I grew up in the 90s and aughts. These containers were frequently around cash registers in convenience stores and perhaps other small businesses. I don’t remember them being so consistently branded, but my experience then would have been limited to going into a handful of stores in the same locale. Of course, Canada ditched pennies (1 cent pieces) from cash transactions just over 10 years ago (we now round for cash transactions).
A penny felt like a meaningful amount of money to me as a child. More than anything, when I look back at them, these little containers stimulated my understanding of karma and perhaps theory of mind (e.g., mentalizing a future customer helping themself to an available penny and how they’d feel as a result). Looking back, I think that’s pretty neat.
I don’t know why, but these things popped into my head as I was doing the dishes. I was assured that, thankfully, there’s a Lemmy community for this :D
We didn’t have these in the UK.
So you leave change for people hard up?
Hard up, a kid wanting candy, or anyone a few pennies short so they don’t have to use another dollar and end up with more change.
And even ‘hard up’ is a bit extreme, but if a single parent is getting hot dog buns and is fifteen cents short, they’d usually take those pennies, just to give you an idea what we mean.
It’s more like leave change for people whose total came out to $5.03 and don’t want a handful of coins to carry around