Locator: 48521PENNIES.
Comment: for thirteen years, from 1983 to 1996, or thereabouts, I was assigned overseas with the USAF, along with my family, of course.
During those thirteen years or so, we shopped on a regular basis at the military department store (BX) and the grocery store (commissary) and we never used pennies. As noted that was from 1986 to 1993, or thereabouts, more than 30 years ago. The military did not ship pennies overseas because it was simply too expensive. Our bills were still calculated to the penny but rounded down / up to the nearest nickel.
If the cashier at the commissary said our bill was $25.62, we would pay $25.60 if we paid in cash, or $25.62, if we paid by check or credit card. At $25.63, we would pay $25.65 if we paid in cash, or $25.63 if we paid by check or credit card.
This does not end the use of pennies; one can still pay for items with pennies. If something costs a nickel, one can still pay with five pennies.
We don't know yet if the clerk will round the bill if one is willing to pay in pennies, but somehow that will be sorted out. I'm sure if one wants to pay with exact change the retailer will allow that. One assumes starting soon we will start to see handwritten notes at service stations and small retail stores that pennies will no longer be given out in change. And at some point we will start reading stories about a shortage of pennies.
My hunch: this won't last long either. LOL.
It was strange at first but most of us figured it out by the second visit. LOL. I'm sure the nattering nabobs of negativity will be sure to weigh in tomorrow. For background to that alliterative phrase, link here.
I'm sure retailers will figure out how to game this: the easiest thing is never price anything at $x.x1 or $x.x2, but always price things at $x.x3 or #x.x4.
This item will probably overshadow earlier news this weekend that President Trump had the acting head of the CFPB pause all activity, have those CFPB employees sign in remotely, and locked the doors to the building that houses those offices. Link here.
Russell Vought, Donald Trump’s newly installed acting head of the US Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, announced on Saturday he had cut off the agency’s budget and reportedly instructed staff to suspend all activities including the supervision of companies overseen by the agency.
Reuters and NBC News reported that Vought wrote a memo to employees saying he had taken on the role of acting head of the agency, an independent watchdog that was founded in 2011 as an arm of the Federal Reserve to promote fairness in the financial sector.
Vought, who was confirmed on a party line vote last week to lead the office of management and budget, also announced on Saturday evening on Elon Musk’s social media platform X that he was zeroing out the CFPB’s funding for the next fiscal quarter, saying the more than $700m in cash on hand was sufficient.
From wiki:
The agency was originally proposed in 2007 by Elizabeth Warren while she was a law professor. The CFPB's creation was authorized by the Dodd–Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, whose passage in 2010 was a legislative response to the financial crisis of 2007–08 and the subsequent Great Recession and is an independent bureau within the Federal Reserve.
Throughout its existence, the Bureau has been persistently targeted by Republican politicians and the financial industry. The CFPB's status as an independent agency has been subject to many challenges in court. In June 2020, the United States Supreme Court ruled that the president can remove the director without cause but allowed the agency to remain in operation.
President Donald Trump has fired Rohit Chopra, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau director. On Friday, February 7, 2025, Trump appointed Russell Vought, the Office of Management and Budget nominee, as Acting Administrator. By Saturday morning, February 8, the CFBP's homepage was no longer functional, although other pages of the agency continued to function.
