Gas stations about to have a Y2K problem when prices exceed $9.99 9/10

[baloouriza@social.tulsa.ok.us]

@whybird "You quoted 25 mils, not 25 cents."

@benaar

[baloouriza@social.tulsa.ok.us]

@whybird Also depending on where you bank and where you spend your money you might actually wind up with your bank account denominated in mils. As happened to me when I was running my own trucking company as a sole proprietor, and both PetroCanada and Pacific Pride were billing me in mils, so after I was done with that, my bank account always ended in an effectively unspendable 7₥ for years, since it's legal to round to the nearest cent on wire transactions here.

@benaar

[demallien@mindly.social]

@benaar it’ll be fine. Just like with y2k, when we went through the date and nothing happened , people were just imagining there would be a problem /s

[baloouriza@social.tulsa.ok.us]

@whybird There's rules for rounding but the choice whether or not to round is up to the seller and the buyer, with the tiebreaker being what's customary (4 down, 5 up; mils get rounded to the nearest cent, nothing else rounds). With Republicans eliminating the penny without implementing a plan, cash transactions are increasingly becoming Interesting here to say the least.

@benaar

[baloouriza@social.tulsa.ok.us]

@whybird Also 0.002¢ would round to $0 here by any measure so I'd say the caller was being generous in not refusing to pay altogether.

@benaar

[robert@rah.social]

@benaar I have bad news from the future: we will just move to $/quart

[johnocfii@twit.social]

@benaar @siracusa I was a senior in high school at first “real” part-time job at a full-service gas station when prices went up over 99 cents a gallon.(1980-1981 timeframe). We set the pump price to the price per 1/2 gallon, and then had to double the amount to charge the customers. Worst part was — at home I had a digital clock, and I’d look at the display, (say, 9:15 am) and immediately double it to think it was 18:30 …

[crankyoldbugger@fosstodon.org]

@JohnOCFII @benaar @siracusa I can remember when it hit 99.9 per gallon. The solution was for the market to switch to metric instead.
Only a temporary solution, though, as it's now $1.80 per litre.

[iamwcr@ruby.social]

@benaar @chockenberry could switch to per Litre like a civilised nation.

[chockenberry@mastodon.social]

@iamwcr @benaar Don’t you mean civilized?

[rconti@c.im]

@dxzdb yeah those signs rarely specify fuel units or currency units. Even where the 9/10 is static you could do 10.1 and 9/10ths of a dime @benaar

[revk@toot.me.uk]

@benaar why do Americans do this 9/10 thing rather than just .9, perhaps even making the .9 smaller to be clear.

Genuinely curious.

[coq@framapiaf.org]

@benaar
Move the dot (in your head).

[bassano@mastodon.social]

@benaar Price it by the quart. Or, god forbid, the litre

[rupertreynolds@hachyderm.io]

@benaar Those 9/10 can go! Nobody needs 5 significant figures in a fuel price.

Will the display show ”1001” instead? If it can't do a decimal point, I'm sure they can put a sticker on the sign

[packeteer@hachyderm.io]

@crankyoldbugger @JohnOCFII @benaar @siracusa $3.30/L in Aus, that's 8.62 USD per Gallon

[crankyoldbugger@fosstodon.org]

@packeteer @JohnOCFII @benaar @siracusa that's nasty.

[whophd@ioc.exchange]

@BalooUriza @whybird @benaar Give a centidollar, take a centidollar

[whophd@ioc.exchange]

@foobarsoft @caspercdn @benaar when I go to America I just say “floz” to rhyme with “floss” and go “what? what did I say?”

[whophd@ioc.exchange]

@aburka @benaar Why did that start? It’s unique to US petrol, not just petrol

(Oh and if we want to discuss “gas vs petrol” then I’m going to pivot into why we don’t measure energy in megajoules like we do with methane gas, and somehow got stuck with kilowatt-hours for some forms of energy, even mixing them on the same bill)