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Making Change
Roland Piquepaille writes "There are mostly four kinds of coins in circulation in the U.S: 1 cent, 5 cents, 10 cents, and 25 cents. But is it the most efficient way to give back change? This Science News article says that a computer scientist has found an answer. "For the current four-denomination system, [Jeffrey Shallit of the University of Waterloo] found that, on average, a change-maker must return 4.70 coins with every transaction. He discovered two sets of four denominations that minimize the transaction cost. The combination of 1 cent, 5 cents, 18 cents, and 25 cents requires only 3.89 coins in change per transaction, as does the combination of 1 cent, 5 cents, 18 cents, and 29 cents." He also found that change could be done more efficiently in Canada with the introduction of an 83-cent coin and in Europe with the addition of a 1.33- or 1.37-Euro coin. Check this column for more details and references." The paper (postscript) is online.
I think the advantage to having a 10-cent piece is that it makes the math easy. Let's face it; can you imagine the average cashier at WalMart giving back 98 cents change with an 18-cent coin?
Swannie
:q!
Are you kidding me?!
... *pause* .... and just stare blankly at the change drawer.
Have you ever gotten a bill for dinner for say $12.50 and you give the cashier $15 saying the tip is included?
You would think 15.00 - 12.50 is doable right?
HELL NO! The cashier pulls out a calculator to do the math so she can write it in for the waiter's tips!!!
If people can't add things like this 18cent coins are out of the question.
Although I would like to hear a cashier go,
"That makes $0.88 change sir." Pick out two quarters then,
"Engineers do the work of man, Physicists do the work of God"
Is it too early in the morning or does this article not make sense? I have never seen an 18 cent piece in circulation n the US...
Eric Aitala
www.f1m.com
Why not just get rid of silly prices like 99.99 and 4.37 and 1.49. ?
Why not round prices to dimes ? Or even quarters ?
for the last time people, I am "frodo from middle eaRTH", not "middle eaST".
Exactly. All you need is a 1 cent coin, and a, er, zero cent coin!
Skiing? Check out The Independant Skiers Portal
I had 18 cents everytime I heard that.
I don't suffer from insanity, I enjoy every minute of it.
I was at a conveinece store yesterday. The price came to $1.37. I tendered $2.12. The cashier's head almost exploded.
So- you have 7 18-cent coins, Susie gives you 13, and you give Bobbie 3. How many nickels must Daddy give you for your 18-cent coins...?
Then, you get on a train in Boston traveling east at 300 MPH. In 30 minutes, will you really care about how many 18-cent coins you're carrying?
Whew! This water sure is cold!
More proof of the ungoing schism between science and common sense.
Me, I'm on the side of science.
You think it's bad enough when the cashier has to use the machine to figure out how much change to give, and in what denominations? You think it's bad when the little old lady in front of you in line starts counting, and then double-counting to make sure, the change she's going to hand over?
You give them a 29 cent piece and see how fast things get.
I'm willing to bet that most of the "coin cost" or whatever you want to call it comes from pennies, anyway -- if the dollar amounts are random, every 5 transactions are going to involve (0 + 1 + 2 + 3 + 4 = ) 10 pennies, or 2 pennies per transaction. Rounding prices to the nickel would be simpler, easier, and more efficient.
employee theft. .99, or 1.95, or 7.53, they gotta make change by opening the register.
If the price is 1.00$, the person working the regster can just take the buck, or five, or whatever, and slide it into their pocket. If its
All Troll + "offtopic" mods are meta moderated as "Unfair", because you abused the system.
more efficient transaction costs?? Again the computer scientists are concentrating on the efficiency of the system, without any regard to the efficiency of the user. What is more important, handing back a smaller amount of change, or allowing for quicker mental computation of what coins to use in the transaction? For example when you are told something costs $3.48, it takes more time to calculate how to break up 48 cents into the available coin denominations, then it does to to actually exchange and identify the coins. The system is not what needs to be optimized, instead the user is what matters, and our mind work well in 10's and 5's.
My mother went to the store to purchase something. The price on it was $20. It was also marked 25% off. It rang up as $18 instead of $15. My mother pointed this out, but the cashier would have none of it. "No, no, that sounds like 25% off."
How the hell can we expect these people to handle 18 cent pieces when they can't even figure out what 25% of 20 is?
Do what Australia did a while back and round everything to the nearest 5c and get rid of 1c and 2c coins entirely (so now Australian coins are 5c, 10c, 20c, 50c, $1 and $2). I couldn't decide whether I liked it to start with, but after a little while you realise just how much shrapnel you carry around and have no intention of using except to empty it from your pocket/wallet at the end of every day. Every time I go to another country and have to again deal with 1/2 cent/euro cent/pence/etc I just appreciate this move even more.
"Because it's there." - George Mallory, when asked why he wanted to climb Mt Everest, March 18, 1923 (New York Times)
It seems like the objective here was to minimize coin exchange. Ususally I try to minimize the number of coins in my pocket.
If something costs 77c I give them 1.02 - and get a quarter back. In the US, the tellers stare at me blankly, but then dutifylly enter the amount I give them - and then smile in amazement at the simplicity of the exchange.
In Japan, it is almost the other way around. The tellers come up with the most creative combinations that minimize my number of coins (and maximize theirs - this is in both of our interest).
Tor
- Some egghead thinks "optimal" means "fewest coins returned in change, on average."
- He recommends introducing 18 and 83 cent coins.
- The people who actually use coins laugh at this idiocy.
Sheesh, "optimal" coinage denominations are those that make using coins easiest. That means quick mental calculations of change, manipulating them with your fingers, and passing them back and forth.The ivory tower academics are certainly earning their reputation for foolishness.
taken! (by Davidleeroth) Thanks Bingo Foo!
Any gain in efficiency of number of coins returned is going to be substantially offset by the decrease in efficiency of time required for people to calculate the change. Seriously, the simplest solution is to do away with the penny and round up/down to the nearest nickel.
"Nothing exists except atoms and empty space; everything else is opinion." - Democritus
Don't y'all remember the SchoolHouse Rock about counting by 18?
. . .
*taps foot*
Eighteen is a magic number.
Yes it is, it's a magic number.
Somewhere in the ancient, mystic eighteenity
You get eighteen as a magic number.
The past and the present and the future,
Faith and hope and charity,
The heart and the brain and the body
Give you eighteen.
That's a magic number.
18, 36, 54 . .
72, 90, 108 . .
126, 144, 162 . .
180.
This approach simplifies all transactions to one-coin change. Some people might argue that this is just too many coins to keep track of, but since no one keeps track of their change anyway, it wouldn't matter. It's easier to use the new change to pay as well: Instead of $0.67 being 2 quarters, a dime, a nickel, and 2 pennies, it can be paid in one coin. Or, you could use a 50-cent and a 17-cent piece. Or two 27s and a 13! The possibilities are endlessly easy!
Some people say that it's a problem to differentiate the 99 different coins (95 new coins) by sight. There's a simple answer to this -- each coin would have a number of sides based on its amount. A 4-cent coin is a square, an 8-cent is an octogon, and so forth. So, remember, don't give them three quarters -- just reach into your pocket, feel for the coin with 75 sides, and hand it over.
Oh, and if you can't tell a 99-sided coin from a 97-sided coin by sight, perhaps you should stick to smaller denominations.
The new two-cent coins are easy to lose, so be careful.
/syle
> Have I been living under a rock? Are my dimes now worth 18 cents?
:)
Apparently so. That's what your dollars are now worth.
Why did we fight against the Imperial System ?
:
easy, look
Measures of length
After 1959, the U.S. and the British inch were defined identically for scientific work and were identical in commercial usage (however, the U.S. retained the slightly different survey inch for specialized surveying purposes). A similar situation existed for the U.S. and the British mass unit pound, and many relationships, such as 12 inches = 1 foot, 3 feet = 1 yard, and 1760 yards = 1 international mile, were the same in both countries; but there were some very important differences.
Measures of volume
In the first place, the U.S. customary bushel and the U.S. gallon, and their subdivisions differed from the corresponding British Imperial units. Also the British ton is 2240 pounds, whereas the ton generally used in the United States is the short ton of 2000 pounds. The American colonists adopted the English wine gallon of 231 cubic inches. The English of that period used this wine gallon and they also had another gallon, the ale gallon of 282 cubic inches. In 1824, the British abandoned these two gallons when they adopted the British Imperial gallon, which they defined as the volume of 10 pounds of water, at a temperature of 62F, which, by calculation, is equivalent to 277.42 cubic inches. At the same time, they redefined the bushel as 8 gallons.
In the customary British system the units of dry measure are the same as those of liquid measure. In the United States these two are not the same, the gallon and its subdivisions are used in the measurement of liquids; the bushel, with its subdivisions, is used in the measurement of certain dry commodities. The U.S. gallon is divided into four liquid quarts and the U.S. bushel into 32 dry quarts. All the units of capacity or volume mentioned thus far are larger in the customary British system than in the U.S. system. But the British fluid ounce is smaller than the U.S. fluid ounce, because the British quart is divided into 40 fluid ounces whereas the U.S. quart is divided into 32 fluid ounces.
From this we see that in the customary British system an avoirdupois ounce of water at 62F has a volume of one fluid ounce, because 10 pounds is equivalent to 160 avoirdupois ounces, and 1 gallon is equivalent to 4 quarts, or 160 fluid ounces. This convenient relation does not exist in the U.S. system because a U.S. gallon of water at 62F weighs about 8 1/3 pounds, or 133 1/3 avoirdupois ounces, and the U.S. gallon is equivalent to 4 x 32, or 128 fluid ounces.
1 U.S. fluid ounce = 1.041 British fluid ounces
1 British fluid ounce = 0.961 U.S. fluid ounce
1 U.S. gallon = 0.833 British Imperial gallon
1 British Imperial gallon = 1.201 U.S. gallons
Measures of weight and mass
Among other differences between the customary British and the United States measurement systems, we should note that they abolished the use of the troy pound in England January 6, 1879, they retained only the troy ounce and its subdivisions, whereas the troy pound is still legal in the United States, although it is not now greatly used. We can mention again the common use, for body weight, in England of the stone of 14 pounds, this being a unit now unused in the United States, although its influence was shown in the practice until World War II of selling flour by the barrel of 196 pounds (14 stone). In the apothecary system of liquid measure the British add a unit, the fluid scruple, equal to one third of a fluid drachm (spelled dram in the United States) between their minim and their fluid drachm.
In Great Britain, the yard, the avoirdupois pound, the troy pound, and the apothecaries pound are identical with the units of the same names used in the United States. The tables of British linear measure, troy mass, and apothecaries mass are the same as the corresponding United States tables, except for the British spelling "drachm" in the table of apothecaries mass. The table of British avoirdupois mass is the same as the United States table up to 1
It takes 40+ muscles to frown, but only four to extend your arm and bitchslap the motherfucker
I understand that an assumption like this is necessary to even begin an anaylysis using our western logic system, but this assumption makes the study useless.
There's no way that the distibution curve is flat. People spend a lot of time and money price setting as described here and you better believe they know how to price their goods to maximize profit.
This study also doesn't take into account people like me, who make a game out of minimizing the number of coins in my wallet/pocket. If I can prevent getting 94 cents in change by carrying and relinquishing a penny and a nickle, I'll do it.
sHi
One can reduce the amount of change simply by getting rid of the silly 1c piece, like Australia did (it got rid of both 1c and 2c pieces).
:)
Sure, people will bitch and moan for about 6 months, but then noone would ever consider going back.
All you need to do is 2/3 round at the till. It's great!
A Canadian quarter is worth about 18 cents. Just use those.
Is obviously not true - prices are clustered at certain points, eg 95c or 99c, so the typical amount of change would be skewed as well. Would be nice to see the experiment using real data for typical prices.
Also, I wonder to what extent the demoninations of currency in use effect the prices of goods?
dave
===== Tech, Ramblings, Photos --> davidgoodwin.net
No not that LSD I mean good old pounds shillings and pence. There you have a system which evolved - it sounds to me - to do precisely this. Whats more, even uneducated victorian urchins understood what two guineas less half a crown tuppence ha'penny was and could offer you change in the form of shillings, florins, pennies, etc.
For those who don't know what I'm talking about, British currency up to the 1970s was counted in pennies, shillings (12 pennies), twenty of those to a pound, with a guinea at 21 shillings (lend a pound, get a guinea back in a year, see, works for interest too).
Euro 1,2,5,10,
When I was in Europe recently I noticed their semi-log scale change system of 1,2,5,10,20,50,... and really liked it compared with the US system, which has quarter dollars, but not $2.50 bills.
Evidently two bits are indivisible anyway these days, so Americans don't seem inordinately hooked on using powers of 2 to divide up their money all the time.
The US should have its monetary system go the same direction as the stockmarket which recently abolished fractions (down to what, 1/64, 1/128?) in favor of decimal stock prices.
Also, the US treasury needs to push $1 coins (and perhaps $2 and $5 coins) because the paper money wears out so much faster and costs more to replace than coinage.
And, while we're on the subject of monetary redesign, coins should be monotonically increasing in diameter, thickness, and mass to make it easier for people with poor vision.
In fact, if the weights were done nicely, it might even be possible to start weighing heterogeneous buckets of coins to obtain value (assuming no rocks, counterfeits).
Or to measure linear thickness of heterogeneous coin stacks and still have $/inch be as good a measure as $/weight, again, to avoid explicit counting.
Ahh, if nerds were running the world, things would be so damn efficient...
"Provided by the management for your protection."
Uhhh...did anyone else have to use a calculator or pencil for this one and go, "Oh, I get it. Those idiot cashiers."?
...snicker...
Any sufficiently well-organized Government is indistinguishable from bullshit.
Engineers also speak PDE, only in a different dialect.
> In Canada, it's illegal to pay for any good or service, with more than 25 of any given denomination.
What he's talking about can be found in Section 8 of the Currency Act.
Basically it is a no-nuisance law to stop people from doing things like pay fines using pennies. It doesn't say the money can be confiscated...
Many businesses will still except coins if they have been rolled. I know I have paid for movie tickes and extra value meals with rolls of nickles and dimes.
From the statute:
(2) A payment in coins referred to in subsection (1) is a legal tender for no more than the following amounts for the following denominations of coins:
-
Rod (Canadian)
The Deivation assumes two falacies
first,
that the price of goods is not partly determined by the demoninations of coins. for example, the reason why a candy bar is 50 cents or 65 cents and not say 48 cents is because we have nickels dimes and quarters. or that the reason a price is 5.95 cents and not 5.96 cents. etc..
Second,
this assumes your change purse is stocked with all denominations. that's true at the cash register but not in my pocket. When I reach in my pocket and I pull out some change there are a myraid of ways I can make 25 cents. 5 nickels, 2 dimes and a nickel, 5 pennies+ etc...,
not so with his optimal set. if I'm nissing any of the denominations its hard to make it up with the others.
third, entropy
again reaching for change in my pocket the goal is not to find the minumum number of coins but rather to be able to pay the bill without thinking too much. that is the more ways I can add up to the same value the more likely I will on a random grab find the right coins to make it. I dont care how many coins.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Back in the long ago, people used to do this. Spanish coins could be broken into eight pieces: "Pieces of Eight". The whole coin was the equivalent of a dollar, so a quarter would literally be a quarter of the coin, or two bits.
"I'm not impatient. I just hate waiting." - My Dad
A few years back, my dad was paying for something, and paid an uneven amount in order to get even change. The clerk looked at the money, sort of shrugged, and punched it in and started counting out the change. The catch is---my dad misheard the amount. So when the clerk started counting out a bunch of pennies and nickels, my dad was like, "wait, what?" Had the clerk had *any idea* why my dad had given an uneven amount, she would have realised that he'd misheard the price. But she just punched it in and started counting it out....
A few years after that, my sister (in 5th grade at the time) had a test with a miscalculated grade, and when my mom went in for a parent-teacher conference, she brought it up. In particular, she said she'd added up the number correct and divided by the total number of questions, and got a different percentage... the teacher looked down her nose at my mom and said, "that's *not* how it's calculated." How was it calculated? Well, you have these cardboard discs that you turn according to the total number of questions, and then you read the grade out of the little window corresponding to the number right.... This woman had only the vaguest notion that this grade was a percentage correct, and *no idea at all* that---as a percentage---it could also be calculated by dividing the numbers out. None.
``This, too, shall pass.'' ---Eastern proverb
Cecil has the right answer instead of this complete conjecture.
Hey, I can beat this guy at this math thing. According to my calculations there are much more efficient combinations. For example, if you use the coins 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64 it will take approximately 3.19 coins per transaction (this is simple binary arithmetic). That's way better than his system which takes 3.89 coins per transaction. The only problem is that the geeks will do just fine with these denominations but just try and ask the average waitress to make change using those coins. Go ahead and ask, I'm sure it will work out just fine! :)
You know, if we mint 1 coin for every amount of change (like a 57 cent coin, a 58 cent one, etc.) then it will only take 1 coin per transaction. Of course then we have to worry about having 99 different coins, making them distinguishable from each other, etc.
The current United States system of currency works just fine. Denominations of 1, 5, 10, 25 are easy enough to calculate and efficient enough for all intensive purposes. Sure this proposed new system may be 17% "more efficient" for a computer but real people need to use the system also.
Some things are best off just left alone...
Sapere aude!
with denominations that do not divide evenly into each other it is non-trivial to find the optimal change for a given transaction.
..., c_k$, such that $\Sigma_{i=0}^k = n$ where $n$ is the amount of money in cents to change. Assume that we remove the coin with the largest value. The remaining coins, $c_2, ..., c_k$, represent the solution to the sub problem of changing $(n - c_1)$. If $c_2, ..., c_k$ is not optimal there exists another set of coins for this subproblem, $x_2, ..., x_k$, such that this solution has fewer coins. However this is a contradiction because we can now form a solution for the original problem, $n$, by combining $c_1$ with $x_2, ..., x_k$ that has a smaller size than the original optimal problem. This is a contradiction and hence $c_2, ..., c_k$ is an optimal answer to the subproblem and therefore the coin changing problem exhibits optimal substructure.
..., C(n-d_k)\}$.
whereas with the US denomination (and most denominations are designed for this reason) you can use a greedy algorithm to give back change (always choose the largest coin possible, repeat) and you are guaranteed to be giving back the fewest coins.
you can prove that a greedy algorithm provides an optimal solution if the problem has optimal substructure and the greedy choice property.
To prove optimal substructure consider a collection of coins for an optimal solution, $c_1,
To prove the greedy choice property we must show that a globally optimal solution can be arrived at by making a locally optimal, this is, greedy, choice.
For this particular set of American denominations we can prove the greedy property with a proof by contradiction. If the greedy choice were not optimal there would be an optimal collection such that:
1. some set of dimes, nickels, pennies added to more than 25 cents or
2. some set of nickels, pennies added to more than 10 cents or
3. some set of pennies added to more than 5 cents
However, all of these situations are impossible. If some set of pennies add to more than 5 cents, simply replace 5 pennies with a nickel (the greedy algorithm is better). If some set of nickel and pennies add to more than 10 cents and if there are two nickels, replace them with a dime; If there are a nickel and the rest pennies,
replace a nickel and 5 pennies with a dime. The same holds for a quarter. If three dimes, replace it with a quarter and a nickel. If it's two dimes and nickel/pennies, replace it with a quarter. And so on... The property of the coins that results in the greedy property is that each coin denomination divides evenly into the next larger coin denomination. Therefore each larger coin denomination that is removed must be replaced by at least two additional coins.
With non-even denominations you are required to actually search an n^2 space for the correct set of denominations. in fact, the algorithm is:
$C(n) = 1 + min \{C(n-d_1), C(n-d_2),
Additionally, $C(n) = 0$ for $n = 0$. We can ignore $n 0$ are we just define $C(n 0) = \infty$. By building the array in time/size $\Theta(nk)$, and keeping track at each step which value of was chosen for the minimum, then we can list the coins by tracing backwards through these recorded values. This augmentation takes no additional time since it can be done during building the array in time $\Theta(1)$.
So, basically you've changed the problem from a linear time algorithm in the amount of change to a quadratic time algorithm in the amount of change...
GOOD LUCK WALMART EMPLOYEES!
An 18 cent coin just seems silly to me, because the calculations required to use it would be difficult to easily optimise in your head. In the UK, we have a 2p coin [ironically, one of the largest-diametered in circulation] and wouldn't this cut down the number of coins needed in an easily calculable way ? It seems to me, that ease of change calculation is as equally important as the average number of coins used for said change, but this is almost glossed over in the article by one sentence.
The computer tells the cashier to give back 98 cents, not "6 times the coin 18, ..." etc.
So your argument is moot: The cashier does actually have to use math to give you back your change.
Pennies are worthless?!?!?
Meet my penny-filled sock, my friend! And the sock is stinky, too!
(Gimme a break, it's noon on Friday and I'm bored outta my mind...)-
Vote monkeys into Congress. They are cheaper and more trustworthy.
<voice style="school house rock">
18...36...54...72...90....108
STOP
Multiply by 18 is like multiplying by 20 but subtracting multiples of 2. So 18*3 is really like 20*3 - 2*3. That's just 60 - 6, or 54! Let's do it again!
18...36...54...72...90...108...126...144...162.. .180!
Ready or not, here I come!
</voice>
no, I didn't use a calculator. I sure hope the math is right.
Forget $1 coins, I want a $1.0753875 coin so I can buy things that cost 99 cents.
I believe that what the researcher failed to take into account is the way that the human mind works. Adding 1's, 5's, 10's and 25's is definately easier than adding 1.37's or 83's for us.
Sure, it may make the handing out of change more efficient by lowering the average amount of change given from 4.x to 3.x coins, but that efficiency will be more than lost when the clerks at the local mini-mart -- who already have problems giving out the correct change -- have to figure out that my $0.72 in change will be two 29-cent coins, two 5-cent coins and four 1-cent coins.
Not to mention the increasing size of cash drawer shortages caused by less-than-mathematically-inclined clerks.
Is it just me, or does it seem that the less "rounded" education becomes, the more one-dimensional "solutions" appear? Guess it is more true than ever: when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
There's so little difference between politics and jihad lately...
This article is a complete waste of time. This might be a fun paper for a discussion about coinage, but it fails horribly when taken as practical advice.
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The US does not need another coin. Indeed, the *opposite* is true. If you get rid of the penny, you can increase efficiency tremendously, to only 2.75 coins per transaction, and a whopping 45% of transactions would require 2 or fewer coins!
Many people oppose the elimination of the penny, but bear with me for a moment. Consider the following issues:
- Pennies cannot be used in vending machines, and therefore are not as "spendable" as all the other coins.
- Prices will not rise as people think they will; they will fall instead! Everything that is priced at $n.99 will now be $n.95 instead (marketers HATE to price in round dollars because it makes their prices look higher). All other numbers will be rounded to the nearest $n.n5.
- The US government makes 12 billion pennies at a cost of $100 million each year (http://www.retirethepenny.org/), which could be put to better use than filling up my coin jar.
- Half of these pennies will disappear from circulation within a year! (http://www.shepherd-express.com/shepherd/19/41/n
- Counting out pennies costs the economy an estimated $20 billion in productivity annually (http://www.retirethepenny.org/)
- The U.S. Mint loses $8 million a year manufacturing pennies. (http://www.shepherd-express.com/shepherd/19/41/n
Think about it - do you *really* want another coin in your pocket? Thank God that politicians don't listen to us all the time!
-Mark
It's just sometimes people like to do this to be helpful or just to be annoying/arrogant (really anticipating the look of panic in the cashiers eyes).
;)
I don't do it for any of those reasons. I mostly do it because I'm lazy and don't want to carry around 5 pounds worth of pennies. Oh, yeah, I also want the only jangling sound when I walk to be from my big brass ones.
Sure I'm paranoid, but am I paranoid enough?
* 2.79 coins average per transaction given that getting 5 cents is just as probable as getting 95 cents, and that no 50-cent pieces are used.
* Counting in 5's, 10s, and 25's is a lot easier.
* Saving pennies, rolling them up, going to the bank, and then driving home is a pain-in-the-ass, and honestly isn't worth my time, e.g. 2 hours of work to get $10 of pennies?!?!?. It's more economical to throw the friggen ugly coins in the trash, but I can't do that out of principle.
GET RID OF THE PENNY!
I prefer the following : make pennies worth $1.
This would:
-eliminate the penny,
-give us a distinguishable dollar coin,
-and stimulate the economy
Pennies are visibly and tactilly different from our other coins; can be used in vending machines; are easy to carry around. Plus, Lincoln was a great guy, what with freeing the slaves and all (better than that indian-killer Jackson that's on the $20, at least) and this lets us honor him once again.
Income would be redistributed somewhat randomly to people with big jars of pennies. The ultra-rich (you know, the ones getting the big tax cuts) probably have no more than a handfull of pennies. Some people would chose to hoard the new dollars; while others would spend them with abandon. And wouldn't you like to pay your taxes by sending in several rolls of pennies?
Just for laughs, I'd make "wheat cents" worth $100.
I just failed to find any of my one sided pennies....Curse you third dimension!
First, can't you tell a joke when you see one? (By joke I don't mean the maths is wrong, just that obviously the writer wasn't intending that we move to 18c coins).
Second, what is easy is what comes with practice. Currencies, like most other measurement systems, were not originally decimal, but duodecimal (i.e. using base 12) and various multiples thereof. Right up to the 1970s, the UK used a currency system which had 12 pennies to a shilling and 20 shillings to a pound. The US and UK still use duodecimal for weights and measures (think pounds and feet) and the whole world uses it for time (12/24 hour systems) and angles (360 degrees is 30 times 12).
Why were systems based on numbers like 6, 12, 24, 360 etc. so common, given that we tend to count in decimal? Well, they have large numbers of factors. In other words, while they might be harder to add and subtract in your head than decimal systems, they're much easier to do division with. And since division is much harder to do in mental arithmetic than addition, that's a big advantage.
For example, with 12 ounces in a pound, I can take a half, a third, a quarter, a sixth or a twelth of a pound and still be dealing in whole ounces. With a decimal system, 10 has only 2 factors: 2 and 5. So to buy a quarter of something devised in a decimal system you end up with 2.5.
Now that also has a knock-on effect when making change. Because of the limited factorisation of 10, most decimal systems divide things into 100s or 1000s.
Result: in a decimal currency, you end up not with 10 cents per dollar, but with 100 cents. And that's the real reason you have so much change in your pocket. If we had 12 cents to the dollar (or euro), then by copying the old british system -- with a 1c, 2c, 3c and 6c coin -- you'd never need more than 4 coins to make change from a shilling.
And would the cashier at WalMart be able to handle it? Well first off, maybe if as a result they had to think more as kids they'd be better off at maths to start with. And secondly, since they have to use a calculator now anyway, what would be the difference?
The author of this post asserts his moral rights.
It doesn't matter what the denomination is. As long as change has to be made, some patrons will receive the wrong change.
Lots of cashiers don't know how to make change. Many have been trained to do it wrong. The most common error is the cashier puts the large bill the customer just handed them into the drawer before giving the customer change and watching them count it. There used to be a little slot between the plastic guard and the metal cash register enclosure that was perfect for temporarily storing that large bill in customer sight. When the customer looks at you after counting his money, pause to see whether he questions it, then put the large bill in the drawer and close it.
Adding this momentary delay before putting the customer's large bill in the drawer and closing it, protects the cashier and the customer from being short changed.
I've seen managers put large bills in the drawer before I counted my change. One gave me change for $10 instead of change for a $20. I'm a creature of habit. When I hand a cashier a large bill, I always say, "outta twenty" or whatever the bill is. I'm sure I did that with this one. But she'd already put the bill in the drawer and insisted upon a recount of the drawer and by the time she did, my food was cold. That is not the way to do things. When I pointed out her mistake, she lost her temper. Then I lost mine.
I was trained on older cash registers to do things this way by a store manager who was very particular about this. He's been in business for more than 30 years and says he's never had a dispute with a customer over incorrect change. Way back then, you had to actually count the coin change. Many of the newer cash registers do this for you. I wonder how many of today's cashiers could make change in their heads.
What's my point? Most point of sale problems concerning change making are due to lack of skill and/or poor training of the cashier. Using more efficient denominations or pricing items to the nearest buck won't fix this.
Wansu, th' chinese sailor
I don't think those Sacagaweas "ones" are really brass - they just look it.
Sorry. Couldn't resist.
Any sufficiently well-organized Government is indistinguishable from bullshit.
I'd be curious to see how the average distribution of change is affected by the dominance of Walmart and it's strange method of pricing where most things end up costing X dollars and 88 cents. With the significant percentage of money spent at Walmart, it seems that it would throw off his distribution method, so perhaps a different denomination coin would be more appropriate in dealing with the Walmartization of America.
The average cachier over the age of 18 barely managed to graduate highschool and is very unlikely to be able to do simple arithmetic. The average engineer I know making $80k+ also cannot do simple arithmetic.
It's hard enough when you have to deal in 5's and 10's, but as soon as you start asking a cachier to add or subtract 18 from ANYTHING, you're going to have trouble.
The whole problem here is that the author doesn't realize that humans are (a) not computers, and (b) don't care about handing out one less coin. The system we have, as imperfect as it is, evolved this way through error and natural selection. Sure, perhaps no one considered printing an 18 cent coin, but that's likely because they knew people would have trouble dealing with them. Humans inherently have trouble with simple arithmetic, so a system evolved that was less ERROR-PRONE, completely ignoring minor improvements in efficiency.
So, of course, one has to ask the question: Could we make the system less error-prone? Probably. Maybe our esteemed computer scientist should develop a system to determine which coins we need to have in order to make it more likely for a cachier to give back correct change.
What's better, taking 2 seconds longer to give you correct change or two seconds less to give you incorrect change? I'll wait the extra 2 seconds.
Or maybe I'll just use my credit card.
In Canada they have the Loony and Toony (denziens of the maple leaf state, please correct my spelling). These are $1.00CA and $2.00CA coins respectivly.
A friend and I were in CA on business and were totally unable to figure out the stripper tipping protocol. We had a few USD which the ladies were happy to accept. But then we were down to "hard" CA currency.
"Maybe you throw them?" I asked. Of course we didn't want to risk chipping a tooth.
One of the ladies drifted over after a while and started talking. She was from the US and I asked her how it was done. She took a Loony from me and walked up to the stage, put it between her teeth and lay down on her back on stage. The performer at the time crawled up over her, mouth over mons, and crawled backwards and removed the coin with her breasts. Very Hot!
She then gestured me over, obvously expecting me to do the same thing! Having spent some time in US strip clubs, this level of contact is strictly Verboten! Enough to get you ejected into the -30 CA winter air. My friend wasn't so shy and walked up and got the ride of his life!
Canada may be cold in the winter but the ladies can be vary warm!
=Shreak
Eliminating the penny just makes sense.
Life gets more complicated when coming originally from Germany, where VAT is always included in the advertized price (for end-users, not for businesses) and going to Japan, where 5% tax is mostly added. About 90% of all times I need to add 5% at the cashier. In the other cases I don't need to. Now that makes calculation the price to pay complicated.