On February 4th, 2013, the Royal Canada Mint stopped making pennies. This means that effectively soon, cash transactions will have to be rounded to the nearest 5 cents. Example: $1.01 will be $1.00, $1.03 will be $1.05, and $1.08 will be $1.10 (official Canadian guide to this: http://www.fin.gc.ca/1cent/index-eng.asp). In principle, if the price of an item is random, then on average, all transactions should even out: sometimes the rounding will be to your advantage, sometimes it will be to the store’s. However, prices are not random, as walking through a supermarket will tell you. Very often, prices end in 99 cents. In the worse case scenario then, if you ever only make one transaction at a time, and buy items that end in 99 cents, you will be charged a penny extra each time (if you buy some food item that is not taxed). Generally, this would not be much of a problem, unless there is a systematic statistical bias overall. That would mean that while the rounding procedure is meant to be a “fair and transparent matter”, people would end up paying more inadvertently.