They’re not worth anything, never were but even less through the years with inflation.
If a store wants to sell something for 99 cent, they can either just take 1€ or 95 cent.
Maybe even 5 cent pieces? But that would be a bit radical.
I am a bit annoyed that easy ideas like this are never discussed in politics, or wherever. It would make our lives just a little bit easier, and having them achieves NOTHING.
I am all for it. Though here in Germany it would probably give quite a number of people a heart attack not being able to pay an exact amount to the cent.
I feel called out.
No, seriously. Last season I bought some plums from my Turkish greengrocer, he put them on the scales which said 1.01 Euro which he commented with “one Euro”. I gave him 1.01 Euro, and got a “can you believe those Almans” look.
Now that’s good German humor.
Come on now, you know you can only have one at a time. So is it German, or is it humor?
Correct and yes. :D
They could by paying with card.
Lol. Have you been to Germany? IF you can pay with a card, it has to be a specific card, not everyone accepts credit cards.
They could pay with card, but it’s something special here with many of the old folks and cash. Part of the ancient shopping ritual to put out the small coins and delay the queue as long as possible. Why? No idea, apart from “Das haben wir schon immer so gemacht!” (We always did it like this)
Well, cash has privacy by design. So I much prefer that to the American card provider monopoly.
Still convenient when traveling light, I just don’t want to rely on it. By regularly paying cash I incentivize the upkeep of the German cash infrastructure.
Austrian here, paying with cash and counting every single coin is still common here.
Part of the ancient shopping ritual to put out the small coins and delay the queue as long as possible. Why?
To get rid of the small coins, duh! Though I only do this when there is no queue. Hate to carry around a few red coins just for these occasions. Yes, get rid of them, please!
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There are European countries that have no 1 and 2c coins (Netherlands, Belgium, Ireland, Finland). The prices are the same, when you buy something the sum is simply rounded up to the next 5 cents.
Works fine.
Here in NL the amount gets rounded to the nearest multiple of five, so for 1.92 you have to pay 1.90 in cash and 1.93 will become 1.95. This so on average you are not overpaying. Digital payments are always exact.
Get rid of them. I just throw the small coins in a box regularly. A couple if years ago I tried to get rid of them. I found out that my bank would not accept them so easily and when I tried to pay with rolls of cent coins, store owners would be pissed. What the hell am I supposed to do?
Self Checkout machines! take them!
Nooo! My poor Sparschwein will die of hunger :(
Some supermarkets have machines where you can just toss them all in and get a coupon you can use in the market. But I think they take a 5% cut or something, so not ideal.
It’s 9,9% for our local Rewe Coinstar.
Yep, I’m a big fan of the approach of getting rid of smaller coins and just rounding at the register. The Netherlands already do this and I don’t think anyone there misses the small coins.
Absolutely! I carry only a small wallet and hate coins in general. Totally could pass on 1 and 5 Cent coins. Throw them in a box at home (even 10 Cent coins) and have no idea on what to do with them. Brought them to a store once, but they would take 10% and you could only use the money in the store. Found a bank where you can bring them in for 5%, but you would have to roll them up yourself (definitely not gonna do their work and still give them 5%). Maybe I will put it in a chest and bury it somewhere in the forest near a playground so kids can go treasure hunting :D
making it a kid’s game is a good idea, but you could also try to go around local shops and ask if they are low on coins, they’d probably give you 1 to 1
Denmark did it too. Worked fine.
We should have gotten rid of them some time ago.
Good riddance! I never use them, collect them and bring them to one of the few banks that still accept coins.
I only use them when I empty my wallet in a self checkout to get rid of them
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Children in elementary schools use coins as an example to learn calculating. They need the 1 cent coins. Is nobody here thinking about the children?
Well, they sure can learn with something else.
Woooosh
(the joke being that the adage is a trope at this point)
Aren’t there already some Euro-Countries that abolished 1 and 2 cent coins?
Just looked it up: Finland, Netherlands, Belgium, Italy and Ireland.
what happens if you pay 5 Cents with 5x1 cent from other countries in those countries?
I don’t know but I guess they still would have to accept them since they are still official currency.
I used to live in Finland for two years. The shop close by to my home wouldn’t accept 1 or 2 cents so I just put them in a drawer and never worried about it again. Don’t know if they are obliged to accept them.
I’m from Italy, most machines that take cash straight up don’t accept 1 and 2 cent coins and 500€ notes anymore, they’ll just spit them out. I don’t think I’ve ever paid a cashier with those, so I don’t know what the policy is, but I think they are allowed to refuse them. It’s still legal tender so banks will take them; I have a big jar at home where I collect all the small cents, I plan to take it to a bank once it’s full and see what I can buy with it (stonks). I can tell you that if you make an electronic payment you will pay the exact price, but if you’re paying in cash it will be rounded to the nearest .05.
Machines here in Austria also often don’t take 1/2ct and €500.
Finland: Price totals are rounded to 5 cents at the checkout but the smaller money is valid and you can generally use them, unless a shop specifically informs that they don’t accept them.
I haven’t seen them a lot lately in Austria…
Austria still totally uses 1/2ct coins. If you are one of the weirdos who still pays in cash, that is.
Why would be one a weirdo if they pay in cash?
Just a joke since hardly anyone in Austria actually pays in cash. It’s mostly something old people, criminals and politicians do.
In Germany, cash is still king 😭 I hate it. Problem that also only many stores take cash. In my district in Hamburg there is even a bike store where you can only pay cash. Recently I had to visit three restaurants until I found one where I could pay by card. The most annoying thing is that you can’t get cash anywhere. My bank (Commerzbank) or the association closes more and more branches. Thus, the ATMs are also missing. With foreign banks to withdraw money is really expensive. I get my money currently from the supermarket. But I have to buy for at least 10 euros to withdraw money. Germany is so annoying. When I was last on vacation in Scotland, I was able to pay even the toilet visit with card. That was so pleasant and easy. Currently, there are also more and more strange groups in our country (from the right-wing fringe, Querdenker) who see a conspiracy in a possible abolition of cash. “the so-called elites want to take us the cash to be able to control us better”.
This would annoy me so much. In Austria you can even pay by card on a farmers market.
It hasn’t been a thing in Ireland since 2015. We have a rounding system in place for cash transactions
Canada got rid of pennies (one-cent pieces) over 10 years ago. Now millennials can’t buy houses. Coincidence? ;)
Hungary has in the recent past got rid of 1 and 2 HUF coins. Prices can still be XX99, only total transaction amounts have to be rounded according to official rounding laws, but only if in cash.
It works.
What are the rules for rounding?
If the price ends on 1 or 2 HUF, it goes down to the nearest ten, if it’s 3,4,6 or 7 it rounds to 5, if it’s 8 or 9 it goes up to the nearest ten.
No one really cares that much, as 1 HUF is worth around a third of a cent.
I am in favour. But let’s go ever further and get rid of cash entirely.
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There are ways to do anonymous payments without cash. Just see the other comment. Relying on cash forever is just some libertarian fever dream.
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Which comment?
https://feddit.de/comment/399272
GNU Taler, apparently. Never have seen this used anywhere.
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Yes, that’s what I fear aswell.
Privacy and transactions without internet connection?
ECB is working on the “digital Euro” right now, and I’m almost completely sure it won’t enable offline payments, simple peer to peer transactions or even anonymous payments. It’s a real shame, because GNU Taler is interesting and the crypto should be explored further.
The 2020 report of the ECB actually states offline payments as a desired feature and to work overall “like cash”. Anonymous payments, however, are ruled out (money laundering bla bla, probably a rather weak argument considering Taler’s characteristics).
Okay, offline payments might work between a shop terminal and a customer, but what is as if not more important is the ability to easily give money to a friend privately, which I don’t see.
Did you see this in widespread use anywhere?
No, but I also didn’t see contactless payment methods being widely used until the pandemic.
Where do you live?
I could pay contactless almost anywhere before the pandemic. You might get weird looks at the bakery if it was like 2€, but that was it.
Germany. You could do card payments but only by sliding your card into a card reader. NFC payments were pretty much non-existent. Third world country 🫠
Thats just objectively not true. NFC payments have been rolled out slowly for years before the pandemic. It would have happened anyways, maybe the pandemic just gave it a little boost.
That sounds a bit harsh. Me and a couple of other people I know have used contactless payments even for quite some time before COVID. It was relatively simple to set up by linking your PayPal account to Google Pay if you had an Android phone. But I agree that contactless payments weren’t widely adopted by the general German population until 2020.
As a swiss person, I get surprised every time the price doesn’t automatically round to the next multiple of 5 cents when I’m in the EU. So yes, get rid of them.
As a swiss, you’re used to find it the first prices in Europe, not you don’t think about other economies.
There’s a comment in here from someone whose country recently switched to euros, and many small items there cost under 10 cents. Rounding down would make them free, rounding up doubles their price…
The measure is reasonable if the local economy is suited - Belgium and the Netherlands have been rounding bills for a good while now, but it’s not something that should be pushed from the European level.
Not that I said rounding bills - individual items are stille priced to the cent. When paying by card, you pay the exact total, but when paying cash it gets rounded to the nearest 5 cent.
Does anyone else think it’s a little backwards that the large denominations are fragile paper bills, but the small ones are metal coins sometimes worth less than the metal in the coin? Shouldn’t the large denominations be coins, which last longer, and the small denominations be bills, which are easier to carry in large quantities?
Making a fake coin is a lot easier than making a fake “paper” bill.
Even better 🏴☠️😂
If anyone can just produce money like the Venezuelan government the currency would also be just as worthless as the Bolivar. Well not really, the coins would at least have exactly the value of the metal inside it, which is better than the Bolivar.
At that point you would just have the good ol’ monetary system where each coin is worth exactly the silver/gold it weighs with all the associated drawbacks.
Absolutely aware of that. Still couldn’t resist to make a bad dad joke :D
Sure, but for low denominations, it doesn’t make sense to develop and incorporate advanced security measures. Coins could support cryptographic technology that would make counterfeiting impossible. Hobbyists have figured out how to do it for $23 a piece. A national mint could probably do it for less.
If you gonna use crypto, why even bother with physical coins?
It’s either gonna have the same benefits and drawbacks of crypto or it’s not going to be secure.
I’m not really talking about cryptocurrency. What I mean is that you could fit cryptographic electronics on a coin that would make counterfeiting impossible. I don’t think that technology would fit on a flexible paper bill yet.
However, it is interesting to consider that you could integrate a national cryptocurrency with physical coins. The benefit would be that people could transact the physical coins without recording anything publicly. Also, the physical coins would also be instantly redeemable for digital currency.
I’m curious as to how this would work. Like you could just clone the data on the electronics and the copy would be virtually indistinguishable. Ofc you can also counterfeit our current currency, so it doesn’t need to be perfect.
If you do the transactions digitally you can’t counterfeit anything. You cannot send anything the blockchain agrees is not yours. But if you can just physically transact coins without recording anything you can always counterfeit and you will only notice once you redeem the coin, just how you will notice counterfeit bills if you try to deposit them.
The way it works is you would just do one transaction to a wallet on the chip in the coin when the coin is minted. The chip is designed so that you can never release the funds on its wallet without essentially destroying the chip. There is no way to simply duplicate the cryptographic data from one of these chips to another. There’s a better explanation available on the OpenDime website.
Isn’t that only because so much effort is being made to improve paper bills - like transparent windows, holograms, UV print, microprint, raised print, embedded metal strips, etc. etc.?
Nothing is preventing anyone from implementing better protections into coins - integrating polymers, transparent rings, multiple metal rings, even integrating chips… it’s just currently not worth the effort.
Well, yes. You could change the form of our bills from very flat cuboids into less flat cylinders. You could even incorporate metals into it if you so desired.
At that point the resulting coin would be just as fake as the bill though.
At that point the resulting coin would be just as fake as the bill though.
Your complaint is that paper bills are too fake?
Nah, I don’t mind paper bills at all. I was only questioning the point of replacing our bills with coins if you make the coins to be basically round bills.
Yeah, but I wasn’t suggesting that we should replace bills with coins.
I’m just pointing out that bills are not inherently safer than coins, and that coins are not inherently less safe than bills. It just depends on how much effort you want to invest in either to make them harder to counterfeit.
I would guess that small denominations are used more frequently in cash transactions and are worn down much quicker. Therefore, it is probably reasonable to use the more durable coins for those instead of having to replace paper bills all the time in large quantities
Yes, but I think the premise of the OP is that frequently transacting with coins is a PITA. Even if paper is less durable, people will be happier not having to deal with coins as much.
