At this point, outside of grocery stores, no one really ever deals in pennies anyway. I don’t buy fast food anymore, so maybe that’s still a use case, but even there, pennies on a $12 combo meal are rounding errors.
Rounding errors are one way to make money at scale. If the smallest denomination you had was $1, you can bet that combo meal would suddenly become $12.50 so you had to pay $13 for it.
The solution is electronic money, like a debit card. Many EU countries have been introducing rechargeable debit cards for people without a banking account, in Spain we can get one at the Post office. It has limitations to the amount and number of recharges per month, but otherwise you can get your salary/pension deposited onto one, then use it with €0.005 rounding errors.
At this point, outside of grocery stores, no one really ever deals in pennies anyway. I don’t buy fast food anymore, so maybe that’s still a use case, but even there, pennies on a $12 combo meal are rounding errors.
Rounding errors are one way to make money at scale. If the smallest denomination you had was $1, you can bet that combo meal would suddenly become $12.50 so you had to pay $13 for it.
The solution is electronic money, like a debit card. Many EU countries have been introducing rechargeable debit cards for people without a banking account, in Spain we can get one at the Post office. It has limitations to the amount and number of recharges per month, but otherwise you can get your salary/pension deposited onto one, then use it with €0.005 rounding errors.
That’s ultimately the plot of Office Space.
Re: your first paragraph. Absolutely, my bank account can round up and put the ‘leftovers’ into a savings account.
Also, Richard Pryor made an excellent film with this as the theme.