It seems a bit dishonest to yourself to say that you don’t trust corporations while espousing a fear whose only source is the zinc lobby trying to retain demand for its product against overwhelming evidence of its uselessness.
“Even if they stopped making them I wouldn’t get that money back” except you would in the form of other places that the money could be allocated to. If you don’t trust the government to properly allocate money that’s fine, but now imagine that this argument were about the government buying $325 million worth of stuff every two years just to then catapult it into the Sun (not in a scientific way; just as in the closest way we have of physically getting rid of something forever). I can imagine you wouldn’t be making the argument that you wouldn’t be getting it back anyway and would instead rightly be asking why the hell the government is doing this. There are downsides to the government just wasting money.
I don’t think the first point will itself convince you of the penny thing since it doesn’t directly contradict your idea of ‘price gouging’, and the second one is just a point against this argument in general, so as my main point, I’ll leave you with this question and see if you can answer it to yourself: “What would be the mechanism by which this ‘price gouging’ would occur, and why hasn’t it happened in Canada?” Mathematically, rounding to the nearest 5 gives you the same odds of rounding up and rounding down, so how do corporations implement this dastardly scheme, and why haven’t they done it in Canada?
My concern is not coming from any information provided by a lobby. It’s coming from my past experiences seeing corporations jump on any and every chance to take more money out of my pocket.
“Even if they stopped making them I wouldn’t get that money back” except you would in the form of other places that the money could be allocated to.
More than likely it would go to some other graft, not anything that would benefit me. It might as well be wasted on pennies which at least keep corporations from increasing prices due to having to round. That at least keeps some money in my pocket.
What would be the mechanism by which this ‘price gouging’ would occur
The easiest method would be just to always round up. If they wanted to squeeze a little harder then maybe go up 10-15 instead. What’s anyone going to do about it? You may say a few cents doesn’t matter but I get a few cents cash back every time I use my card and that alone covers all my christmas shopping on amazon at the end of the year. It’s not negligible. As for why it hasn’t happened in canada, capitalism has escalated a lot since then and they’ve gotten a taste of what they can get away with during covid.
The law in Canada specifies how you round both down and up, and it’s not ambiguous. The reason why it hasn’t happened in Canada is because the law in Canada trivially renders your proposed method impossible, not because Canadian companies haven’t specced into gouging enough.
With that basic misconception cleared up, I’ll ask again: What would be the mechanism by which this ‘price gouging’ would occur?
What prevents companies in Canada from setting prices in such a way that they always round up?
There’s no guarantee that such a law would be the same in America. The majority of our law makers are bought and paid for. It would be trivial to “lobby” them to just leave that part out.
My concern is not coming from any information provided by a lobby. It’s coming from my past experiences seeing corporations jump on any and every chance to take more money out of my pocket.
More than likely it would go to some other graft, not anything that would benefit me. It might as well be wasted on pennies which at least keep corporations from increasing prices due to having to round. That at least keeps some money in my pocket.
The easiest method would be just to always round up. If they wanted to squeeze a little harder then maybe go up 10-15 instead. What’s anyone going to do about it? You may say a few cents doesn’t matter but I get a few cents cash back every time I use my card and that alone covers all my christmas shopping on amazon at the end of the year. It’s not negligible. As for why it hasn’t happened in canada, capitalism has escalated a lot since then and they’ve gotten a taste of what they can get away with during covid.
The law in Canada specifies how you round both down and up, and it’s not ambiguous. The reason why it hasn’t happened in Canada is because the law in Canada trivially renders your proposed method impossible, not because Canadian companies haven’t specced into gouging enough.
With that basic misconception cleared up, I’ll ask again: What would be the mechanism by which this ‘price gouging’ would occur?
What prevents companies in Canada from setting prices in such a way that they always round up?
There’s no guarantee that such a law would be the same in America. The majority of our law makers are bought and paid for. It would be trivial to “lobby” them to just leave that part out.