In the wake of the penny production cessation, retailers nationwide have begun instituting rounding policies for cash payments. In Durango, that practice has reached City Market, with plans for similar rounding to reportedly take place at other stores around town in the future.
In the past several months, Durango City Market shoppers began noticing signs near registers and notes on receipts that cash payments would start being rounded to the nearest nickel.
“The U.S. Treasury has stopped production of pennies, which is now impacting supply,” a sign near the self-checkout registers at north City Market reads. “If using cash for payment, please consider providing exact change.”
A City Market receipt totaling $7.43 was paid with $10 in cash. The customer was given $2.60 in change, meaning the store rounded down to $7.40 and the shopper saved 3 cents.
The receipt even shows the 3-cent rounding.
The general system for U.S. retailers recommended by the U.S. Treasury Department is to round cash transactions with a final digit (including taxes) of 1, 2, 6, or 7 cents down to the nearest multiple of five, and up if the final digit is 3, 4, 8, or 9.
Card purchases are not impacted by new rounding policies.
City Market did not respond to requests for comment on the new system.
Longtime Durango resident Modou Sow paid cash for groceries from a self-checkout stand Friday at north City Market. The machine delivered no pennies in change.
Sow said he doesn’t mind the new system.
“I think it’s great,” he said.
Local employees at both Walgreens and Walmart said the two corporate giants also plan to eventually institute rounding practices in their stores.
The U.S. Treasury Department ended production of the penny Nov. 12 after more than 200 years.
The department wrote in a Dec. 23 release that the U.S. Mint was expecting the cessation of penny production to save $56 million annually in reduced material costs.
Tim Walsworth, director of the Durango Business Improvement District, said local businesses haven’t reported strain in the wake of the penny cessation – at least not yet.
“My sense of it is that it's not a big deal, because you can just adjust your prices by a penny or two, and run the math, and make everything equal,” he said. “Businesses are pretty good at telling me when things are not going well ... and I’m just not hearing this (as a concern). So it’s either that it hasn’t really hit yet, or it’s not a big concern for the majority of the businesses I work for.”
Walsworth said there’s a possibility penny rounding practices could cause consumers to use cards over cash more frequently – which could increase card fees and cause businesses to either swallow a higher fee volume or make customers foot the cost.
Card fees, which are typically paid by businesses to the banks and other providers who process the transactions, generally run between 1.5% and 3.5% of the total transaction amount.
Under Colorado law SB21-091, following the repeal of a previous ban, merchants can impose a surcharge for credit card use up to 2% of the total transaction or the actual processing fee cost, provided they post notice of the fee.
epond@durangoherald.com
