Boy do I hate change — literally

I hate change.

Mind you, I don’t mean the process of things changing; I generally enjoy those days in life when you wake up and all of a sudden things are a little different. I am fine with that type of change, even excited by it. What I am referring to are those little metal objects that weigh your pants down, scratch cellphones and for the most part do very little to make you happy but are forced into your hands by businesses that think they are clever by not rounding their prices to the nearest whole number.

I get excited when people start talking about eliminating the penny. I have nothing against Lincoln, of course, but I find the precision of being able to carry out trade in the hundredth of a dollar to be superfluous. I would take it a few steps further even and rid the space beneath our car seats of nickels and dimes as well. Just imagine for a moment how wonderful life would be if the only change was the simple and elegant quarter. No fishing around in the bottom of bags or pockets for the right amount, no jars of copper-plated disks lying around the house. Imagine the beautiful efficiency of never having to be stuck behind people in checkout lines fighting to fish out the exact change from a purse the size of a hockey bag. Those people tend to drive me nuts when I am behind them in line, but I will, of course, stand at the checkout for as long as it takes to find the last cent I know is somewhere on me and will only be revealed after every pocket has been emptied onto the small, advertisement-laden counter at least three times.

I have a personal rule that if a business insults me by pricing things at numbers that do not end in .00, .25 or .50, then I am free to pay for the object guilt-free using the denominations that they themselves employ. If the price ends in 99, then as a simple act of protest you can expect me to clean out my pockets and pay with 99 pennies. If a merchant feels free to waste my time and pocket space with silly pricing schemes, then I will deliver to them exactly what they have asked for.

I understand that if businesses price something at $4.99 instead of a clean $5 that somewhere in our primitive mind we see it as $4. Our brainstems will quell the forebrain rebellion and instinctively and paradoxically round down. Shopkeepers know this and use this subtle pricing ploy to nudge us towards buying, resulting in more sales and lots of annoying little coins wedged in my couch. And the big stores seem to quietly acknowledge the inherent ridiculousness of change as they often guard their bathrooms with machines that transform this chicken scratch back into useful tender.

And don’t get me started on taxes. Mind you, I like schools and roads and bridges and libraries and a justice system, so I don’t really have a problem with the concept of taxation. I do, however, have a problem with businesses not including sales tax in their prices. I am told that this is the result of marketers trying to make products seem cheaper, and I have watched enough episodes of Mad Men to assume that humans are, in fact, this gullible and susceptible to marketing voodoo. But come on. I think we all know that feeling of running into a store, grabbing something for $10, having a crisp $10 bill ready to go and being forced to shatter another innocent, perfectly good piece of paper into a pile of miserable hunks of metal that you are supposed to carry around in your pockets in preparation for the next crafty merchant. It all seems so 20th century.

If I didn’t know better, I would assume that the good store owners in our communities were pushing us toward using credit cards — which may be the case if they are as appalled by the inefficiency of coins as I am. However, as the credit card companies take their bits out of the profits, I suppose that this is probably not what is going on. We are simply caught in a self-reinforcing loop of stupidity, driven by our susceptibility to influence on one side and a desire to maximize profit on the other.

So I will continue fighting the good fight in my own ineffective and meaningless way, throwing the copper back at these merchants, annoying the people behind me and reveling in the inefficiency of the precision of the penny. So don’t get angry when the person in front of you at the checkout removes a sock full of pennies and pays for a $72.93 purchase entirely with coins. He or she is making the world a better place.

Pete LaFrance grew up in Palmer and has moved back to the area after a number of years living abroad.