tvordlj | (no subject) (Reply)

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!