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It sounds like a customer friendly move - "We still accept your out-of-date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.

On 19 Jun, 16:46, "Tim Roll-Pickering"
wrote:
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It sounds like a customer friendly move - "We still accept your out-of-date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.

Yes indeed, but the emphasis on pairs implied something significant
when it was neither likely that someone could offer a single ½p nor
that it would matter much if they did.


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?

Presumably if they offered the correct price for some stilton
calculated to the nearest ½p and the staff forgot to round it down.
Maybe the pairs instruction was a way of making sure that staff had to
round down.


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

If half the population's accounts ended in ½p that could be a bit of
extra/loss of money for the banks (about £200 000 between the UK
banks?), whichever way it was rounded, but I bet that hardly anyone
either paid or deposited amounts ending in ½p in banks for a long time
before that. Interest resulting in fractions of p would work as it
does now.

MIG wrote:

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

If half the population's accounts ended in ½p that could be a bit of
extra/loss of money for the banks (about £200 000 between the UK
banks?), whichever way it was rounded, but I bet that hardly anyone
either paid or deposited amounts ending in ½p in banks for a long time
before that.

I'd disagree - a lot of people often put some of their loose change in when
depositing cheques, at least whilst the banks still allow such deposits. The
chances of a spare ½p ending up would have been quite strong.

"Tim Roll-Pickering" wrote in
:

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

My recollection is that the bank current accounts didn't handle ½p amounts
ever.

Long before I had a bank account they had stopped allowing ½d balances, so
you couldn't, for example, write a cheque for £1.2s.6½d. At
decimalisation, there was an approved 'whole penny' conversion scale and
the banks used that to convert every balance on D-day to a whole number of
new pence. So you were never able to write cheques for, eg, £1.23½.

To get slightly back to topic, I don't remember any train fares costing odd
halfpennies (my monthly child season was 4s 11d which was 1/3 of the adult
rate), but I do remember when the Edinburgh buses (and trams) abolished the
last halfpenny fare by putting the child rate up from 1½d to 2d -- it would
be around 1955. I put in a correspondingly inflation-linked claim for a
pocket money increase.

After that fare increase, the maximum adult bus fare in Edinburgh was 6d,
and that was also the maximum fare that the ticket machines could print.

Peter

--
Peter Campbell Smith ~ London ~ pjcs00 (a) gmail.com

In article , (Peter
Campbell Smith) wrote:

To get slightly back to topic, I don't remember any train fares
costing odd halfpennies (my monthly child season was 4s 11d which
was 1/3 of the adult rate), but I do remember when the Edinburgh
buses (and trams) abolished the last halfpenny fare by putting the
child rate up from 1½d to 2d -- it would be around 1955. I put in
a correspondingly inflation-linked claim for a pocket money
increase.

Crikey! I was paying 1 1/2d child fares in London much later than that,
maybe 1960 even.

--
Colin Rosenstiel

In uk.transport.london message ,
Fri, 20 Jun 2008 14:13:03, Peter Campbell Smith posted:

To get slightly back to topic, I don't remember any train fares costing odd
halfpennies (my monthly child season was 4s 11d which was 1/3 of the adult
rate),

When I was younger, I (and others) purchased a Third Class Cheap Day
Return to travel from Mottisfont to Romsey and back. at a cost of 5½d -
tuppence three-farthings each way, it would have been. But BR did not
say that, although an outbound train was conveniently imminent, there
was no return service at any reasonable hour. I still have the return
half, unused.

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