(no subject)

[tvordlj]

A penny for your thoughts.
A penny saved is a penny earned.
See a penny, pick it up. All the day you'll have good luck.
A bad penny.
Costs a pretty penny.
Don't have two pennies to rub together.
The penny drops.
As of February 1, we Canadians won't be able to say things like that anymore. The Canadian Mint is not going to make them anymore. It costs more to make one than it does the value of the coin itself. Will you be sorry to see it go or happy not to have them clogging up your wallet? I never seem to have enough of them when i want them, like when your purchase is $3.49 or 5.01. Expecially if it's $5.01 and you get .99 back in change when, if you had the penny to give the cashier, you could have got a single $1 coin. True, you have give up a coin just to get a coin back in that circumstance, but at least you didn't get a handful of them back for not having that penny.

I usually clean the change out of my wallet every night or most nights and save up my coins. It really adds up and I use it to buy my foreign currency when i go away. If i can manage to save the two dollar coins, even better. A roll of them is $50! Most of the change i have in my change tins is copper pennies. The one that I don't seem to get nearly as much of is the nickel, the 5 cent coin but I suppose that will change. Vendors will start rounding to the nearest 5 cent mark, up or down depending. No doubt people will complain that it's costing them a few cents more, more often than it costs them a couple of cents less but I figure it will all even out more or less. It's such small change that overall it won't matter. If you were to be pedantic and counted up how much it cost you for rounding up compared to how much you save for the rounding down over the span of a year, I doubt very much you would see more than a dollar or so one way or the other. If vendors were to start pricing things at amounts ending in 5 instead of 49 or 99 or, like Walmark, ending in something dumb like 7, with the tax at %15, you wouldn't need to round anyway.

Or, maybe now is the time to start adding the tax on to the sticker price like it should have been all along.  Then you can calculate the tax, add it to the price, round as needed and the sticker price will be what you end up paying. No surprises at the cashier. When they first gave us the GST and the sales tax together as the "harmonized sales tax", they tried to show the price of the item with tax included, like all the countries in Europe do and probably everywhere else in the non-North American world. The tax they were actually paying was printed on the receipt. People got too upset with the apparent jump in the price of things. Psychologically, they see the price of a $10 item jumping to $11.50 and think they're being ripped off but they don't think there's anything wrong with taking the $10 item to the cash to pay for it and being told, "That'll be $11.50 with tax please". Doh. To them, the price is still $10. the other way, the price is now $11.50. They're paying exactly the same but  don't see the difference.  The tax included price only lasted about a week and it was back to the traditional way of doing things.

The airline industry is really coming under fire these days. They advertise a flight but don't tell you that the cost can more than double once they add on the taxes and fuel surcharge and other fees. A flight to the UK for me can be $399 return but i pay almost $1100. Some travel agents are starting to put the full price of flights in the window advertising. That's a start. The airlines still aren't but at least are starting to note the added fees underneath the fare (in wee, small print of course). It wasn't that long ago, either, that I could book a ticket using Aeroplan miles and not have to pay the taxes and fees then suddenly I had to. I was told by a call centre agent that it was "always" that way but i know it wasn't.

No wonder we all feel like they're ...er... nickeling and diming us to death. At least we can still use that expression!

Comments

[steer.livejournal.com]

It's so frustrating when airline companies do this yet I see why they do. There was a recent ruling here (don't know if it was UK or EU) that they had to be upfront with the price. They still try to hit you with extras all the time though -- extra cash for putting a bag in the hold, for extra leg room, for a meal during the flight, for "priority boarding" and so on. I really hate it and try to get out of paying as many as possible just on principle.

[tvor.livejournal.com]

Oh i really resent them charging me for food on a domestic flight. And they will only accept a credit card these days, at least on air Canada. On the overseas flight to the UK, though, the meal and drinks (beer, wine, soft and hot drinks) are free.

And extra cash for putting even one bag in the hold, that's just criminal. Our airlines here don't do that yet, but we don't have super-discount ones either which are the ones that do it the most i think? Air Canada was charging you to pre-select your seat too, when you booked online but i don't think they're doing that now. When you check in online, you can book your seat free but then you're stuck with what's leftover. Mind you, I do like that i can change my seat when i check in that way.

[steer.livejournal.com]

Yes, it's only these cheapies which do this kind of thing in the UK. I find it really horrible. It happens on short international flights. They also charge to preselect seat (whether in person or online).

The worst thing about charging for hold bags is that it means everyone takes cabin bags of the biggest possible size so there's a big scramble after boarding to stow bags. Those airlines always run to really tight schedules so the hosts and hostesses are running around shouting at people to stow bags when there's no room. Often they have to ditch something in the hold. The people at the boarding gate are really savage about ensuring that bags "fit" so I've sometimes seen people nearly in tears trying to repack bags so they are smaller because otherwise they'll pay £50 extra. (They seem to charge loads extra for a cabin bag if you want it "on the day" rather than in advance). I really hate it.

[acey.livejournal.com]

Will the existing pennies remain in circulation? It sounds as if the answer is 'no' if vendors will be rounding up. I wonder if there has been a mad rush to cash in loads of rolls of pennies?

[tvor.livejournal.com]

I believe they will accept them at shops but shops won't be giving them out and will be rounding up. As they are turned into the bank over time, i wonder what they'll do with them? Melt them down maybe?

[john beresford (from livejournal.com)]

Did you have endless pressure groups fighting to retain your penny? Claiming nefarious profiteering reasons for dispensing with it? Fairly certain that's what would happen here in the UK if they tried it, although it's long overdue IMO and for much the same reason. I've always thought prices ending in .99 were a complete sham and from the age of about 12 have been loudly announcing the price in whole pounds in shops when friends or family have asked "how much is it?" Maybe that just proves I've been a pedantic curmudgeon from an early age! ;0)

Never heard of x.01 prices though. Don't think we have them here, or at least vastly less common. That's even more ridiculous. Bah!

On the subject of your approach to sales tax, well as you might expect I find it totally barmy, as would anyone from this side of t'Atlantic. But hey, "people" as a herd are stupid. To see the pre-added tax as a "price rise"? That's just plain thick. Your government should just bite the bullet and do it. There'd be a small hurricane in a teacup and within a few months everyone would have settled down, got used to it, and stopped moaning. And within a generation or two people would wonder why they ever had price stickers without the tax already added.

[tvor.livejournal.com]

I agree with your last point. People would get used to it soon enough. Mind you it took them YEARS to stop putting the price per KG/price per LB on meat and produce in the grocery stores after we went metric.

People were suspicious that vendors were hiding real price hikes behind the "Oh it's just the tax added", i think.

We don't have x.01 price at least not that i've ever seen but the .99 or .97 or .49. When i referred to $x.01, that was the end price after the tax was added on, not the base price. And the x.99, apparently it's psychological. $21.99 looks "cheaper" than $22.00.

I don't know if there have been lobby groups pressuring against the dropping of the penny. It has been in the air for a few years and i don't know if it's been peer pressure that's held it off this long or just the government getting it's ass together with the Mint to work out the details. It won't affect electronic transactions so if you pay by credit or debit, you get charged the exact amount. It's only for cash transactions.