>But with 20 million customers a year, and 17% of them paying with cash, the policy will eventually cost Kwik Trip a couple of million dollars a year, McHugh said.
If we figure two-fifths of cash transactions need to be rounded up and the store is losing an average of 1.5 cents each time, their expected losses would be around $2,000, yeah?
> Kwik Trip, a family-owned convenience store chain that operates in the Midwest, decided to round down cash purchases in stores where it hasn’t been able to find pennies.
They're rounding all cash transactions down to the nearest nickel, so an average of 2 cents per transaction, 3.4 million customers, gives me $68,000 assuming each "customer" makes a single transaction per year. If they mean that there are 20 million unique customers, not 20m transactions, then the a long tail of customers who make frequent small transactions in cash could make their claim check out.
Whatever the total ends up being, it's basically a marketing expense that they're electing to make. Probably they do it for a year and then switch to rounding to the nearest nickel, which is what everyone else will be doing.
Without a write off, their income is $X (what they actually collected), with a write off, their income is $Z (what they should have collected) - $Y (what they didn't collect), but $X = $Z - $Y. There's no material difference between counting what they actual collect as income vs what they should have collected minus the goodwill discount. Unless there's some specific tax justification (maybe accounting differences could justify remitting less sales tax overall and retaining more of the funds, etc)
Why wouldn't the write off be useful? I think your formual needs to add "+ ($Y x .3)" for tax deduction if you frame as promotional or other tax write off strategies.
It won't be the same as what they would have collected without rounding, but it will be better than if you didn't write off anything.
They must mean unique customers, not customer transactions.
They have about 878 stores, according to Wikipedia, so if it was transactions, each store would only see about 62 transactions per day, which is way too low.
What's more contemptible: that CNN refused to spend the 30 seconds that it would take to do the math; or that it interviewed a "spokesman" that also didn't spend 30 seconds to do the math, and was sure that nobody would check?
This is the kind of article that should be written by AI (or not written, really.) If you completely fictionalized the empty interviews, nothing would be lost.
Maybe the "spokesman" has been told to angle for a government subsidy for the inconvenience of losing pennies? And from a gas station, which add that goofy fraction of a cent at the end of their pricing.
20 million customers doesn't mean 20 million transactions. Considering we are talking about a convenience store I'm sure a large chunk of their customers visit every day, some probably multiple times a day.
Assuming 3.4 million customers (cash users) and 2.5 cents average loss per transaction, it would only take one visit a month for them to cross a million dollars in losses.
Of course at that scale it's not like that million or two is really making a difference to their bottom line. Doing some quick Googling their annual revenue is estimated to be $6-7 billion.
Plenty of people stop somewhere to get hot breakfast and coffee every day. If you also need something that can't set in your car all day (e.g. milk) that would be a second trip in a day.
Whether that's convenient or not depends on location... If it's right off your route to work/home, a stop may only add a couple minutes to your drive.
If we make the maximally pessimistic assumption that every cash transaction would require rounding down four cents, that's 68,000 customers per year times four cents, which is $136,000 per year.
A more reasonable assumption that half of transactions require rounding down cuts that in half, I suppose.
20m customers * 17% * 4 cents * 'x' transactions per customer = $136,000 * x
I suppose this makes some sense. In a worst case situation, if every customer makes 10-20 transactions per year, and they always round down the maximum possible amount, they would lose millions per year.
That's honestly not true at all; it all just depends on your platform. On the Pocket, the FPGA _is_ the processor (there are actually two FPGAs, one for the actual emulation core, and one for scaling video, and there's technically a PIC microcontroller for uploading bitstreams and managing UI). The FPGAs are still not much power compared to the display itself. With the in-built current sensor on the dev kits, the highest we've measured drawn by the main FPGA is ~300mAh. Now this sensor isn't going to be the best measurement, but it's something to go off of.
Personally I think this is the biggest selling feature of FPGA based emulation.
The reality is both Software and FPGA emulation can be done very well and with very low latency, however to achieve this in software you generally require high end power hungry hardware.
A steam deck can run a highly accurate sega genesis emulator with read-ahead rollback, screen scaling, shaders and all the fixings no problem, but in theory the pocket can provide the exact same experience with an order of magnitude less power.
It's not quite apples to oranges of course, but the comfortable battery life does make the pocket much more practical.
When being nitpicky about latency is where FPGAs truly shine. You lose a good bit of it by connecting to HDMI (I think the Pocket docked is 1/4 a frame, and MiSTer has a similar mode) (EDIT: MiSTer can do 4 scanlines, but it's not compatible with some displays), but when we're talking about analog display methods or inputs, you can achieve accurate timings with much less effort than on a modern day computer.
For a full computer like the Steam Deck, you have to deal with preemption, display buffers, and more, which _will_ add latency. Now if you went bare metal, you could definitely drive a display with super low latency, hardware accurate emulation, but obviously that's not what most people are doing.
Gate for gate an FPGA consumes more power then a dedicated chip, but the power dissipation depends heavily on the programming. Careful programming can reduce power dissipation.
A potential advantage of an FPGA over a dedicated chip is that any unused functions can just be left out, saving power dissipation and logic resources. This is the (largely unrealised) promise of Reconfigurable Computing [1].
They are generally much more power hungry than the equivalent ASIC, built using the same process. However if your aim is to emulate a sufficiently old ASIC then you can probably beat it with a modern FPGA. And there are FPGAs aimed at low power consumption: they are just also slower.
You are entirely correct, but I would like to point out that there are Cyclone V cores running logic ~140MHz, not just RAM clocks, and the power consumption is nowhere near that.
Getting a large design that passes timing at that frequency with the Cyclone V fabric is unlikely, however.
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The distinction here, being that more capable FPGAs can get up to the 600MHz+ range, and actually run a full design at that speed.
I'm delighted your stopped by! Thanks to you and Weird Al for all of your dastardly animated criminal words.
Your Shop Vac cartoon led me to discover Jonathan Coulton's other geeky music, like Code Monkey! He makes his songs available via the Creative Commons license, so people have made some really cool videos to them, including yours.
>Jonathan Coulton is a singer/songwriter who releases his songs via the Creative Commons license, which enables projects such as this video. Through his "Thing A Week" podcast, Jonathan has put out a clever, creative song like this one every week for a year.
>Mike Spiff Booth is a Program Manager at Adobe who though this great song really deserved a video.
>Before you ask, since apes, goblins, and night elf receptionists don't tend to interact much in the wild, I couldn't only use captured game footage to make this video. Every frame of this video was composited together by hand using images captured from the WoW Model Viewer, WoW Map Viewer, and the World of Warcraft game itself.
>No monkeys were harmed in the making of this film.
>Please visit www.spiffworld.com for more information about my videos, including info about how I make them.
>The song at the end of the video is "Big Bad World One", another great Jonathan Coulton song.
>This was an animation that was done in about 2 1/2 weeks. My friend Tom Weiser and I wanted to put together a short for a free ASIFA event. We are both fans of Jonathan Coulton so we figured a music video would be fun. I know Code Monkey already has a lot of videos made of it, but having worked as a web design/developer for the government...well how could I not?! I hope everyone enjoys it.
>Code Monkey Jonathan Coulton Lyrics Kinetic Typography (shorter version). Thanks to Jonathan Coulton for releasing his music under the creative commons license!
>Tenth song- Code Monkey.
Recorded live at Temple Bar Santa Monica CA.
October 9 2006.
Code monkey like this song.
MP3s of this performance graciously made available at spiffworld.com. Check out his amazing JoCo/WoW videos too.
When I first met with Al about this project, I was quick to point out that linguists would disagree with about a third of the "advice" he's giving out. His immediate reply was "WELL THEY'RE WRONG"--really loudly in the "Weird Al" character voice.
In my mind the joke is that the song's narrator is a know-it-all character that shouldn't be taken entirely seriously. But on the other hand, a lot of educators have contacted me to tell me they use the song as a learning tool.
It's a great project, and a wonderful read, thank you.
However, I can't resist pointing out something ironic in a post about a video about grammar:
> The number 27 is referenced at least seven different ways.
"Referenced" should be "referred to", or "The video makes reference to the number 27...".
Although I accept that this misuse of the word is so widespread that it will probably end up being accepted on the "if enough people make the mistake long enough and often enough, it ceases to be a mistake" theory of language...
If we figure two-fifths of cash transactions need to be rounded up and the store is losing an average of 1.5 cents each time, their expected losses would be around $2,000, yeah?