It just makes sense.

As the number of significant digits goes up, people's understanding of the extra meaning goes down. The first digit is the most important, the second less, and so on. Adding many significant digits is only used to distract people.

I don't think giving people the economic freedom to exploit gullability of the population is beneficial. I think that's a popular idea, too - there are quite a few other laws of the same type. For example, laws against cigarette advertising, bait and switch sales. It's also the reason we make things like heroin illegal. In all those cases if people behaved reasonably and responsibly and made sure of things themselves, there wouldn't be a problem. Yet, those laws were still passed. That's because although we could do everything ourself, it's a lot of work. One benefit of government is to make things easier. It's easier not to be tricked or misled if it's illegal to do it, it's easier not to get on heroin if it's illegal. I don't want to always have to mentally round up, and preserving the need for it doesn't help people. This isn't the bill of rights we're talking about here.

The reason for these god-awfully wierd prices like 19999 and 5.95 is because of one man's deam of getting rich...He asked vendors to set their prices slighty below a full dollar so that they would get a nickel change to buy his newspaper with. Newspapers have gone from US$ 0.05 to US$ 0.50 to 1.00, but the *.95 and *.99 prices remain regardless.

Now you have a possible excuse to build a time machine.

I agree. You should be charged $290,000.00 for your house instead of $281,000.00. In fact, I'll take the extra $9,000 you paid just so you can buy things at the prices you apparently want..

What? You want that rule to apply only for low priced items? What counts as a low price? Let's get a committee together and have them come up with a pricing scheme that's at least half as impressive as the tax code.

Of course, this will simplify advertising and teaching kids money values. We could simplify all prices to $x.yEz, which could then be simplified to $xyz.

Then we could use the resistor color code to specify prices. Manufacturers could spend millions making their box complement the colors on the price tag (which would result in price fixing - no store would put brown on our box)! Our money could be replaced with paper that has 3 stripes of color on it!

At military canteens and PX s, they've discontinued the use of the penny, all prices are in $.05 increments. We also use this where I work, so I don't even see a penny all day unless some moron gives me 5 to get rid of his change. Company policy is to just chuck it in the trash when they do that, right in front of them so they see exactly how little it means to us.

Australia has cancelled the use of one and two cent coins for some years now, and quite frankly it hasn't made much difference to business. Prices are still calculated to the cent (and even a tenth of a cent for petrol), but any figure is rounded down or up to the nearest five cents. Example: two of the same cans of food may cost $2.85, but if you bought each seperately you would only pay $2.80 (each can would have been $1.42) - Always buy fuel when a total ends in $x.x2 or $x.x7.

Take note though that costs are rounded only when paying in cash. With the increased use of credit cards, every cent is accounted for so it is still viable to price products to the cent and you'll get billed all of the cost.

VAG tells me that this practice is in place in the Netherlands also.

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