• Ken B (unregistered) in reply to Puddin'
    Puddin':
    When did TDWTF start linking to the sites shown instead of trying to obscure them?
    July 17th, 2009.
    Why is "someone's line printer doesn't handle foreign characters properly" a WTF?
    Because Alex says it is.
    Does the Scandisk come with fries?
    Only if you get the super-size combo.
    Who's going to trust a weather prediction for 35 years in the future when we can't even accurately predict tomorrow?
    The same people who believe it doesn't matter, since the world will end in December 2012.
    This article raises a lot of questions.
    And a lot of answers. :-)
  • DaveK (unregistered)

    I'm getting a little scared by that cable TV WTF at the end. I live in Macomb County. I guess I'll have to move to a safer area by 2037.

  • (cs) in reply to Anon
    Anon:
    Wouter:
    Actually. That's correct. The supermarkets here (The Netherlands) round the total to €0.05 so that they don't have to handle 1 and 2 cent coins.

    Well, there's TRWTF. The store just stole 2 cents from the customer because small coins are too much hassle for them. If 1 and 2 cents coins are too much trouble, then W(hy)TF do they use prices such as 3.19 and 3.89. Just make them 3.20 and 3.90 and the problem goes away completely.

    The problem doesn't go away completely if there are taxes applied to the total of all items that you buy. (If there are VATs included in the product price, then maybe that would work.) When you apply a tax percentage, you'll end up with a total that the customer has to pay the store that is not a multiple of 5 cents. Unless the tax percentage is 100%.

    If the customer bought something for 3.89 and something for 1.01, then the total is a multiple of 5 cents, and no 1-cent coins are needed. Also, as someone pointed out later, you don't want to raise the price on something from 3.89 to 3.90 arbitrarily: when buying 10 of something that "should" be priced at 3.89, the customer is better off with the price at 3.89 than if the price of each item had been rounded up to 3.90.

    I used to wish that the U.S. Postal Service would set first-class postage stamps at a multiple of 5 cents, and when the price goes up, to raise the price by 5 cents. But I realized that companies that send lots of mail would be adversely impacted by this; if the "preferred" stamp price is 42 cents, making it 45 cents would be a larger-than-necessary increase in cost to those businesses.

  • (cs)

    I think there's a large psychological element to the 1p and 2p (I'm English) coin thing. To demonstrate, assume your prices are all rounded to the nearest 10p. That makes half of the commenters here happy it seems as you don't have to worry about any small change at all, it's all nice big numbers. Now divide all prices and coin face values by 10. You have exactly the same coins, buying exactly the same items, but suddenly (oh no) there's "small change" again and you can't deal with it. The two situations "feel" completely different even though they're exactly the same.

    Real numbers example:

    An item costs £1.78, it's rounded to £1.80 and you pay with a £1, 50p, 20p and 10p coin. You didn't have to dig out (or recieve) any 5p, 2p or 1p coins, yay :-)

    The currency is "revised" and now that item costs 18p. Oh dear, now you have to pay with a 10p, 5p, 2p and 1p coin. Observe that there are the same number of coins, but they're smaller value and thus automatically more annoying.

  • Marc B (unregistered) in reply to Le Poete
    Le Poete:
    Andreas:
    My guess is that it was written with a french e aigu (Saté Ayam).

    I live in Québec and French is our main language and I see these wierd characters replacing accentuated letters all the time on purchase receipts.

    Where in the world is Québec? Is it somewhere in Canad&iacutea?

    And 2 cent coins? WTF?

  • slapout (unregistered) in reply to Steve the Cynic
    fleen has been ogglefloggled

    I'm going to use that in my next error message...

  • Lone Marauder (unregistered) in reply to OMG
    OMG:
    This is really, really lame. C3P0 is a widely-used JDBC connection pool; I'd think most people here would know that.

    Actually, in the GroupWise context C3PO is an acronym for Certified 3rd Party Object.

  • (cs)

    Related but unrelated, does anybody even know how to play Blueberry Garden? It's by far the most confusing and inexplicable game I've ever subjected myself too, and I've tried Dwarf Fortress.

  • Starla Insigna (unregistered)

    What? Doesn't the Audacity error make sense? You can't really modify and audio until you select it....

  • J (unregistered) in reply to Kemp
    Kemp:
    I think there's a large psychological element to the 1p and 2p (I'm English) coin thing. To demonstrate, assume your prices are all rounded to the nearest 10p. That makes half of the commenters here happy it seems as you don't have to worry about any small change at all, it's all nice big numbers. Now divide all prices and coin face values by 10. You have exactly the same coins, buying exactly the same items, but suddenly (oh no) there's "small change" again and you can't deal with it. The two situations "feel" completely different even though they're exactly the same.

    Real numbers example:

    An item costs £1.78, it's rounded to £1.80 and you pay with a £1, 50p, 20p and 10p coin. You didn't have to dig out (or recieve) any 5p, 2p or 1p coins, yay :-)

    The currency is "revised" and now that item costs 18p. Oh dear, now you have to pay with a 10p, 5p, 2p and 1p coin. Observe that there are the same number of coins, but they're smaller value and thus automatically more annoying.

    It's not just the psychology of bigger numbers but the actual value of the money itself (i.e. the amount of goods that it can be exchanged for). Now that we are at a point where there is literally nothing you can buy for less than a nickel, there's not much reason to sub-divide below that. 80 years ago, a penny could at least be considered to have some value, so rounding off pennies would have been a bad idea. Now that a penny is worth about 1/20th of what it used to be, a few pennies lost or gained is meaningless.

  • modo (unregistered) in reply to powerlord
    powerlord:
    rant64:
    It's never been any different. I'm Dutch, btw. The last instance of the Dutch currency before the EUR also didn't have cent pieces. Prices that were rounded to the nearest 5 cent number, both up and down. With the introduction of the Euro in 2002 (for cash) there was a brief period where 0,01 and 0,02 euro coins were accepted but it required far too much handling for stores that handled cash money. So at least Holland and many European countries reverted to 5 cent increments, even in countries that had used cents in their currency before.
    Please come to North America and convince the countries here to do this.

    I hate carrying around pennies.

    All of you "No-Change!"-ers are missing the point. There used to be items for sale at penny increments, before we inflated the ever-living fuck out of our currency. It is only recently that they are so near to worthless that nobody wants to have to "deal with them" (really? you hate "dealing" with your own money? wtf?). Instead of whinging about abolishing any coin smaller than a quint, we should be looking at deflating the currency by an order of magnitude, so the units make sense and have value again, like...oh, wait...

    Kemp:
    I think there's a large psychological element to the 1p and 2p (I'm English) coin thing. To demonstrate, assume your prices are all rounded to the nearest 10p. That makes half of the commenters here happy it seems as you don't have to worry about any small change at all, it's all nice big numbers. Now divide all prices and coin face values by 10. You have exactly the same coins, buying exactly the same items, but suddenly (oh no) there's "small change" again and you can't deal with it. The two situations "feel" completely different even though they're exactly the same.

    Real numbers example:

    An item costs £1.78, it's rounded to £1.80 and you pay with a £1, 50p, 20p and 10p coin. You didn't have to dig out (or recieve) any 5p, 2p or 1p coins, yay :-)

    The currency is "revised" and now that item costs 18p. Oh dear, now you have to pay with a 10p, 5p, 2p and 1p coin. Observe that there are the same number of coins, but they're smaller value and thus automatically more annoying.

    yeah, ok. This.

  • sagaciter (unregistered) in reply to J
    J:
    Kemp:
    I think there's a large psychological element to the 1p and 2p (I'm English) coin thing. To demonstrate, assume your prices are all rounded to the nearest 10p. That makes half of the commenters here happy it seems as you don't have to worry about any small change at all, it's all nice big numbers. Now divide all prices and coin face values by 10. You have exactly the same coins, buying exactly the same items, but suddenly (oh no) there's "small change" again and you can't deal with it. The two situations "feel" completely different even though they're exactly the same.

    Real numbers example:

    An item costs £1.78, it's rounded to £1.80 and you pay with a £1, 50p, 20p and 10p coin. You didn't have to dig out (or recieve) any 5p, 2p or 1p coins, yay :-)

    The currency is "revised" and now that item costs 18p. Oh dear, now you have to pay with a 10p, 5p, 2p and 1p coin. Observe that there are the same number of coins, but they're smaller value and thus automatically more annoying.

    It's not just the psychology of bigger numbers but the actual value of the money itself (i.e. the amount of goods that it can be exchanged for). Now that we are at a point where there is literally nothing you can buy for less than a nickel, there's not much reason to sub-divide below that. 80 years ago, a penny could at least be considered to have some value, so rounding off pennies would have been a bad idea. Now that a penny is worth about 1/20th of what it used to be, a few pennies lost or gained is meaningless.

    Way to miss Kemp's entire premise, there, J.

    Er, sorry, mean to say: Whoooosh!

  • Arenlor (unregistered)

    Ok, so let's say you go into a store and with tax the one item you buy adds up to 1.89, yet they charge you for 1.90, because it's round. That is our problem with the rounding part. Now let's say you go into a store for a drink every day, that's 3.65 a year that you're losing, and they're gaining. Let's say that 10,000 do that every day, 36500 a year they're gaining. Can anyone see why we are pissed about this theft?

    About the Audacity error, I really don't get it. A program instead of just ignoring a users input gave an error explaining that it wasn't allowed (instead of being illegal) and that maybe they should select some music to see if it will help. Wow, giving the users information that won't confuse them, WTF man, just WTF?

  • fleen has been ogglefloggled (unregistered) in reply to Marc B
    Marc B:
    Le Poete:
    Andreas:
    My guess is that it was written with a french e aigu (Saté Ayam).

    I live in Québec and French is our main language and I see these wierd characters replacing accentuated letters all the time on purchase receipts.

    Where in the world is Québec? Is it somewhere in Canad&iacutea?

    And 2 cent coins? WTF?

    Canad&iacutea had two dollar bills for a while. I've got one.

  • Shinobu (unregistered) in reply to Anonymous Cow-Herd

    [quote user="Anonymous Cow-Herd"]Lazy goits.[/quote]I agree. Sure it may cost them (not that much actually) but legal tender is legal tender. While officially that term may only have meaning for clearance of debt, I think it should extend to payment as well. The situation that someone can give you a proper coin, and you subsequently wind up being unable to pay with it at your supermarket is ludicrous. [quote user="Xanthus179"]Even if you can't read Dutch you should be able to figure out those aren't prices. Now what would NR. mean I wonder? ;-)

  • Shinobu (unregistered) in reply to Shinobu
    Anonymous Cow-Herd:
    Lazy goits.
    I agree. Sure it may cost them (not that much actually) but legal tender is legal tender. While officially that term may only have meaning for clearance of debt, I think it should extend to payment as well. The situation that someone can give you a proper coin, and you subsequently wind up being unable to pay with it at your supermarket is ludicrous.
    Xanthus179:
    ...
    Even if you can't read Dutch you should be able to figure out those aren't prices. Now what would NR. mean I wonder? ;-)
  • (cs) in reply to Steve the Cynic
    Steve the Cynic:
    OMG:
    This is really, really lame. C3P0 is a widely-used JDBC connection pool; I'd think most people here would know that. The Audacity and Blueberry Garden error messages are perfectly reasonable and informative. And regarding the receipt, I don't even know what the hell we're supposed to be looking at -- it's not in English, there's no translation. Is it that one funny-looking character? For all we know, that's the word for "fuckwad" in whatever language we're gaping at. Are we supposed to attach some special significance to the word "Ajam?" Given that all the other crap on the receipt is just as meaningless, it says nothing. Bullshit.

    Why would I know that C3P0 is something to do with JDBC? I've been programming professionally, mostly, for twenty years, and I've never used JDBC even once.

    C3PO stands for Custom Third-Party Object, supposedly. And anyone who hates GroupWise should try Lotus Notes if they really want to get their hate on.

  • Anonymous (unregistered)

    In the U.S. at least, anyone who buys gasoline already deals with pricing precision that doesn't match monetary precision. No stations charge a whole number of cents for a gallon of gas. It's always something like $2.499. They round the total amount to the nearest cent (for 1 gallon it would be $2.50 while for 10 gallons it would be $24.99).

    Rounding to $0.05 isn't really much different. Did the station steal $0.001 from you when they charged you for 1 gallon of gas? If so, do you care? I'd prefer we just eliminated the penny and rounded to a nickel, but those "take a penny / leave a penny" little dishes that a lot of retailers have accomplish the same thing. I'd just rather the "take a penny / leave a penny" happened on paper instead of with little bits of metal in the dish.

  • Sammy (unregistered)

    I believe the error with the year 2037 is combined with the unix timestamp. As far as I know, the seconds since 01 01 1970 0:00 o'clock reach the limit of an integer on January 18, 2038. It's not an exact match, but I take the year 2037 as a hint for this limit.

    -"delenit"-

  • (cs) in reply to jonnyq
    jonnyq:

    In my town, a stiff breeze is enought to interupt the audio on every freaking channel with a recorded message and big flashing banner cross the screen on every freaking channel. On every freaking channel. Stiff breeze.

    I have satellite now.

    Stiff breeze.. snicker snicker

    [image]
  • Shaft (unregistered)

    waves hand These are not the commands you are looking for.

  • willicueva (unregistered) in reply to Herohtar

    For all you Americans who are so hoilier than thou, the US Military has been rounding prices up and down to the next nickel for more years than the EURO has existed. Why? because the cost of transporting cents overseas was a multiple of the actual prices. Additionally, the costs of HANDLING the cents was also processed into the equation. Deal with it.

  • Noone Really (unregistered)

    I suspect that there is at least one other WTF on the Taco Bell Scandisk error. Either I live near that Taco Bell, or they all crapped out at the same time. It displayed that message for at least a month, and yesterday when I went through the drive through, they had put a piece of cardboard over the screen. ???

  • regeya (unregistered) in reply to TarquinWJ

    HEH

    Maybe I shoulda clarified...the people trying to GUESS what C3PO could have been instead of just lookin' it up...

    ah, well.

  • (cs) in reply to Arenlor
    Arenlor:
    Ok, so let's say you go into a store and with tax the one item you buy adds up to 1.89, yet they charge you for 1.90, because it's round.
    So I pay $1.89. It's not that difficult. What is difficult is that there are still parking meters around that only take cash.
  • mjb (unregistered) in reply to OMG

    Nope. As a GW third party ceveloper AND a java programmer I can tell you you are wrong.

    C3P0 as a connection pool - around 2001/2002 C3PO in GroupWise is a COM extension for plugging in things like menu and context action and trapping events in the client. It standard for Custom Third Party Object and was introduced in 1997 or so. May 10, IIRC. (Not joking, I think that was the release date of 5.2).

    I agree the message could be less geeky. ("Custom 3rd party plugin into GroupWise" might work) But remember, any language change has to go through like 10 localizers - however many languages GW supports. So probably it's never been a major priority.

  • (cs) in reply to fleen has been ogglefloggled
    fleen has been ogglefloggled:
    Marc B:

    And 2 cent coins? WTF?

    Canad&iacutea had two dollar bills for a while. I've got one.

    America has 2 dollar bills.

    <pedantic> the 1,2,5 division is supposed to make it so that less coins/bills are needed. The american quarter is actually the anomaly, as the system goes to 1,2,5 from the dollar level. They skip the two cent coin as wel.

    OF course alot of countries had a quarter including the netherlands. The guilder system was consistent however in its application of 1,2.5,5 progression (except no 2.5 cent coin, and there was 1,5 guilder coin, which was called a daalder which is related or possibly the root of the name dollar). </pedantic>

    As to those weirdos complaining how unfair it is that duthc stores use rounding... They will not return small coins but they are required to accept them. OF course, you have to be willing to get into a discusion with a cashier who probably only knows that they don't use small coins and doesn't have a degree in...well anything probably.

  • (cs) in reply to Puddin'
    Puddin':
    Why is "someone's line printer doesn't handle foreign characters properly" a WTF?
    A pr.nter .n a DUTCH shop not handl.ng DUTCH characters properly is a WTF. Just the same as a pr.nter .n a shop .n Amer.ca or England not pr.nt.ng characters .n Engl.sh properly .s a WTF.
  • iMalc (unregistered)

    Wow, weather prediction has come a long way since I was a kid.

  • (cs) in reply to Random832
    Random832:
    (as with Superman III/Hackers/Office Space/Entrapment/Don't movie writers know any other financial scams?),

    Sure they do - making movies.

  • lokey (unregistered) in reply to J
    J:
    Kemp:
    I think there's a large psychological element to the 1p and 2p (I'm English) coin thing. To demonstrate, assume your prices are all rounded to the nearest 10p. That makes half of the commenters here happy it seems as you don't have to worry about any small change at all, it's all nice big numbers. Now divide all prices and coin face values by 10. You have exactly the same coins, buying exactly the same items, but suddenly (oh no) there's "small change" again and you can't deal with it. The two situations "feel" completely different even though they're exactly the same.

    Real numbers example:

    An item costs £1.78, it's rounded to £1.80 and you pay with a £1, 50p, 20p and 10p coin. You didn't have to dig out (or recieve) any 5p, 2p or 1p coins, yay :-)

    The currency is "revised" and now that item costs 18p. Oh dear, now you have to pay with a 10p, 5p, 2p and 1p coin. Observe that there are the same number of coins, but they're smaller value and thus automatically more annoying.

    It's not just the psychology of bigger numbers but the actual value of the money itself (i.e. the amount of goods that it can be exchanged for). Now that we are at a point where there is literally nothing you can buy for less than a nickel, there's not much reason to sub-divide below that. 80 years ago, a penny could at least be considered to have some value, so rounding off pennies would have been a bad idea. Now that a penny is worth about 1/20th of what it used to be, a few pennies lost or gained is meaningless.

    Glad you feel that way. Can all of you who feel likewise please gather all of your "pesky" pennies and nickels together? I'll be by to pick them up, and take the problem off of your hands...

  • moz (unregistered) in reply to Arenlor
    Arenlor:
    Let's say that 10,000 do that every day, 36500 a year they're gaining. Can anyone see why we are pissed about this theft?
    What you have to remember is that the Netherlands replaced its currency with the euro a few years ago. Shopkeepers made far more than a few cents per transaction when that happened.
  • Noorie (unregistered) in reply to Anonymous Cow-Herd
    Anonymous Cow-Herd:
    MichaelWH:
    The usual policy of places that do this is to round 1 and 2 down, 4 and 5 up and 3 in whichever direction is advantageous to the customer.

    ITYM 1 and 2 down, 3 and 4 up. 5 MOD 5 == 0

    Thus it actually, in the long haul, costs the businesses who do this and yet they find that it saves them money over the expense of counting, rolling, transporting and otherwise processing the smaller denomination coins.

    Again, lazy goits that can't be arsed to count their money properly. In many other places that have adopted Swedish rounding, the coins concerned have gone away. Australia lost its 1c and 2c coins in 1992. New Zealand abolished 5c in 2006. Otherwise, the mint still produces them, and the banks still have to handle them. If you're not going to use the small value coins, abolish them. If you're not in a position to abolish them, don't act like they have been. I don't much like the collection of coppers in my pocket, but until HMG decides to abolish them, I've got to live with them.

    I think I tend to agree here....

    1c & 2c pieces remain (as far as I'm aware) legal tender in Australia at least, however a total will still be rounded even if the money you pay with includes such coins (the mint no longer produces these coins, however they are considered legal tender in small enough quantities). In fact I suspect (and I'm sure I'll be corrected if I'm wrong) that almost any coin produced by the Australian Mint is legal tender (provided it has a value shown on it). This includes $5 coins and other unusual quantities (I think there's some higher value coins too). Of course, wasting a coin at $5 face value when it probably cost you more than that seems a little silly...

    But, I digress....

    If we don't need 1c & 2c pieces, we should change pricing structures so that items aren't sold at prices that require these (of course for weight/volume based sales this isn't so simple - although there must already be a rounding effect at some level on them). It is hard to see a justification for removing 1c & 2c pieces from circulation when groceries are still advertised at $1.99 or $6.97 etc. If having such low granularity causes a problem, then why not get rid of the granularity instead of working around it?
    I believe (in Australia, at least) that part of the problem was the metal used to make those denomination coins (Copper, I think) was worth more than the face value of the coin itself. This had happened before, with a silver 50c piece, and the metal used was changed, and the silver currency withdrawn from circulation. I guess it is a lot harder to find a (costwise) suitable metal for small denominations

  • Jimbo (unregistered) in reply to Anon
    Anon:
    Wouter:
    Actually. That's correct. The supermarkets here (The Netherlands) round the total to €0.05 so that they don't have to handle 1 and 2 cent coins.

    Well, there's TRWTF. The store just stole 2 cents from the customer because small coins are too much hassle for them. If 1 and 2 cents coins are too much trouble, then W(hy)TF do they use prices such as 3.19 and 3.89. Just make them 3.20 and 3.90 and the problem goes away completely.

    And the shop potentially makes even more from you (because to make thew rounding disappear, it needs to happen at the point the price is marked on an item).

    518g mushroom @$7kg = $3.626 = $3.65 326g Apples @$3 = $0.978 = $1.00

    and the consumer has lost 4.6c. Conversely, under the current system (all else being equal), the total cost is $4.604, and the customer wins by 0.4c.

    Of course, in either system you could find examples where the customer wins (or loses), but the point is that attempting to get rid of rounding before the cash register introduces bigger variance on the total cost. At a 2c loss, the customer is minimally worried. In a large shop of weighed groceries, a customer could be losing (or gaining) 20c or more. This sort of variation is (surely) less acceptable?

  • Miguel (unregistered) in reply to Lone Marauder
    Lone Marauder:
    OMG:
    This is really, really lame. C3P0 is a widely-used JDBC connection pool; I'd think most people here would know that.

    Actually, in the GroupWise context C3PO is an acronym for Certified 3rd Party Object.

    Grazie, thank you. I hadn't picked that up.

    (Captcha: Odio - 'O Dio' - 'O Lord!!'

  • Joseph (unregistered) in reply to Arenlor
    Arenlor:
    Ok, so let's say you go into a store and with tax the one item you buy adds up to 1.89, yet they charge you for 1.90, because it's round. That is our problem with the rounding part. Now let's say you go into a store for a drink every day, that's 3.65 a year that you're losing, and they're gaining. Let's say that 10,000 do that every day, 36500 a year they're gaining. Can anyone see why we are pissed about this theft?

    About the Audacity error, I really don't get it. A program instead of just ignoring a users input gave an error explaining that it wasn't allowed (instead of being illegal) and that maybe they should select some music to see if it will help. Wow, giving the users information that won't confuse them, WTF man, just WTF?

    I buy them in threes, roughly twice a week. I feel like I'm a little ahead....

    (of course, this shows that on average the shop is ahead, however let us remember that it is rarely the shops that make the decision to abolish certain values of coins)

  • fahle (unregistered) in reply to TheJasper
    TheJasper:
    fleen has been ogglefloggled:
    Marc B:

    And 2 cent coins? WTF?

    Canad&iacutea had two dollar bills for a while. I've got one.

    America has 2 dollar bills.

    <pedantic> the 1,2,5 division is supposed to make it so that less coins/bills are needed. The american quarter is actually the anomaly, as the system goes to 1,2,5 from the dollar level. They skip the two cent coin as wel.

    OF course alot of countries had a quarter including the netherlands. The guilder system was consistent however in its application of 1,2.5,5 progression (except no 2.5 cent coin, and there was 1,5 guilder coin, which was called a daalder which is related or possibly the root of the name dollar). </pedantic>

    As to those weirdos complaining how unfair it is that duthc stores use rounding... They will not return small coins but they are required to accept them. OF course, you have to be willing to get into a discusion with a cashier who probably only knows that they don't use small coins and doesn't have a degree in...well anything probably.

    Wouldn't it make more sense to do 1,2,4,8,16,32 to minimise on coin/note used rather than 1,2,5,10,20,50 or do prices cluster toward multiple of 5 (psychology at work)?

    Then again, if a tree fell in the woods....

  • PaddyWhack (unregistered) in reply to Noorie
    Noorie:
    Anonymous Cow-Herd:
    MichaelWH:
    The usual policy of places that do this is to round 1 and 2 down, 4 and 5 up and 3 in whichever direction is advantageous to the customer.

    ITYM 1 and 2 down, 3 and 4 up. 5 MOD 5 == 0

    Thus it actually, in the long haul, costs the businesses who do this and yet they find that it saves them money over the expense of counting, rolling, transporting and otherwise processing the smaller denomination coins.

    Again, lazy goits that can't be arsed to count their money properly. In many other places that have adopted Swedish rounding, the coins concerned have gone away. Australia lost its 1c and 2c coins in 1992. New Zealand abolished 5c in 2006. Otherwise, the mint still produces them, and the banks still have to handle them. If you're not going to use the small value coins, abolish them. If you're not in a position to abolish them, don't act like they have been. I don't much like the collection of coppers in my pocket, but until HMG decides to abolish them, I've got to live with them.

    I think I tend to agree here....

    1c & 2c pieces remain (as far as I'm aware) legal tender in Australia at least, however a total will still be rounded even if the money you pay with includes such coins (the mint no longer produces these coins, however they are considered legal tender in small enough quantities). In fact I suspect (and I'm sure I'll be corrected if I'm wrong) that almost any coin produced by the Australian Mint is legal tender (provided it has a value shown on it). This includes $5 coins and other unusual quantities (I think there's some higher value coins too). Of course, wasting a coin at $5 face value when it probably cost you more than that seems a little silly...

    But, I digress....

    If we don't need 1c & 2c pieces, we should change pricing structures so that items aren't sold at prices that require these (of course for weight/volume based sales this isn't so simple - although there must already be a rounding effect at some level on them). It is hard to see a justification for removing 1c & 2c pieces from circulation when groceries are still advertised at $1.99 or $6.97 etc. If having such low granularity causes a problem, then why not get rid of the granularity instead of working around it?
    I believe (in Australia, at least) that part of the problem was the metal used to make those denomination coins (Copper, I think) was worth more than the face value of the coin itself. This had happened before, with a silver 50c piece, and the metal used was changed, and the silver currency withdrawn from circulation. I guess it is a lot harder to find a (costwise) suitable metal for small denominations

    When Australia first dropped 1c & 2c currencies, some (all?) supermarkets would round everything down.
    Apparently people would do several trips through the registers (eg when kiwi fruit was 9c each, buying 10 of them one at a time saved you a massive 40c - provided you had a friend that was willing to help look after the ones you had bought already).

  • Amesho (unregistered)

    In my day, a dollar was worth a dollar, and a penny was worth a penny. My how things change.

  • Swedish tard (unregistered) in reply to Joseph

    Im from sweden, so I'm used to the "swedish rounding" thing. So used that when I go to countries where they have 1c change and they cashiers refuse to keep them, I just take them and throw them on the street as I exit the shop. I hate small change, and I wish we'd lose the 50 öre (cent) coins in sweden, since they are pretty much useless as it is anyway. We aready tossed the lower denominations anyway. Why bother with the fractions anyway? >.< Thats just silly really.

    Just let the money devalue a tiny bit more and 1 SEK/USD/Whatthefuckever will be worth about 1 cent/öre/penis of 30 years ago. Might as well go with it.

  • (cs) in reply to rant64
    rant64:
    It's never been any different. I'm Dutch, btw. The last instance of the Dutch currency before the EUR also didn't have cent pieces. Prices that were rounded to the nearest 5 cent number, both up and down.
    Of course there were 1 cent coins, my parents still have a couple of them, together with several 10 guilder coins. They were a bit smaller than a 5 cent coin, made of the same material, and a bit bigger than a 10 cent coin. (Trivia: the size of the hole in a CD or DVD is exactly the size of a Dutch 10 cent coin. When they invented the thing in Eindhoven, the Netherland, they decided to make the hole the size of this small coin.) 1 cent coins stopped being legal tender about 30 years ago, anyway around the time that I was 10.

    1 and 2 cent coins are still legal tender in the Netherlands, and supermarkets like Aldi will give you exact change (at least, they did so the last time I was in the Netherlands).

    Bizarrely enough, Malta (where I now live) joined the euro in 2008, and after about a year, most of the 1 cent coins were Dutch. But even here businesses started rounding off to the nearest 5 cents. They didn't do that with the Maltese lira, but on the other hand, it was the second highest valued currency in the world, with 1 lira being worth €2.30, or almost US$ 3.50.

  • Xythar (unregistered) in reply to Arenlor
    Arenlor:
    Ok, so let's say you go into a store and with tax the one item you buy adds up to 1.89, yet they charge you for 1.90, because it's round. That is our problem with the rounding part. Now let's say you go into a store for a drink every day, that's 3.65 a year that you're losing, and they're gaining. Let's say that 10,000 do that every day, 36500 a year they're gaining. Can anyone see why we are pissed about this theft?

    Oh my god not $3.65 a year. However will I be able to afford to eat now that those evil retailers are stealing such a massive sum from me on an annual basis, bleeding me dry.

    We've been doing this here in Australia for years (rounding all prices to the nearest 5c since we got rid of 1c and 2c coins) and I have absolutely no problem with it. It's considerably more convenient.

  • (cs) in reply to Starla Insigna

    It's a good error message I agree... It tells you exactly what went wrong in simple words that a user can understand... I just posted it because i thought the "disallowed for some reason" part. I thought that was funny. Just some good-natured humour by the developers of the app xD

  • (cs) in reply to Starla Insigna
    Starla Insigna:
    What? Doesn't the Audacity error make sense? You can't really modify and audio until you select it....

    It's a good error message I agree... It tells you exactly what went wrong in simple words that a user can understand... I just posted it because i thought the "disallowed for some reason" part. I thought that was funny. Just some good-natured humour by the developers of the app xD

  • Steve the Cynic (unregistered) in reply to Slave Programmer Overseer
    Slave Programmer Overseer:
    As long as you keep working with Microsoft tools, you'll never need to worry about it. Would you like an extra chunk of gruel today?

    Actually, I haven't used any Microsoft tools in my job in the last six years. (Unless you count the Windows machine that ran the X server...) Before that, it was a mixed bag, but mostly neither Windows nor Java.

    And no thanks, gruel is a bit much first thing in the morning.

  • (cs) in reply to Big Guy Surprise
    Big Guy Surprise:
    "When shopping at the local super market for a cheap diner and a movie," Stefan Thoolen wrote, "I noticed very weird Ajam stuff!"

    TRWTF is that they were trying to buy a diner at the super market. Clearly a commercial real estate agent would have been the best solution to this problem.

    You misunderstood, he obviously was looking for a female diner, and supposedly the local supermarket is a good place for picking up one of those.

  • (cs) in reply to Swedish tard
    Swedish tard:
    I hate small change, and I wish we'd lose the 50 öre (cent) coins in sweden, since they are pretty much useless as it is anyway. We aready tossed the lower denominations anyway.

    You're late, it's already announced. They will cease to be legal tender on 30 september 2010. Look it up on www.riksbank.com .

    And to all you other whiners, how often do you buy just one item at a grocery store? I usually shop for around 50 usd or more, losing one cent would be 1/5000 of the whole sum. You all seem to forget that it is the total that is rounded, not each item.

  • (cs)

    I think I can clear up the 'Ajam' mystery. Though not a native Dutch speaker, I lived in Amsterdam for a few years about 25 years back and am familiar with the culture.

    IIRC, ajam is Indonesian (a former Dutch colony) for chicken. And satay is one of the Amsterdam mainstays. So that item on the receipt is meant to be 'sate ajam', or chicken satay.

  • Swa (unregistered) in reply to Doooood
    Doooood:
    No stealing involved. Next time around, you'll get 2 cents more if the rounding works in your favour. It all balances out in the end. I wish they'd do the same here in the US.
    maybe there's a conspiracy where prices used in the supermarket will always add up to 0.03, 0.04, 0.08 or 0.09! the store manager at Albert Heijn might very well be an evil mathematical genius.

    Captcha: facilisis, a obsessive compulsive disorder that causes you to help other people's progress by facilitating even their most inane & retarded IT change requests.

    3rd try

  • titter.com (unregistered) in reply to Home Shopper
    Home Shopper:
    Angsty Teen Vampires 3
    The most original mock title for Breaking Dawn I have seen.

    CAPTCHA: inhibeo, as in, "I could not inhibeo myself from posting this comment".

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