5 cents - seems like a waste of time and money

I did think about that, but I also get the 4 cents off per litre coupons.

So I need to...

Check what happens to part litres, if I put in half a litre do I get 2 cents off or do they round it up or down?
Fill up, check the amount I put in.
Deduct 4 cents for every litre and whatever part of a litre gives me.
Add enough fuel to bring me up to the 0.4 over the nearest round number so I can round it down to save the 4 cents.

It does remind me of a time I went into Woolworths and they had an item for 2 cents, it was damaged and it was some sort of Yu-Gi-Oh disk collector album and was marked down in some end of year toy sale or something. I have have no real idea what it was for as I don't collect the disks but I wasn't going to pass up the opportunity to see what would happen.

My wife was doing the shopping so I took the item to the checkout.

The assistant scanned the item and it came up as 2 cents. She then saw I had nothing else on the conveyor belt.

She said it was not going to go through properly and asked me if I wanted to buy anything else.

I said no, that was all for today, and offered her a five cent coin.

She pointed out that they wouldn't be able to give me three cents change.

I pointed out that they could round it the same way they always round things.

She said that they didn't expect someone to buy just that item, they thought it would be part of a larger purchase.

I reminded her that I only wanted that item.

She said she would have to charge me the full 5 cents because she couldn't make change.

I told her that was over double the cost of the item.

She said she couldn't just give me the item.

Not wanting to be a complete dick about it as it wasn't her policy I said fine and paid the 5 cents.

It rang up and told her she had to give me five cents change, which she did quite happily.


I am pretty sure that a credit card would be able to accept payment in fractions of a cent, so if someone wanted to charge $1.025 for an item then I should be able to pay it without any rounding at all.

 

if you take a 10lt can to the petrol station at 3 different times of the day.
fill each can with 10lt of petrol going by the same pump, end of the day you will find you have 3 different measurement of petrol.
none will be 10lt.

so to save money at the fuel pump, well, more than 2c, you should fill in the early morning, when it's coldest.
petrol going through the pumps register as volume, not in litres.
the warmer it is in the day, the petrol expands, so the pumps reads the same amount but actually it's different.

and never fill your tank full because when it's very hot the fuel expands a lot, causing you to lose fuel in overflow.

this will save you a lot more money, especially in warmer climates, could amount to thousands.