The only real answer would be to revalue the dollar. Increase its
value by a factor of ten. Essentially, push the decimal point one
position to the left on all prices - overnight. A penny now buys what
a dime bought yesterday, a dime now buys what a dollar bought. A 50
cent candy bar is now a nickel. Gasoline is 23.9 cents per gallon, a
gallon of milk, a loaf of bread, and a lb of butter are 20 cents each,
a McDonald's burger is a dime, large fries about 15 cents, minimum
wage is 62 cents an hour, a newspaper is a nickel, a lb of ground beef
is about a quarter, a haircut is a buck and a half, a barrel of crude
is about $5, the median price of a single family home is about
$20,000, a new car about $2,000, cross country airfare about $50, a
movie ticket is 75 cents, etc, etc, etc.

Best of all - we keep the penny!

On Feb 21, 9:43 am, AL wrote:
John Gilmer wrote:

(not sure who wrote

I would expect that, like most other things, competition on price
alone would be ineffective.
If they are in the same consignment shop, B might have the edge.
If A is next door and B is across town, B's price is never seen.
So?
Rounding UP makes the calculations easier for everyone. At worse, it will
cost comsumers $.04 per item.

Recommendations that anything be "rounded" up OR down to the nearest
nickel tells me somebody skipped class the day rounding was taught.
Rounding is to the NEAREST DECIMAL POSITION, not to the nearest half
decimal position! If you eliminate the penny you must eliminate the
nickel - it resides in the same decimal position as the penny. Or are
you going to tell me all the accounting systems out there already know
how to "round" to the nearest nickel without having to be modified? I
think somebody needs to dust off their 5th grade arithmetic book - the
topic doesn't even rise to the level of math.

Add it up if you will. The most lazy and stupid consumer might pay an
extra $50 the first year. After a year things will sort out.

"things will sort out" - WHAT could that ever mean?

But if we DID eliminate the penny and nickel:

Having programmed accounting systems in a past life I can see a
wonderful world of opportunity opening up for crooks. The
rounding/truncating to the nearest decimal position of $.1 in a
multi-million transaction a day, or even hour, system could feed
enormous wealth to a hidden slush fund. You sometimes hear about
schemes where the fraction of pennies truncated are accumulated in a
hidden account? Well think 10 times that in terms of what would be
truncated in a $.10 system. Fortunately we can rest assured no one would
be that dishonest...

What we have works, sort of. If anything needs to be changed I would
think backing up the currency with something of real value rather than
promises would be a good start.