Comment by simpleguitar
4 hours ago
As the article points out, there are laws that say people who pay via SNAP debit cards "cannot be charged more than others".
If cash payments are rounded down, but debit card payments aren't, they are in violation of state law.
The article also points out that rollback of pennies in Canada and other places were planned, addressing these kinds of issues. USA is doing it with no such planning.
> there are laws that say
Hmm, maybe this is why it should be handled by Congress and not at the whim of the executive. They can handle all this in one piece of legislation.
If the law is slow to change or there are no available pennies, the stores can adjust the prices to match the expected rounding of prices. I can't imagine someone being prosecuted from rounding a penny but it's a quick and easy way to avoid any doubt.
> I can't imagine someone being prosecuted from rounding a penny
Under this executive, I wouldn't be so sure. If a grocery chain starts deviating from the law, then the government can use it against them to further a political agenda like we've seen with Eric Adams for example.
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The article also points out that some states and a lot cities require retailers to provide exact change. Congress would need to pass legislation to allow rounding nationally. I'm guessing in the meantime they'll continue holding pennies from previous years?
Is gas sold as a whole penny amounts in those locations? Where I am it's always something and 9/10ths of a cent.
Allowing gas stations to denominate their prices by the 10th of a cent has always struck me as a just an underhanded and extreme way to practice the "9.99" retail psychological trick. Why not allow retailers to price things 9.99999? Ridiculous.
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The amount is only rounded at the end of the transaction. Those fractions make a difference if you're buying more than a few gallons
Here in Argentina the law says they must be rounded down. Initially it was for 5 AR$cents, and some shops still has the oficial sign that says AR$ 0.05.
We unofficially drop the coins/bills when the reach ~US$0.03, so now we dropped the AR$50 bills and everythig in cash is rounded down to AR$100 (US$0.07).
(The only exception is the photocopy shop 2 blocks away from home.)
Credit cards are charged the exact ammount, with cents that are irrelevant.
If the national government literally stops creating a certain precision of money, i expect the "exact change" requirement should be invalid.
You volunteering your business to be the the test legal case for that? Or are you stocking pennies?
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I don't want to be glib, but hey what the hey. This is how you can see that the United States is in decline; it can no longer discontinue a coin through legislation.
Congress seems like the most dysfunctional branch of government going on a couple decades now.
They poll worse than the most unpopular presidents
So, round down debit cards too? This seems like a really easy problem to solve.
They're all easily solvable problems. The issue, as GP mentioned, is that the pennies are just stopping without the thought through these problems and planning for the solutions. This was done via a social media post, not a well thought out transition like Canada had.
> The issue, as GP mentioned, is that the pennies are just stopping without the thought through these problems and planning for the solutions.
That's not an "issue". That's the way things that actually happen, happen.
If they're easily solvable then why do you need planning?
Changing the currency on a whim by executive fiat is stupid, but that's just principle. In practical terms, I really have a hard time caring about the problems this specific change creates.
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SNAP is a major source of revenue for grocers so it seems like you wouldn't have to prod them very hard to do that.
Charges take into account severity of the crime and intent. Nobody is going to get criminal charges for rounding pennies on cash transactions.
Ok— Walmart decides to do something the government doesn’t like re:tariffs or whatnot. They can either plead fealty and retract their decision or the C-Suite can defend themselves against conspiracy to commit a zillion misdemeanors an hour…
Sure, on paper. In reality bored fedcops trying to justify their budgets is how you get plenty of unjustifiable suffering.
The secret service probably won't cause a Waco out of it, but I'm sure they'll do something dumb.
Generally in accounting, insignificant amounts are... insignificant (like how tax calculations are rounded to the dollar).
Please don't strawman this, there is ample evidence for rounding pennies on everyday transactions.
Can you not argue that the average is the same and thus the law isn’t violated?
No, because the law applies to individual transactions, not averages.
Does the law say the average price must be the same, or does it say the price must be the same?
Reality: the supermarket does it the common sense way, and never gets sued, but if they do get sued, the outcome is "you must now refund 2 cents from every SNAP transaction you ever did"
Very unlikely that would happen. The way similar issues have been dealt with in the past is that settlement is negotiated to something "reasonable" (at least arguably so) and administrable. Probably the settlement amount would just go to a fund that the state would then distribute according to its priorities.
It's probably the case that the real risk is being suspended from SNAP for failing to comply with their rules.
More annoying especially during the SNAP gap due to the shutdown the law forbids differential pricing in general so shops couldn't offer lower prices for EBT/SNAP customers as a way to help their neighbors.