Meanwhile in...

[Diaphone Jim]

An extremely useful question that should be asked by everyone several times a day is "Cui bono?". Who benefits?
When the price of something is $.99 instead of a dollar, you might wonder is the merchant is fooling you or are you fooling yourself to think there is a difference.
But the real question is: Who benefits?

All the coins we have to use instead of even money is good for somebody, just not us.

Anyone ever clerk at a store where every cash register had a well worn tax table? You had to follow down the column of the total of taxable items to find the rounded-off break set at the current percentage rate to add to the total that would eventually be backfigured to pay the franchise boards.
WTF benefited from that? We still do it most everywhere except the cash register steals the money without the hassle.
I remember marveling on trips to England how everything came out even, no small change (coins) involved.
Cui bono?