Erie County is expected to change sales standards within a couple weeks to account for the federal discontinuation of pennies.
All prices on cash sales will soon be rounded to the nearest nickel, pending a vote next week by the county legislature. It's a matter of convenience and should balance out overall, Erie County Comptroller Kevin Hardwick said.
“Businesses are slowly running into the same problems. If they can't get pennies, then they have to decide what to do," he said. "And I think most businesses will adopt this same solution. It's a, if you will, It's a commonsense solution. Pun intended.”
The proposed standard would mostly apply to payments being made to the county, such as fines or property taxes.
It would mean no more worries about having rolls of pennies on hand but could have a negative impact for customers using SNAP benefits through electronic benefits transfers, said Seth Brown, store manager of Lexington Cooperative Market on Elmwood Avenue.
“We don't want to give EBT users an advantage or disadvantage over other forms of payment," he said. "So when we lose the penny, and we would be rounding up or down for cash users, that would be giving them an advantage over EBT users.”
It will take time for the change to take full effect, Hardwick said. But as making money gets more expensive, he doesn’t expect the discontinuation to stop with pennies.
“I'm sure that there will come a time where people say, ‘Why are we making nickels? They cost more to make than a nickel,’" he said. "That's what happened with the pennies, and as inflation increases over time, it'll make the nickel less and less significant.
Some state legislators proposed their own bill last fall that would have rounded all merchant sales statewide to the nearest nickel, but the proposal never passed committee.
