The world according to Sven-S. Porst
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When actually looking at a receipt I received recently, it looked like they’re actually rounding their totals to the next €0,05 at the d.m. drug store. Nice move.
I didn’t check whether they adjusted all their prices to be perfect multiples of 5 cents and only have the rounding issue remaining for special items (photo prints in my case) that are individually priced. Or whether they just kept their old prices and started rounding (off). I’m wondering to which extent this makes things easier and quicker for them.
It’s also another hint that software in those checkout terminals must be able to cope with all sorts of crazy ideas. And I could easily imagine that this could be considered a bit of a bookkeeping nightmare as well.
March 17, 2010, 8:52
Tagged as
business, shopping.
Maybe DM took a look over to Sweden [de]?
March 17, 2010, 15:07
Yeah, possibly. Although I heard a while ago that people don’t use 1 and 2 cent coins in Finland either.
Wikipedia confirms this, but they claim doing this is known as Swedish Rounding, so it’s back to Sweden…
March 17, 2010, 16:00
I mean even if you were to go to a kiosk to buy a single piece of wine gum they would most likely charge you no less than 5 cent, which is the only situation I can think of where this kind of small change used to make sense. The kiosk of my trust in my childhood used to sell mixed goodies for 5 Pfennig a piece, which would theoretically equal to maybe 3 cent nowadays, but I guess they probably used the dealer friendly currency converting method which means to just exchange the currency symbol and leave the numbers untouched when switching from D-Mark to Euro.
March 18, 2010, 1:45
As usual, I’ll blame marketing.
Somehow they came to think that a €0,99 item sells better than a €1 one. So they managed to think that they need those little coins even if it doesn’t make any sense.
I wonder how much cost creating and distributing the little coins creates.
March 18, 2010, 9:23
In Sweden the government actually encourages the population to choose card payment because the cost of card payment for society is lower for every purchase over x crowns. This is of course superfluous because practically the Swedes already pay basically everything with their credit card, which is from a privacy perspective of course pretty perverted.
March 24, 2010, 21:30
