders.
Side note: I wanted to get rid of the penny and the dollar bill. We already have a dollar coin. With the decision to remove the penny from circulation, that frees up a slot to move all the coins down one and have room for a dollar coin where the quarter was, after the slide to the left. When the cashier, rare though they are, gets pennies in transaction, the pennies would be placed under the till just like big bills ($50/100 bills). The cashier would start the shift with one roll of pennies and ten loose pennies. When they get pennies, they add them to the loose pennies. When they run out, they open the roll. At the end of the shift, the [drawer] would be reset with a roll of pennies and ten loose pennies. Any extra pennies would be counted then added to the coin dispensers at self-checkout. Self-checkout would dispense change in coins that would include pennies.
I play the penny game, trying to pay for items to the penny. I usually carry a few (random, just grab and go) pennies with me so I can pay the pennies and pay the rest with my debit card. It works well with self-checkout. It's confusing for some cashiers.
