Except there is sales tax, so your $xx.99 purchases usually don't end up that way. For a $1.99 purchase in my city I end up paying $2.13 which would be helped nicely by the $.37 cent coin.
I see your point, I doubt the distribution is completely uniform. But it's probably not as clustered as you'd think (different taxation levels helps).
The problem as others have stated with including the tax is that if you have a multi-state presence, the tax rates for different cities, counties, and states are different, and sometimes are a huge difference (2-3%). I don't think it should be up to the retailer to foot the difference. But I do think rounding is an easier solution than a 37-cent piece.
Things are complicated when considering applying this to an online price list for example, but applying to individual brick and mortar retail locations, I don't see what the problem with the in store displayed price to be different in different tax jurisdictions.
Well for starters it would be a lot more expensive to print signs dedicated to the city/county of a store. Price matching becomes tedious too, requiring a calculator.
I had no idea that american sales taxes were so byzantine as to have individual city and county sales taxes in so many areas. Although I still contend that price matching is easier, because who really cares what the pre-tax price is, post-tax is what comes out of the wallet.
Well, America is large, and there's always been this struggle of Federal Government vs. State Government. And every state is run differently. The less competent ones require more taxes, or, on the other hand, should really be split into two states (e.g California).
Or retailers that don't do the .99 business when tax is already in place. For whatever reason, movie theaters in the US do this. They build the tax into the price and then use even units (it's still way overpriced, but at least you know the $6 pop-corn and $4 soda will mean you owe $10).
You're still ahead of the game because for a .99 purchase you'll get .01 back which is just one coin where if I'm using bills would need to pay with two singles and get .93 back (which for the US is at minimum 8 coins). It's no coincidence why I have tons of change collected.
I see your point, I doubt the distribution is completely uniform. But it's probably not as clustered as you'd think (different taxation levels helps).