On Wed, 18 Jun 2008 19:52:37 GMT, (Neil
Williams) wrote:

snip
On another note, though, I would like to see the abolition of the 1p
and 2p coins as the Dutch have done with the 1 and 2 euro-cent coins.
There is hardly a need for them these days.

Ah! How the other half live. ;-)

On 18 Jun, 07:59, James Farrar wrote:
On Tue, 17 Jun 2008 20:55:59 +0100, wrote:
"James Farrar" wrote in message
.. .

Todays 5p IMHO clashes with the lower threshold where coins are too
small to be convenient to handle.

They're almost impossible to pick up when dropped on a hard floor
without long fingernails. I've taken to hoarding them, along with
pennies and tuppences, and exchanging them at the bank when I have a
bagful.

Is there any estimate on how much in coins people are hoarding?

If you believe this American eco-nut, somewhere in the order of £400
million.

http://www.greenlivingtips.com/artic...ding-and-the-e...

"According to the research I was able to do, in Ireland, approximately
$60 million of coins are being hoarded. In the UK it's somewhere in
the region of three quarters of a billion dollars worth!"

Sounds reasonable. Right now I've got about £6 not counting the "in
use" ones.

A few years ago I had got into the habit of chucking all my brown
money into a box.

I didn't know what to do with it till Sainsburys provided a machine to
count it and give you a receipt that you could take to the till for
the equivalent in sensible denominations (minus an outrageous 7%).

Howl!

Years ago when the Canadian dollar was trading in the region of 70-75
US cents, the finance chair of our (apartment) strata corporation
began separating out Yankee quarters from the cash inserted in the
complex's laundry machines.

She'd amassed a considerable number of 25-cent pieces (replacing the
value of submitted Ammurican quarters with equivalent Canadian two-bit
pieces so the corporation's books balanced).

She knew I was about to visit Seattle, and asked if I'd cart the loot
across the line and Make A Profit by exchanging the US quarters for
Green Back paper.

Any bank I approached, refused to accept the large numbers of coins as
I wasn't/we weren't a customer.

I finally found one that accepted the metal, although at a "discount"
to handle the loose change... so I ended up basically with paper/bills
worth the same "face value" of the original mass of coins in Canadian
dollars anyway.

The problem was that I could barely pick up the money and had to put
it in a large rucksack to get it there. I got over £80 even with the
ripoff.

But it would require about 9 million people to do something similar to
add up to the three quarters of a (presumably American) billion
suggested. I am not one of them any more.

In message , at 17:40:44 on
Wed, 18 Jun 2008, Nobody remarked:
exchanging the US quarters for Green Back paper.

Any bank I approached, refused to accept the large numbers of coins as
I wasn't/we weren't a customer.

15 years ago I was given $100 bills by a clueless Bureau de Change, and
I couldn't find a bank in a large US city that would change them, even
when I enlisted the support of one of their customers! As a result I now
never accept notes larger than $20.
--
Roland Perry

On Wed, 18 Jun 2008 22:20:05 +0100, Steve Fitzgerald
] wrote:

Are they allowed to do that when they are valid elsewhere in the EU?

You might be able to pay with them if you happen to have them. But I
think it's an agreed scheme (which any retailer can do provided a debt
does not occur before payment).

It's a slightly odd scheme - instead of just pricing everything to the
nearest 5 cents, items are still priced with the ubiquitous .99 etc
but the overall total is rounded off.

Neil

--
Neil Williams
Put my first name before the at to reply.

In article ,
says...

On another note, though, I would like to see the abolition of the 1p
and 2p coins as the Dutch have done with the 1 and 2 euro-cent coins.
There is hardly a need for them these days.

Neil



I guess you don't drink in Wetherspoons, because of their pricing they
get all my shrapnel.

In article Steve Fitzgerald writes:
In message , Neil Williams
writes
On another note, though, I would like to see the abolition of the 1p
and 2p coins as the Dutch have done with the 1 and 2 euro-cent coins.
There is hardly a need for them these days.

Are they allowed to do that when they are valid elsewhere in the EU?

The 1 and 2 cent coins are accepted but that is just about all. Moreover,
when paying in cash the total amount to pay is rounded to the nearest
multiple of 5 cent (which is allowed *), so you will never receive 1 and
2 cent coins.
--
* And the rounding occurs even when you want to pay the correct amount using
1 and 2 cent coins.
--
dik t. winter, cwi, kruislaan 413, 1098 sj amsterdam, nederland, +31205924131
home: bovenover 215, 1025 jn amsterdam, nederland; http://www.cwi.nl/~dik/

On 19 Jun, 11:55, "Dik T. Winter" wrote:
In article Steve Fitzgerald writes:

* In message , Neil Williams
* writes
* On another note, though, I would like to see the abolition of the 1p
* and 2p coins as the Dutch have done with the 1 and 2 euro-cent coins.
* There is hardly a need for them these days.
*
* Are they allowed to do that when they are valid elsewhere in the EU?

The 1 and 2 cent coins are accepted but that is just about all. *Moreover,
when paying in cash the total amount to pay is rounded to the nearest
multiple of 5 cent (which is allowed *), so you will never receive 1 and
2 cent coins.
--
* And the rounding occurs even when you want to pay the correct amount using
1 and 2 cent coins.

When I was working at Sainsburys in 1984ish, ½(half)p coins stopped
being legal tender. Deli and meat scales were still calculating to
the ½p, but staff were told to just ignore them and round down.

But here's the odd part ...

Staff were told that we could still accept ½p coins from customers,
but only in pairs. This was strongly emphasised and always struck me
as bizarre.

Presumably Sainsburys had an arrangement whereby it could cash in all
its ½p coins by some deadline, but even if staff accepted them not in
pairs, the entire Sainsburys chain could only ever have been stuck
with one odd ½p if they ended up with an odd number overall.

The Scottish banks have to have their banknotes backed by Bank
of England notes, and for this purpose the Bank of England has
issued notes for GBP1 million and GBP100 million.

The highest denomination banknote that I have ever seen issued was for
$100,000, bearing the portrait of late US president Woodrow Wilson.

It's mentioned on this page.
http://www.bankofengland.co.uk/bankn...ther_notes.htm
I like the point that the GBP1 million and GBP100 million notes are
'not for general circulation.'

Neither were the $100,000 US ones. The largest US denomination for
general circulation is the $10,000, last issued around 1944 (but still
valid if you have any, as the US does not demonetize old issues).
The highest denomination still printed in the US dropped again around
1969 from $1,000 to $100, and Canada copied that move in about 2000,
in both cases on the grounds that criminals would be inconvenienced
and most other people would not.

ObRail: a few years ago in Switzerland I had the pleasure of buying
a train ticket that cost something like 130 francs and paying for it
by inserting cash into the ticket machine *including a 100-franc note,
worth over 40 pounds*. The 200-franc denomination was in common use
as well, and I daresay the machine would have accepted that too if my
ticket had been expensive enough.
--
Mark Brader | "But [he] had already established his own reputation
Toronto | as someone who wrote poetry that mentioned the el."
| --Al Kriman

My text in this article is in the public domain.

MIG wrote:

Staff were told that we could still accept ½p coins from customers,
but only in pairs. This was strongly emphasised and always struck me
as bizarre.

It sounds like a customer friendly move - "We still accept your out-of-date
coins" - as well as an way of ensuring people suddenly have, for want of a
better term, credit that can only be used there.

Presumably Sainsburys had an arrangement whereby it could cash in all
its ½p coins by some deadline, but even if staff accepted them not in
pairs, the entire Sainsburys chain could only ever have been stuck
with one odd ½p if they ended up with an odd number overall.

Well when would anyone have reason to pay a sum ending in ½p? And how could
the store convert or give that back in change?

I also wonder what happened to anyone's bank balance that ended in ½p.

Neil Williams wrote:

Banks vary quite a bit on this. When I first got a current account in 1992
one of the considerations was the ability to pay in loose coins. Even then
some banks wouldn't take them out of hours. Now even my bank is switching
its payin machines from "deposit an envelope" to "feed in the notes and
cheques" with no cash option.

Go to the counter?

That is an option, although one that is never popular at the counter, but
most of the time when I'm able to go to the bank the queue is either
ridiculous long or it's out of hours. Not everyone works in a way that fits
in with the opening hours.

With a bit of effort, it's easy to minimise the amount of it you
produce by taking the time (it doesn't take that long!) to pay with
exact change when you have it.

It depends a lot on what your cash transactions are. Mine are primarily
small purchases at the supermarket, newspapers, fast-food or the bar. With
the exception of papers these aren't circumstances and amounts that are
terribly favourable to faffing about with getting the exact coinage for the
amount involved. And on top of everything else my wallet is ridiculously
large with the number of cards I have to carry in it and carrying the loose
change makes it worse.

And of course most vending machines (on a side note to come back on topic
does anyone know why all the chocolate machines on tube platforms have
gone?) don't take coppers.

On another note, though, I would like to see the abolition of the 1p
and 2p coins as the Dutch have done with the 1 and 2 euro-cent coins.
There is hardly a need for them these days.

It would solve a lot of the problems but you'd need to do something about
the price levels. Rounding the prices up for paying by cash would be heavily
unpopular and would disproportionately hit particular groups in society.