On May 11, a new law went into effect in Florida, “allowing” businesses to round the amounts charged for cash purchases to the nearest nickel.

Really? Nothing more important than this for our masters in Tallahassee to spend their time on?

Don’t get me wrong. The practice in question makes sense:

Last November, the US Mint stopped producing pennies for circulation. That seems like  a sound decision, since the cost of producing the one-cent coins came to nearly four cents each.

Perhaps the production cost could have been brought down by using different materials, but after more than a century of fiat currency inflation, we’re well past the point where most people can be bothered to pick a stray penny up off the sidewalk anyway.

When I was a kid, one could put a penny in a machine and get a gumball, or buy a piece of “penny candy” at the store counter. According to my handy-dandy AI assistant, those treats now cost anywhere from a nickel to a quarter each.

Because new pennies aren’t being minted (and many Americans are socking the pennies they have away as collector items), the retail sector is experiencing a penny “shortage.”  If your purchase comes to $1.98 or $5.01, and you’re paying in cash rather than with a debit card, there may not be pennies in the till to make correct change.

So, rounding. Under the Florida law, retailers can round cash purchases up or down (whichever is closest) to make that $1.98 into two dollars even, or that $5.01 into $5.00.

Very nice, very neat, and goodbye to those “take a penny, leave a penny” trays on convenience store counters. While retailers MIGHT game their pricing to make individual items come in at the “round up” point, most people don’t buy just one item anyway, so I doubt we’ll see a general price increase out of it.

But why on Earth would merchants need a law to “allow” this?

Early on, it seems reasonable for stores to put up signs notifying customers that their cash purchases will be rounded up or down to the “nearest nickel.” Customers would be free to either accept those terms or to shop elsewhere.

Over time, it would just become accepted practice, like handing over $6.00 for a gallon of gas even though the price is technically only $5.999 per gallon (I’m pricing in the likely continuing impact of the Iran fiasco).

A law “allowing” this kind of obvious, transparent, and not dishonest practice isn’t just useless, it’s damaging.

Even when framed as “voluntary” — as this one is –unnecessary laws “allowing” behaviors already unquestionably “allowed” (by common sense and conventional morality) tend to nudge  the public toward an “everything not required is forbidden” mindset in which we instinctively seek permission from our rulers for every action, trivial or momentous.

And that mindset widely adopted, leads us inexorably toward Mussolini’s definition of fascism: “All within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state.”

But with rounding, my two cents come to nought, don’t they?

Thomas L. Knapp (X: @thomaslknapp | Bluesky: @knappster.bsky.social | Mastodon: @knappster) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY