Oh, Canada…!

End of the week, decided to indulge myself with a little Dunkin’ Donuts coffee (their Hazelnut latte really hits the spot!).

In front of me in line was a road construction worker. I could tell because of his reflective safety jacket.

Anyway, he makes his order and it comes to $5.02.

He asks the lady at the counter if she could please round it down to $5.00 because he didn’t want to carry around 98 cents jingling in his pocket.

The lady at the counter didn’t know how to react to that. He had to repeat himself a couple of times before she understood what he was asking and, in that time, I pulled two cents from my pocket and offered it to her.

The road construction dude thanked me and repeated how annoying it would be to spend the workday with 98 cents jingle jangling in his pocket and I told him I could totally understand.

Now, I’m not posting this to show just how magnanimous a person I am. Rather, to point out the following, which some of you out there may not know:

In February of 2013 Canada officially did away with their pennies. They noted that it took 1.6 cents to make a 1 cent penny and therefore it was -obviously!- silly to keep making and using them.

The last time I visited Canada, stores still charged regularly for items.

However, if the total of your sale was, to pull a number completely randomly out of thin air, $5.02, you would be paying $5.00 for your item(s).

If, however, the total of your sale was $5.03 or $5.04, you’d be paying $5.05 for your sale.

In theory, this balances out sales to you over time.

While there will certainly be times you lose as well as “win”, it seems to me the Canadians are on to something.

Certainly that road worker wouldn’t have had to ask the cashier to please keep him from filling his pockets with change.