Comment by basscomm
12 hours ago
> 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.
I’d regularly use quarters in vending machines, but not waste time during a retail transaction.
In most other countries, since prices are shown including all taxes you can often have the money ready while waiting in line etc.
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.
Entering your PIN and using a debit card is the least secure/safe version of electronic payment.
Tapping (NFC) or dipping (EMV) are safer and faster for everyone.
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Wasting people’s time is rude here not illegal.
Courtesy may seem outdated to some, but it can occasionally come back to bite people.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.
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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).
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> but not waste time during a retail transaction.
we could just go back to writing checks while we're at it.
I used to do this for vending machines but now it’s common to need more than eight of them per transaction so it's kinda silly.
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.
I also keep the obvious fakes.
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
It's amazing to me that there are people with this mindset. I enjoy the process.
That's incredibly bizarre. If I have coins my first instinct is to spend them ASAP so I don't have to carry them around.
I pay exact change whenever I can.
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.
I legitimately don't understand why people object to this strongly enough to downvote it without comment.