UKC

Should the UK stop the production of copper coins?

In Aus the smallest coin is the 5c , prices are then rounded up or down to the nearest 5 denomination.

5c is 3p and as I understand it living costs are relatively high in Oz so perhaps more like 2p functionally, all they've really done is get rid of the penny.

Seems reasonable but then so does keeping it.

jk

Yes.

Ever since being a kid I’ve hated them. They make your hands smell and when they go green I can’t even look at them. 

Good riddance I say!

I'll bet that not much gets rounded down...

Not sure about getting rid of them but they should surely be made smaller. 2p pieces are massive.

I think making 2p smaller (as suggested)  could be a better idea, probably the price of everything will go up a little bit, which isn't a good thing for anybody who watches what they spend.

Yes. 

Just round up or down all cash transactions. Electronic can still be paid to the penny. 

You buy two items, one priced 99c one priced 87c

Total price = $1.86,

The price gets rounded down to $1.85

We should be aiming to get rid of cash altogether.

I hardly ever use it now.

But since you'd have to allow cash purchases I bet those would be rounded up.

Why? 

Rounding is pretty basic mathematics principle. Most 10year olds can do it.

Rounding already occurs, in production costs and sales pricing, the rounding will be to the nearest penny etc..  

Just because the principle is simple doesn't mean that shops and businesses have to use it. If Tesco have the option of selling 27p value baked beans for 25p or 30p, I wouldn't be too surprised if they went for the 30p option.

They still price them at 27. Pay by card you pay 27.

Buy 1 for cash 27, rounded to 25. 2 for 50, 3 for 80. 

If it bothered you that much you could always buy in multiples where the rounding works in your favour.

Not that I've seen anything more than the headline on this, but I'd assume that inflation over the last few decades has more or less reduced the value of 5p coins to what 1p and 2p coins once were in recent history.

If that's the case, keeping them, for no reason other than presumed granularity in pricing and nostalgia, seems a bit pointless. 

Put another way, a few decades ago we were probably not using such large numbers of higher denomination notes as we theoretically are today.  If so, something surely has to go from the lower order areas of the currency, otherwise we just end up with an ever increasing range of notes and coins.  Seems like an inevitable rationalisation.

It doesn't bother me, I'm merely pointing out that while rounding down to 25p is mathematically sound, you may well find that Tesco et al see it as a great opportunity to round up to 30p, and everything becomes a tiny bit more expensive as a result. Business opportunities don't necessarily have to follow sound mathematical principles. Well they do...should...but...you know what I mean!

For what it's worth I don't see any point in getting rid of 1p and 2p coins. If people don't like having them in their purse or wallet, drop them into the collection tin that most shops have at the till.

Yes but there is no rule that ensures rounding an odd integer to an even one when the penny is eliminated occurs equally up and down thereby maintaining prices on average. That function relies on the behaviour of people and people setting prices are motivated to round up not down.

jk

I just can't get excited about losing 1 or 2p coins they are effectively worthless, but do cost time for cashier, machine maintenance etc.. 

Perhaps it's because I've become accustomed to having coins no lower than the equiv of 10p, but you'll often see prices in shops to the equiv. of 0.1p and the till just rounds the final total .

BBC website said the current penny is worth less than the halfpenny was when it was stopped.

I hardly pay with cash anymore but that's what I always do if I end up with a couple of pennies change.

I'm on the continent and so it's Euros but the problem is the same - I always tend to accumulate useless coins so regularly strip out anything under 50c and chuck it in a jar and try to remember to put them in one of those Flying Start charity envelopes on a plane or something.

What I don't see over here are those machines you get in UK supermarkets where you can just tip a whole jar of coppers in - it will sort them all and give you a voucher for your shopping or let you give it to charity.

We should scrap the 1p and 2p coin. Its time for change.

At 2am this morning I was very puzzled and in a small pickle to find my card wasn't accepted by two cash machines in a row and walked the 4 miles into a fairly dodgy area to help out a friend, and walked back with her dog this morning to find my card was working by 7am where I'd last tried it (it's always nicer to taxi it through dodgy areas). Getting rid of a cash is a rubbish idea when they system fails. On three occasions now it has been a 'when', too,  through no fault of my own. One time it affected most Natwest customers, another time my card was randomly swallowed, and this time my card wasn't accepted for some unknown reason when tried in three differently branded cash machines.

In case you hadn't guessed, I don't agree.

You should try washing your bits more often then!

And this discussion, apart from being on the WWW is much like the discussion then, and I suspect (but was too young to remember) when the farthing was scraped.

At least the UK coins are a reasonable size, the one centime coins in Euroland are tiny and I suspect they'll disappear soon

This is how it works in Aus, (done in £ and p.)

You buy two items, one priced 99p one priced 87p

Total £1.86,

The price at the till gets rounded down to £1.85

You buy three items priced at 99p, 87p, and 32p

Total £2.18

Price paid gets rounded up to £2.20

We're all going to be ripped off, again.
Smaller burgers and costing 6p more.
I wish I was rich and could hire my own personal chef.

Items are priced .99 to make them look cheaper than they are. £7.99 is closer to £10 but the psychology purports to make shoppers see £7 and think it's closer to £5. By rounding prices up I wonder what the overall effect on sales would be?

There is at least one pub in Manchester which has gone cashless. They will not accept cash at all now. Card only. And it's busy. It's only a matter of time.

Moving to a cashless society makes sense and the technology will have to work more of the time to support it. There'll be more and better tech.

Edit: spelling

In Holland they price things at 99c but charge you a Euro. I was standing with my hand out for ages until I realised my change wasn't going to appear!

They want everyone to pay by card. They have pop-up charity shops which don't accept cash and are well equipped with card machines. Cents are still in circulation in the country though!

You took this headline from a current publication...........you plagiarist.

If your card fails you can't get cash out anyway. Chance are your contactless pay or Apple pay would still have worked.

Yes, that was rather the problem at 2am, I took it to be a lesson in making sure I always have some cash to hand. Odd that things worked again a few hours later I thought 

That's not so handy in an area where nowhere local is open 24 hours though....

The notes you keep in your wallet, however, would still continue to function.

A few years back I cut up all my credit cards, paid them all off, and vowed never to own another one... I now have one debit card in GBP and one pre-paid EUR card. I don't have my phone set up for contactless payment as I am far too lazy to check my statements for pretty theft. I quite like the fact that a few quid in my pocket means I won't go hungry if my card provider falls over for a while

I'm confused.  Wasn't the problem here that you were trying to get cash from a machine, and therefore cash was the problem?

I'm finding contactless a winner.  Never use cash - and if for some reason my card doesn't work, the NFC on my phone will.

In China, even the beggars and buskers use cashless transactions. Its the way forward.

Do they buy their drugs cashless as well?

If nowhere is open where would you spend your precious cash?

If the infrastructure was developed further (as it is) everywhere which accepts cash would accept card payment. Even the government think it's a good idea hence scrapping the debit/credit card charge.

If cash is stolen you have virtually no chance of getting it back, if you are a victim of digital theft or fraud you normally get your money back

I mentioned a taxi in my first reply to you on this thread.

Normally, in what context?

I'm not trying to argue a case 'for cash', but I'm not sure how far one can say that people normally get their money back. You & Your's is often seeming to talk about people losing their money, with the end message being that people need to be vigilant to not end up out of pocket. Currently.

Do UK taxis not take cards or phone to phone payments? 

Don’t know what the “you and your’s” was about??

if you are victim of online fraud or theft the bank give you your money back. Certainly in all the cases I’ve known of anyway.

There would be no need to round prices up, or down, for sale. Things  can still be sold for 99p.

See my examples above.

The company I work for routinely rounds up to the nearest £1 for rates that come in between. It generates approx 10k extra gross margin per year. 

Of course. If you made a million sales, then you'd make much more. Most companies look at the big final figures etc.. They don't tend to get drawn into a bargain under a £100 costing as little as £99.99. 

But we are talking about 1 or 2p, then rounding up or down as appropriate, not rounding to the pound. Give it another 50 years though... 

I think they should be scrapped, as I think someone has already pointed out a 1p is now worth less than the halfpennies were when they were scrapped. 

For those worried about price rises due to rounding, I think it's insignificant if you fill up your car with fuel at 122.9 pence (already requires rounding) is it really going to matter on a £70 bill if you're loosing out by 2 or 3 pence?

And for other goods, say during your weekly shop, again you can round the total up or down to the nearest 5p which isn't going to make any difference on a £100 bill. A max of 0.05% extra on a shopping bill is defiantly worth the total amount of time I spend dealing with 1 and 2 pence coins over the remainder of my lifetime. And as time goes on I think individual products prices will settle on round numbers either £0.95 or near pound costs so there won't be a need for rounding with a lot of stuff anyway.