An hour in the 20th Century

Yesterday (December 31) I spent an hour in the 20th Century, or so it seemed. I went to the post office to mail a letter and actually went up to the counter to make sure there was enough postage on it. Then I went to Kroger, and after picking up a prescription, bought a newspaper.

Two things that were unlike the 20th Century were the extremely smooth-running engine of my car (much smoother than anything not microprocessor-controlled) and the fact that at no point did I smell cigarette smoke, which used to be the unavoidable smell of public places in America.

The newspaper was, in fact, the very final print edition of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution (AJC), the newspaper all Georgians grew up with. Melody missed an opportunity to work for this newspaper when I plucked her out of Atlanta to get married and move to Los Angeles in 1982. She was then working for the newspaper in Marietta.

When we were children, the Journal and the Constitution were separate newspapers, combined only on Sundays. The morning paper, the Constitution, was printed in the dead of night and trucked all over Georgia so that it was, in fact, our morning paper even in Valdosta, and we got the local Valdosta Daily Times in the afternoon.

The AJC continues, of course, as a web site for subscribers.

It has been more than 20 years since we had newspapers delivered to our house. The Internet has supplanted them, but imperfectly. The problem is pricing. Much Internet news is free, totally ad-supported. Major newspapers, however, still require subscriptions, which few people feel the need to pay for (we don't). We're aware that we get appreciably less local news than we used to. This effect may in fact be tearing apart the fabric of towns, turning small cities into mere suburbs with less of a local identity.

I wish they could make themselves fully ad-supported. The key to it may have to do with how you see the ads. In a print newspaper, the ads are something you look through — almost like a city directory — particularly the classifieds. On the Internet, as on TV, ads are things that intrude into what you are doing. Is there a way to turn them into something interested shoppers will actually browse through, the way they did newspaper ads?

I don't know how much the AJC was selling for normally, but the price of the final issue did strike me as a bit daunting. Eight dollars can pay for a lot of Internet access.

It was a poignant moment when I sat down to read the day's Atlanta newspaper for the last time. I had not done so in years, but it's something I did almost every day for decades.

I didn't read everything of course; just as in the old days, I looked at maybe a quarter of what was there. But there were entertainment items that I would always look at because they were there, even though I didn't seek them out on the Internet: the comics (in color in this issue), the Jumble (a word puzzle), and Dear Abby, whose first question this time was about a chatbot.

Other printed newspapers still exist, but this old familiar one is gone.

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Who is this "Penny Rounding"?

In keeping with the spirit of the 20th Century, I paid for the newspaper in cash, and to my surprise there was a new line item on the receipt, "penny rounding." Kroger gave me a 4-cent credit in order not to have to give me pennies, which are being discontinued by the Mint.

It appears that Kroger always rounds in the customer's favor. The other way to do it is to always round to the nearest multiple of 5 (thus 1 and 2 round to 0, but 3 and 4 round to 5; my price of $8.64 would have rounded to $8.65).

I've already seen people on Facebook saying, "This rounding always makes you pay more, it's another sneaky trick." No, it doesn't. Someone shouldn't have slept through elementary-school arithmetic. Rounding to the nearest multiple of 5 should be fair, assuming the price before rounding can be anything. Of course, if a merchant were to arrange for the prices after tax to always end in 3 or 4, they'd gain a few cents, but it would take a lot of effort.

There's a simple way to eliminate the problem. Round the amount of sales tax to the nearest 5 cents.

No, I didn't say change the tax rate, which is what people usually think I mean when I say that. The tax can remain 8%, as it is now. The tax on $10 will remain 80 cents. But the tax on $1 would not be 8 cents; it would round up to 10. Likewise, the tax on $1.50 would not be 12 cents; it would round down to 10.

If the amount of sales tax were always a multiple of 5 cents, and the merchant's prices were always a multiple of 5 cents, no further rounding would be needed. The merchant would not be taking a loss or a gain — just collecting the amount of tax prescribed by law. Numbers that are not multiples of 5 cents would disappear from our economy.

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