1p and 2p

RaymondLin

thumpingrug said:

Of course, we could all pay with cards and wireless payment systems then it doesn't matter.  

Cash is still necessary as a redundancy payment method, such as last week when Crowdstrike, some banks and payment terminals went down.

ICBM

RaymondLin said:

Cash is still necessary as a redundancy payment method, such as last week when Crowdstrike, some banks and payment terminals went down.

Except that if the tills go down, most shops can’t even do cash sales because everything is so integrated that it would cause immense problems to have sales which are not via the till system. Items are usually not even individually price stickered any more, so without the barcode reader (which is linked to the tills) working, the staff would have to take the customer’s basket round the shop and write down all the prices from the shelves, and manually write a receipt in duplicate - and almost no-one has receipt books now. Then afterwards when the computer is working again, everything would have to be transcribed from the duplicate receipts and manually entered so the stock system knows what’s been sold. At least three times as much work, even if there’s time and the staff numbers to do it… which there won’t be in any modern shop.

I manage a shop now, does it show? Thankfully, our system is not Microsoft-based so Clownstrike didn’t affect us - but if something similar happened to ours, I would really have no option other than to close the shop until it was back on line.

snowblind

The end-state is actually to remove humans from all financial transactions as far as possible. Real goods and services are secondary to the numbers. It is almost like the financial system has become an entity in its own right and is  effectively competing for resources with the other occupants of this sphere upon which we all exist. better for everyone if we did away with it.

But we won't.

Nitefly

The answer is to mint a 99p coin.

hollywoodrox

Does anyone remember that film with Justin Timberland in it  where your money & life is on a digital counter embedded in your arm  and you can transfer it to people  to make transactions .
its very very good 

CavemanGrogg

ICBM said:

I manage a shop now, and counting the damned things at till totalling time every day is a bit of a pain -  quite a faff for very little gain. We’ve eliminated non-5p prices for shelf stock items, but the products sold by weight still end up with penny pricing, so we do need to keep the coppers for change for the 10-20% of buyers who still use cash. I’d like to investigate whether we could legitimately round up to the nearest 5p, either per item or on the total.

Why not do what the banks all do, and simply weigh them, as long as the coins are separated into 1, 2, 5, 10, 20, 50, £1, and £2, denominations you can easily weigh out tens of thousands of pounds worth of coins extremely fast - seconds if not minutes including double and triple checking, not taking the time it takes to sort them all out into their denominations into account which is very fast and is even automated - funnily enough it is done automatically by both size and weight is how the coin changers in Tesco that charge you a % do it, you can easily weigh out tens if not hundreds of thousands of pounds in seconds if not minutes.

guitars4you said:

I can still recall the 1/2 penny or apney depending where you are from - But it looks like time will soon be up for our copper friends - Request that no more to be minted

I keep all my 1p and 2p ‘s in a coffee jar - Then bag and bank them when the jar is full 

Do like wise with 5/10/20 and 50p coins- Again in different jars 

I use to do this before I discovered ''round-up'' apps, I would use 2 liter kiln jars - and multiple jars for each denomination, for 1ps, 2ps, 5ps, 10ps, 20ps, 50ps, £1, and £2 coins.  And I would do this for a year, as in every year make multiple trips to the bank to deposit the coins into my bank account - not joking it wasn't unusual for these buckets to weigh over 20kg each.  Now it might be because I still make a lot of cash transactions - in fact I paid for the house I live in with cash not because I'm super wealthy but because the property was in such a state of disrepair and needed a fortune of work done to it to make it habitable again that it was valued far far too low to qualify for a mortgage on.  No exaggeration, I used to regularly deposit over £5K a year in coins that I collected into my 2 liter kiln jars every year into my account, and it would take minutes at most to do, the teller would simply tip the buckets of coins into a machine that weighed them out and totaled them up.

GoFish

hollywoodrox said:

Does anyone remember that film with Justin Timberland in it  where your money & life is on a digital counter embedded in your arm  and you can transfer it to people  to make transactions .
its very very good 

In Time

"Hey buddy, can you spare a minute?"

CavemanGrogg

GoFish said:

hollywoodrox said:

Does anyone remember that film with Justin Timberland in it  where your money & life is on a digital counter embedded in your arm  and you can transfer it to people  to make transactions .
its very very good 

In Time

"Hey buddy, can you spare a minute?"

I really enjoyed that film, thought it and the idea behind it was brilliant.

Dontgiveupyourdayjob

I wonder how phasing out coppers will affect charity takings? I always put any 1p, 2p and 5p coins I get as change straight into whatever charity tin is on the shop counter, and I imagine a lot of people do similar.

strumjoughlamps

CavemanGrogg said:

GoFish said:

hollywoodrox said:

Does anyone remember that film with Justin Timberland in it  where your money & life is on a digital counter embedded in your arm  and you can transfer it to people  to make transactions .
its very very good 

In Time

"Hey buddy, can you spare a minute?"

I really enjoyed that film, thought it and the idea behind it was brilliant.

Great film but what tickled me was Olivia Wilde who briefly plays Timberlakes Mum was 27 at the time, Timberlake was 30  

dano

The 99p store is fucked then

ICBM

CavemanGrogg said:

Why not do what the banks all do, and simply weigh them

That's a possibility, although I don't think our scales are calibrated for coinage. (I haven't looked at the manuals, there may be such a mode.)

To be fair, it doesn't take *that* long, it's just an annoying faff for almost no gain when the total value of coppers in each till is never over £1.

Kittyfrisk

Are these kind of things not affordable/offset against business expenses?
https://www.amazon.co.uk/coin-counter/s?k=coin+counter
Balanced against the time over a year that a salaried worker would cost to do the job, it might just work out OK.

JAYJO

1p costs 20p to make....apparently...

ICBM

Kittyfrisk said:

Are these kind of things not affordable/offset against business expenses?
https://www.amazon.co.uk/coin-counter/s?k=coin+counter
Balanced against the time over a year that a salaried worker would cost to do the job, it might just work out OK.

The funny thing is that before you posted that, I'd done the mental calculation that in fact it is worth the time at my hourly rate to count them manually - not by much, but at least it's not actually costing the company money .

(I still want to phase the damned things out though .)

BillDL

JAYJO said:

1p costs 20p to make....apparently...

I think that would only be if the local council was making them because you would need at least 3 workers for each of the processes and each of them would have to be given separate vans to travel to and from the mint.  The time actually making the coins would have to be in between them sitting eating McMuffins and burgers in the car park for breakfast, then brunch, then lunch, then an afternoon snack before knocking off at 3pm. Yes, I know, it should only need one worker to man each of the processes (furnace, rolling mill, blanking press, packaging), but you would need one to do the health and safety risk assessments and put out cones each time the machinery was started up, another to erect scaffolding for no apparent reason, and you always need a spare man because one person is always going to be off using up his unused sick time or in the toilet doing a crossword 

Stratavarious

£1 gets me 50 goes at the coin falls at the local pier amusements.  Be sad to see that go.

Kittyfrisk

Stratavarious said:

£1 gets me 50 goes at the coin falls at the local pier amusements.  Be sad to see that go.

One of the very best ways to throw money away