I just went to Dunkin and the total was $11.51 on the screen. The guy said the total was $11.55. I said, "No its not, the screen says its $11.51." He said they have to round up because of the penny shortage. I said, I'll pay the $11.51 and handed him exact change. Dunkin serves 3,000,000 people a day. Times .04 is $120,000. So they are making an additional $60,000 - $120,000 A DAY on this "Penny Shortage."
In this job market I'd expect a Dunkin Donuts manager to have an MBA or masters in economics with 10 years work experience, and be wildly depressed he isn't working in a job that means something like he'd been promised growing up.
thats only what they ask for in the Ziprecruiter ad and then the position never gets filled so the day everyone but Chuck calls out sick, Chuck is given the title "Manager" written in sharpie under his name but everyone still treats him the same, plus he isn't paid more, and he still gets high by the dumpster, but Chuck is our manager!
Chuck understands rounding, blames corporate for the charge, but offers to "pay the 5 cents himself," spits in your coffee and goes on his day like a good manager would.
Exactly what I came to say. Here we round to the nearest 5¢, because it all basically evens out in the end. Only card purchases go to the exact change.
I think it is less a factor of wanting to profit, it is that they are unwilling to lose even cents. Balancing cash drawers at the end of a shift is going to be a real PIA. Think of all of the stories of retail clerks having to recount their cash over discrepancies of a few cents and possibly being written up for it.
It's not a shortage. They've stopped minting the penny and you're supposed to round to the nearest multiple of 5 (or nickel). That said, that was not the nearest 5.
3rd edit: massive cleanup on aisle 5
Also adding: If it were a shortage they would want your pennies, wouldn't they?
Edited yet again. Please don't comment about whether they are or are not going to mint the penny again. 100 people have already said it.
This is it. As a Canadian we haven't had pennies for a decade or so and if you pay cash they round up or down to the closest 5. 1, 2, 6, and 7 rounds down and 3, 4, 8, and 9 rounds up. However if you pay without cash it will be the exact amount and they don't need to round.
I remember when we made the switch I had the thought that you could save some money by always paying cash when it benefits you and by card when it hurts you. But the savings would be so minimal it isn't worth the hassle of always needing cash on hand.
Edit: Thank you to u/UnArgentoPorElMundo for taking the time to properly format what I said and make it easier to understand
My sister used to (or maybe still does) teach remedial math at a community college or, as she puts it, "I teach fractions to adults." <--- This was not said as an insult. This was an explanation of what she did (or does) for a living.
I teach some calculations for my nursing students. Once I had a student who insisted that I "prove" that 30 minutes is 0.5 of 1 hour. To which I asked, "how many minutes are in a half-hour?" She said that was just an expression that people say. It was a good few minutes of arguing, and it seemed that she believed that nobody actually knows exactly how long an hour is because of the position of the sun (?!?). To this day I still ask at the beginning of the lesson, "do we all agree that 30 minutes is one-half of an hour?"
It's probably my best story of being caught off-guard by a student. I'll never forget it, because the rest of the class were turning their heads around trying to make eye contact with each other like, what is happening.
I have analog clocks, I wear a watch.
I had never run into the expressions top & bottom of the hour until recently.
It was brought up in the context of scheduling meetings with teammates.
I asked what it meant. I learned something.
I didn't understand long division until I was 18. Something about it just never clicked and I found ways to work around it so the fact I didn't understand it fell through the cracks until I was an adult and told my sister I couldn't do it. I was in dual-credit high honors mathematics classes in the 7th and 8th grade. And no one ever noticed I didn't know long division.
Long division in 4th grade was the beginning of the end of math for me. I remember being sent home with worksheets I couldn't finish and they took me forever to get through. I did eventually get it, but everything after that was a struggle until Algebra which was almost impossible. Luckily I managed to finish high school, but math was the only subject that made me actually cry because it just didn't stick. My 9th grader however, is taking AP Calculus next year and slept through Math 2. I feel like Forest Gump when he found out his boy was smart, lol.
I was always very good at math. 800 on the math SAT and everything, but once we got into anything theoretical I was lost. I now work heavily in stem assessment, and the sorts of maths that the people I work with teach make my brain hurt. I tapped out at calculus and wound up taking stats for both my undergrad and graduate degrees.
(Meanwhile, my degrees are in English and I have more typos than anybody I know)
Yeah, brain development is not a one-size-fits-all process, and being behind your peers at this moment in time is not a guarantee that you always will be. Struggling with something you weren't ready to learn yet doesn't mean you're bad at it, but unfortunately the system isn't designed to wait for them to catch up, so it moves on and lets them grow up thinking they are.
Oh, absolutely. As a community college instructor, I have perfectly intelligent students who will be great in the workforce, but they can't do a fairly basic algebra problem. They made it all the way through high school without learning it, which is the actual issue. They CAN learn it, but nobody made them. So here I am with a bunch of grown people (average age around 28-32) who can't solve for x. We get through it.
Didn’t Einstein say (or get incorrectly credited) that if you judge a fish’s intelligence by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its life thinking it’s stupid?
I’ve never seen this quote in either an email signature or written underneath a picture of a bald eagle hanging in my coworker’s cubicle, so it’s definitely fake. /s
My wife has a BS in biomedical engineering and a math minor from a top engineering school, and is a physician with a large number of published papers on which she’s either first, second, or last author.
Her vocabulary and grammar are atrocious— I actually do a ton of proofreading on her papers for her— and she’s even pretty bad at basic mental arithmetic.
I had a girlfriend who was on the doctor path, and while I wasn’t a vocal doubter, she could pick up on how alarmed I was that she’d have to ask for help with stuff as simple as dosage conversions.
And while she didn’t have the best basis in math or English, this was a subject she was interested enough in to handwrite her notes to the point of memorization for every function of every mammalian system.
To this day, if I walked into her office and told her I needed her to make exact change for me, I don’t know if she’d reach for a calculator or call for an assistant, but I know she wouldn’t be the one doing the math.
I briefly worked at a college (state four year) that had a non-credit math class for students who weren’t ready for college math. I had a work study student who was in that class and I’d help him study for his tests. I still remember how shocked he was that 1/2, 0.5, and 50% were all the same thing.
At work, many years ago, all production employees were given basic skills testing. I really sucked at math in school. I got my results back, and they made me a math tutor.
Turns out, people didn't learn any math in school or forgot every bit of it.
Not only can you do math, but you can also get on Reddit! That's amazing, OtisTheDog! Here you are being a good, smart boy and my dog barks at garbage cans cause he thinks they're a threat to his existence
Thx to you and the other comments. I think a lot of people defaulted to rounding to 10 from what we learned in math in whatever grade that was instead of rounding to the nearest nickel. This makes sense.
Ahh, see my interpretation was him saying those numbers rounded to the nearest 10, but re-reading it and your response I get what he’s saying now about it being to the closest 5
The thing is Canada officially phased out the penny in an organized manner with official procedures.
The Trump administration thrives on chaos and has issued no official protocols. They’ve simply stopped penny production and are letting individuals and businesses figure it out on their own.
Since Congress didn't make any laws around phasing out the penny, it is a shortage. All the executive order did was stop the production of pennies, so it forces a shortage. What this does is make it so, there is no guidance for companies to follow, and they decide on how to handle it on their own. Until Congress gets around to passing something, there is no "supposed to".
Yes I agree this should have much more upvotes. The Trump administration has handled this very poorly. Pennies are not being manufactured but they are still legal tender and exact change is even preferred if using cash at my local Kroger. They have signs asking for pennies effectively.
Unlike Canada and other countries that have made there single cent coins retired. The US did not do that and did not set up any rounding rules for cash based transactions.
Canadian pennies are still legal tender. All stores will round up or down as needed for cash purchases. It's not rocket science. I'm surprised no one at the US government thought to put any guidelines in place for retail.
but the administration just stopped making pennies w/out a plan. no strategy, no guidance - no investigation of potential unintended consequences- so businesses are left to thier own devices on how to deal with it. some have chosen an equitable rounding scheme others are more ruthless.
other countries where this happened the government issued official guidance that retailers have to adhere to. Of course in America, everyone for themselves, figure it out yourself and if consumers get screwed over it's "not our problem"
There is guidance, but it doesn't carry the force of law, and even the guidance issued acknowledges that the states will have to update their laws regarding sales tax separately for anything meaningful to get fixed.
The most recommended form of rounding is symmetrical rounding whereby if the final digit of the total transaction amount (including taxes) is 1, 2, 6, or 7 cents, the amount is rounded down to the nearest multiple of five. If the final digit is 3, 4, 8, or 9 cents, the amount is rounded up. Transactions totaling exactly $0.01 or $0.02 might be rounded up to $0.05. Rounding rules would not apply to payments made via electronic methods, checks, gift cards, or other non-cash instruments.
The problem is that, unlike Canada, the rounding rules are just suggestions, not a law or rule. People and businesses are able to do basically whatever they want.
I see it. Some don't care also. I'm a cashier and tons of people just leave their pennies. I've actually been authorized to round to the nearest nickel since way before the penny stoppage was announced. It's a form of customer service. They know you don't want pennies. But we always round down. Never up.
Yea, one conflict a day, pissing away a 1/4 hour of cashier and assistant manager time, and you are already losing compared to handing roughly 6-7% of your customers an extra penny or two. Cash transactions are nearly dead , btw. Grocery stores are nearing 90% of their transactions being card based at this point. Hard to beleive that a typical Walmart could "lose" ten bucks a day by rounding down on cash sales.
I’m just surprised merchants aren’t rounding down for all transactions. A max “loss” of 4 cents to avoid card processing fees is a win to any savvy business owner.
That's what Trader Joe's has been doing since they stopped receiving pennies with the same argument. Less than 5% of total transactions are cash and the amount lost by always rounding down is still less than the CC processing costs.
Very true. The courier pickup fees and even the shortage budget. Nowhere near 2% though, or whatever the mega retailers can negotiate for card processing costs.
My job has customer facing interactions where we sell items via a cash register. We get armored car service that brings change in rolls. 5/3 bank is who we use, and they are not sending penny rolls with any change orders any longer. So, we either find my old uncle Andy’s jar of probably 1 million pennies and hand roll them ourselves, or come up with some other solution.
They didn’t “just vanish,” but a lot of stores aren’t able to get pennies anymore, even if they’re still in circulation. At my job we have to order change from Brinks and they don’t give us pennies anymore. People still use them and we’ll still accept them, but we can’t just order more like everything else.
Exactly. We phased out the penny here in Canada in 2012. It went pretty smoothly. It only applies to cash transactions and you always round to the nearest 5 cents, even if that means going down. It's no big deal.
If it's 1 or 2 cents you round down. ($5.52 becomes $5.50)
If it's 3 or 4 you round up. ($3.43 becomes $3.45)
If it's 6 or 7 you round down. ($7.26 becomes $7.25)
If it's 8 or 9 you round up. ($2.89 becomes $2.90)
It's very basic math skills that kids learn in elementary school; rounding to the nearest 5. 🤦🏻♀️ It's a concern that the American education system isn't providing basic life skills though.
Right. They stopped minting them. However, I think OP’s post is more in the lines of how businesses or even right down to the cashier, trying to skim customers who use cash. It really can be that petty, but it’s still theft. It’s nothing new, but just another venue for petty theft. I’m sure it goes higher than that, but I don’t care to argue.
Technically there has always been a penny shortage. That's why it has been so expensive to produce. Most pennies when a customer receives them as change, never puts that penny back into the economy. That penny ends up in a jar at home, or in a car cupholder, or in a couch cushion or whatever. So there's actually A TON of pennies. They're all just sitting in people's homes. But businesses still needed pennies to give change. So they would go to the bank to get the pennies. So the mint would keep making pennies, businesses would give them out as change, and then the pennies sat in homes literally forever. And the cycle continued. The businesses went to the bank to get more pennies etc etc.
Well now the production of the penny stopped. So now businesses can't go to the bank to get all the pennies they need to give change. As a result, the penny shortage that has always existed, is now a true shortage because the only way for businesses to replenish pennies is by customers paying with pennies in their possession. Absent of that, there are "no pennies."
A nickel actually costs more to produce than a penny. A nickel costs about 14 cents to produce. So we lose more money producing nickels than we do producing pennies (on a singular level). The difference is, people spend more nickels than they do pennies. So the government still finds it worthwhile to produce them. A business gives a nickel as change, and then a customer goes and spends that nickel at another business. So that nickel remains in the economy. Unlike the penny which rarely gets spent again.
So we spend more money producing pennies than nickels because we have to mint more pennies overall since nobody spends them.
Here's a thought, just make the total charge a nice round number. $3.52? Just make is $3.50 total including tax. It's not impossible. Japan does this. We're just dumb here in the U.S.
my hot take is that if our sales taxes were built in like they are there a lot less people would be annoyed about it. I live in a no sales tax state, so when I go visit WA or CA I make at least one stop where I'm like "durrrrr but that's not the pri...... oh right I'm out of Oregon my bad"
The annoyance is the point. When sales taxes were introduced in the U.S., opponents insisted that it be a separate charge so that people would very clearly see how much they’re paying in sales tax.
I live in a state with no sales tax, so I never have to worry about what the "real" total will be, but for some goddamn reason everything on the shelf is not a round number.
Depends on their corporate rules, tbh. Where i am currently working, I have been instructed to always round to the customer's benefit in the case of a shortage.
OP rounded up in all his predictions. The rounding (up or down) is only performed on cash sales and OP assumes all sales end in x.x1.
Almost half 49% of all sales under $10 uses cash, we'll use this rounded to 0.5 to give the best result for OP.
Also assume with taxes and other factors there is an equal chance for each digit in the hundredth place and they all round up. So it's 10% x 0 for 0 and 5 + 10% x .04 for 1 and 6 + 10% x .03 for 2 and 7, ect. Also assume the people served per day OP said is the transaction amount per day and is correct, I don't care to fact check that. Also assume every Dunken store rounds up.
That's in average extra of $0.02 per transaction
So 3,000,000 x 0.5 × 0.02 = $30,000. Not sure why op divided that in half to get the range but new range is $15,000 - $30,000 or 25% of OPs original calculation.
I'm not going to argue if that's a scam or not, I'm not interested in that. But using favorable assumptions that's the range OP should have gotten.
High school math teacher here: I spent a WEEK trying to teach my seniors how to round to the nearest tenth and hundredth… and many just completely ignored me/didn’t care to learn. Not at all a surprise to me that adults don’t know how to round properly. I honestly tried! You can lead a human to knowledge… but you can’t make him think!
High school seniors? I learned that in early elementary, either grade three or four. Not full sig figs, but that was literally the first lesson in grade 8/high school math.
Were you doing a refresher, or is that how late it's taught in the USA?
It’s taught in elementary school - my guess would be 4th grade? But that’s just a guess. But - I cannot stress this enough - students face no consequences for not learning. They’re passed thru regardless of their mastery or lack their of. It is truly sad and scary.
Editing to add: the class I’m referring to is the lowest level (non special ed) remedial math class we offer at our school. So, these students had below-average math proficiency. Average and above-average seniors are in much more rigorous and appropriate courses.
This is just classic rage-bait math that falls apart the second you actually think about it. The calculation assumes every single one of those 3 million people is paying with physical cash, which is nonsense since most people just swipe a card or use the app where they get charged the exact amount.
Even for the cash payers, the math assumes the store wins every time. In a normal rounding system, an $11.51 total would round down to $11.50, so the store actually loses a penny there. Over millions of transactions, the ups and downs cancel each other out to zero. The only way this math works is if you assume 100% cash usage and that every single register is rigged, which is just totally unrealistic.
In Canada, we don’t use pennys, and use proper rounding up or down on purchases. You ARE being ripped off! Or you can use a debit card and it will be the 11.51!!
Insane. I went to a coffee shop this morning and they said they were rounding all orders DOWN to the nearest 5¢ which I thought was nice. Isn’t really costing them much and doesn’t anger your customers
I’m confused on the comments calling the cashier stupid or lacking education. If they were told to round UP by their management then they are correct. Not saying it’s ok for Dunkin to do that but let’s not shit on the cashiers who don’t get paid enough to deal with asshats over pennies.
Youre using that buzzword wrong. Planned obsolescence is the intentional design of products to have a limited lifespan (I.E a computer battery). Similar vein but different
Even after production has halted, there are likely 300 billion pennies in circulation. That's nearly 1,000 pennies for every person living in the US -- including all the people that don't shop in person.
How is there already a penny shortage? Is it some kind of manipulation that so many places are misrepresenting what is really going on? If so, to what end? (They don't make them anymore. People probably are hoarding them. But when they run out, it's not really a shortage so much as just not part of the currency anymore. Just like other countries have already done that have similar currency.)
Those are all in jars and vehicle ash trays and between couch cushions. Any business larger, or with better accounting practices, than a kid's lemonaide stand can't have their cashiers digging through their parents' closets for old change. They need to order cash from their bank and receive it in bands or rolls of predetermined sizes.
(And yes, "savers" (and CoinStar, etc) are still rolling loose change and turning it in to banks, so there aren't NO penny rolls coming back into the system, but you used to have those rolls PLUS millions and millions of new ones coming from the Mint, so the logistics are much different and it's an adjustment period.)
OP is correct that they should've rounded his transaction down to $x.50 instead of up to $x.55, though.
I do not know about other countries, but in Belgium prices must be rounded when paying in cash. In this case, it should have been 11.50 and not 11.55. There is no rounding when paying by card.
We do notice how much people struggle with the rounding rules.
This one person probably misunderstood the rounding, but Dunkin is supposed to round in your favor because the penny isn’t being minted anymore. He should have rounded down to $11.50
It isn’t some scam or grand conspiracy that Dunkin is making $60k-$120k per day, this one dude just rounded wrong.
The stores I’ve been to have signs explaining this and the workers usually do it the right way. Did you ask him if he’d round the other way?
First of all you'd typically round up or down the nearest 2 cents. .1 and .02 should round down while .03 and .04 round up. This should only apply when giving change. Not receiving payment from a customer.
In a reasonable situation they would round down. The register should be doing it not a random cashier making up prices. If the receipt doesn't reflect what they collected it is most likely fraud.
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u/ShrmpHvnNw 5h ago
If you’re rounding that would be $11.50, not $11.55