Your 25 Cents and the Big Corporate Crooks

Have you ever thought about what happens to those accumulated unaccounted profits big companies like malls and supermarket chains collect everyday from the centavo changes they don't return to you?

Sometimes I just wish to myself that hopefully the money goes to something like that of a 'crew tip' bowl/box like fastfood stores and restos have. At least, in that way, the seemingly petty profit won't just easily go into the pockets of these mall supermarkets along with the millions they already earn everyday.

Eh... have you also ever thought of how much clean invisible profit these supermarkets do actually get from those centavos they don't give to you... say on a monthly basis?

Let's do the math.

What if there are about sixty customers a single cash register (cashier) transact in a day. And an average of 25 cents fails to return to each of these 60 customers. The total amount of unaccounted money the cash register will accumulate by the end of the day will be P15.00.

Not really significant to many of us, right? Let's continue.

Now let's say each of their supermarkets have some 30 cash registers, multiply 30 (cash registers) with 15 (pesos) and the amount you... esteh... THEY will be getting P450.00, right?

Then multiply that amount again to 30 (days = 1 month), the amount the supermarket makes is P13,500.00... an amount that's probably still more than the average monthly wage their salespersons receive.

A pretty big amount now, yeah?

But wait...

Let's keep computing, shall we now?

So there's 12 months in a year and they make an average of P13,500/month (based on the computation we made)... how much do they REALLY profit from not handing you your 25 centavos in a year?

My dearies... that would be P162,000.00. Please do correct me if my computation is wrong.


But hey... don't they have like a lot of branches all over the country?

Sige, let's say the supermarket chain has some 50 branches all over the country, let's do the counting further.

Php162,000.00 (per year) x 50 (branches)... how many zeros are there?


The collective 25 centavos being stolen from us can (and will) profit the supermarket giants PhP8.1M in a year... and best part of it for them is that... the BIR can't run after that amount.

Now, beat that strategy.

Yes, I think it's a marketing trick and not just some damn good coincidence.

Have you guys ever noticed the way the products are priced now? Notice the 1 or 3 centavos they print on the price tab?

They seem to come of as like a nice way of them supermarkets being transparent to their ever loyal customers but who are they really fooling?

How will they ever provide you with an honest and exact change when the smallest bill is 5 cents, right?

So much for honesty, duh!

I think, it's a brilliant scheme of corporate crooks to separate a part of their actual profit that can be excluded from taxation.

And to me... this is High-tech tax evasion tactic.


I would rather be given a little bit of overprice on the products I purchase (with the 'butal' ending in 5 cents) and the government still gets to tax the supermarket... than being shown (by the supermarket) the actual retail price and not return my exact change (which literally is impossible when your change ends with something like 87 cents, right?).

You will often hear cashiers now asking if it's OK for you to accept a change short of 25 centavos... sometimes even a whole peso... worse, sometimes they don't even apologize anymore. And if you'd look closely at your bill, it's just because there's a 4 centavo at the end and of course it's impossible to return and they would rather take a whole 25 cents from you than to be short of cash at the end of their shift.

But that's not even allowed... at least based on my own experience when I was a working student in college. In food chains, either way -'over' or 'short', you get a memo.

But I'm just curious of why almost all the cashiers of that supermarket do it. Are they being made to do so? And doesn't the company (that owns the supermarket chain) have it's own bank too?

Is the Bangko Sentral not issuing 5 and 10 centavo coins to banks anymore? What has the BIR and the DTI have to say about this fresh produce price tag system?


Now, does your change short of 25 cents still don't matter to you?