If the law is slow to change or there are no available pennies, the stores can adjust the prices to match the expected rounding of prices. I can't imagine someone being prosecuted from rounding a penny but it's a quick and easy way to avoid any doubt.
Anything measured by weight is already rounding prices to the nearest cent. If something is $1/lb and I have 0.995 lbs of it, I get charged $1.00 not 99.5 cents. Presumably just rounding to the nearest 5 cents isn't that different.
Of course we don't expect anyone to be charged fractional cents because our currency doesn't support it. So just changing our smallest currency unit from 1 cent to 5 cents.
Yea but I guess my thinking is that all totals would just be rounded to the nearest 5 cents, like how they're currently rounded to the nearest 1 cent. So would be the same price whether debit or cash. We already round percentage based taxes to nearest cent, even though it's feasible you could charge someone fractional cents on a debit card.
Really state laws just should be amended to include something like "costs must be the same or as close as possible using the currently available denominations of currency"
That's why it should be rounded for everything. No pennies should probably mean that any final transaction totals are rounded to the nearest nickel. Whether they pay with cash, credit, debit, snap, gift card, etc...
IMO, rounding for cash purchases only sounds worse than keeping the pennies.
> I can't imagine someone being prosecuted from rounding a penny
Under this executive, I wouldn't be so sure. If a grocery chain starts deviating from the law, then the government can use it against them to further a political agenda like we've seen with Eric Adams for example.
Good luck getting Congress to do anything at all, ever. Best we can offer you is one big partisan pork bill every two years, no matter who's in charge and no matter what voters actually want. Maybe if one senator (foolishly) decided to make penny rounding his pet issue, and worked his ass off at it, he could get half of it wrapped into the bi-annual pork bill.
Hmm, maybe this is why it should be handled by Congress and not at the whim of the executive. They can handle all this in one piece of legislation.