The local news, tonight, ran a piece on businesses already running out of pennies. Businesses are taking losses because they need to round the total down to the nearest nickle. Folks must be hoarding them.

Coincidentally, I stopped at a Subway for a sandwich a few days ago. The total came to $8.47. I had $8 in fives and singles. Dug around in my coin pouch and told the clerk I would need to give her a $20, as I didn't have 47 cents, only a flock of pennies. She said "I'll take seven pennies". I didn't ask, but maybe they were running short too.

Of course, "Plan Steve" is dead simple, and eliminates the entire problem: have registers and POS systems round to one decimal point, instead of two. In the days of mechanical registers, this would be a big program, almost as bad as when the UK switched to a decimal currency system, when the gears in registers had to be changed.. But these days, what would it take? A few keystrokes on the POS server?

Steve