this post was submitted on 20 Aug 2023
700 points (96.8% liked)
Asklemmy
44199 readers
1389 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
Search asklemmy ๐
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- [email protected]: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_[email protected]~
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
They're not referring to the federal road tax , but the $0.009 in the price.
The US actually has a legal denomination that is 1/10 of a cent, called a mill. It's 1/1000 of a dollar. It's very rarely used, and was never actually minted. The closest we had were 1/2 cent coins (5 mills), but those were short lived coin denominations in the 1700's.
So, why do gas stores get to use mills in their prices? I don't know, but I'm sure they do it either for a legal reason that outdated, because they get to derive extra profit per transaction, or because it's an extreme form of the ยข99 advertising trick.
In any of those cases it's really annoying.
Well the federal gas tax is 18.4 cents per gallon, and the state gas tax where I am is 28.5 cents per gallon, for a total of 46.9 cents per gallon, that's where the $0.009 comes from.
It mattered a lot 100 years ago when gas was like 5.5 cents a gallon.