A University of British Columbia researcher believes Canadian grocery stores have benefited from the demise of the penny, but retailers disagree.
Economics and mathematics student Christina Cheng has produced a paper that contends Canadian grocers are pulling in more than three-million dollars a year from rounding up.
She and a friend documented 18-thousand prices at grocery stores and found that most ended in .99 or .98 -- meaning they'd be rounded up for cash transactions, if tax wasn't applied.
Cheng then used a computer simulator to create ``grocery baskets'' with various items and concluded that retailers have been profiting from penny-rounding.
However, the Retail Council of Canada says Cheng's research doesn't reflect real grocery baskets or take into account various provincial taxes on bill totals.
It says its members have found that penny-rounding is about 50-50, with half of the bill totals being rounded up and benefiting stores, and half being rounded down and benefiting consumers.