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.
We should have gotten rid of them some time ago.
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.
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?
They could by paying with card.
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)
Austrian here, paying with cash and counting every single coin is still common here.
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.
Yes, please remove 1, 2 and 5 cent coins. I’d argue for also removing 10 and 20 cent. How do you get rid of them? I feel ridiculous paying with them. So I just don’t.
Doesn’t make sense. You could just throw away all 1 and 2 cents for yourself and round everything up if you really wish not having to worry about them anymore. Problem solved :)
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.
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
what? so if my bill is 1,96 euro i should pay 2 euro and the store will get the 4 cent? no way. that sounds not like much but its like per custumer per day lot. i even hate it that on gas stations there is a .cent. for example gas 1 euro 59,9 cent. what is this bullshit? just money making for the gas stations and oil companys.
I refuse to believe that anyone pays for gas in cash anymore.
I think the idea is that on the other hand the store will only get 2€ if the bill is 2,04€. On average there shouldn’t be any difference for both sides. About the gas stations I agree 100%.
new chalange for me always buy thinks that cost x,x4 euro :)
And nothing else ;-)
The Stores will all do 1,96 then and no store will do 2,04 since that would make a loss on their side.
Only if you buy just one thing.
What makes you think you’d have to round up instead of down?
I have a big jar at home putting all copper coins into it out of my wallet from time to time …
Some stores provide the possibility to round up the sum and donate the difference to a charity. I think this is also a good idea.
Some banks also have coin deposit machines
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’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.
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.
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)
The problem gets worse if you realize that the material value of the copper is greater than the coin value itself with 1 cent.
They’re not made from copper in Europe though.
I actually looked it up. They are 5,65% copper, the rest ist iron. But because they are not 100% copper, they are less valuable then 1 cent. https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euromünzen
I just put 1,2 and 5 cents in my kid’s piggybank instead of carrying em around.
your poor kid xD
They would be even poorer if I wouldn’t do it
I never accept 1,2 and 5 cent coins. This probably adds up to 3€ a year, which is affordable to me
Yeah it’s always so weird to me, people pay 100x that for other minor conveniences.
croatian here, we recently, in january of this year, switched to euro. im still mindblown by how much 1 cent is (like, 7.5 times more than 1 lipa was). and since i already carry 10 times more coins now then when i did when we used kunas, i really dont mind the 1 and 2 cent coins. in fact, a lot of things here cost x.x3 or x.x7 €, so its quite convenient to have some cents in your wallet
Damn that’s interesting. In Germany you can maybe get something for 10 cent somewhere, but everything else is at least 20 or 50 cent ^^
I don’t have them when paying with my Amex… And if I have too much of them, I’m kindly asking at the drinks store if I can throw them into their coin counter for payment when not many customers are there. If everything fails I wait until I have 11800 one-cent coins or a mix with 2 cent to pay that €118 every 10 years for ID card and passport. Which astonishingly is machine-payable with One and Two-Cent coins.
If you need ways to get rid of them:
- gift them to me, :D Or I’ll PayPal it back to you.
- have a bank account at one of the old, expensive classical banks here in Germany, they usually take them. Don’t have the cheapest account there. Take their kind of all-inclusive account model.
- Go to your nearest “Deutsche Bundesbank” and take your foreign coins and banknotes with you, they have to exchange it for you as long as all the money you bring is or was valid payment money somewhere.
- supermarket self-service machines
- Get to your nearest Späti (in Berlin) or kiosk store and ask the owner if he needs 1 Cent coins. Some give a small discount for you being the person, making sure they’ll not get into trouble with missing 1 Cent coins. And some just trust that the thousands of coins you bring is roughly what you counted.
Avoid:
- Coinstar, 10+ % fee (or any other machine that’s not a self-service cash register)
- rush hour on counting machines not fully used as self-service – ask the store when it’s okay to come with so much money – those machines take some time to count your thousands of coins.
So in conclusion: Stores would want to do €,99 prices, because that’s why you can steal a whole other Euro for every item the customer grabs. Doing .95 would change that unless everyone does it or is forced to do that. Because the lobby from these businesses is too big, we will not see the 1-cent and 2-cent pieces disappear. Milk business will complain that they can’t afford selling at 4 cent less and all the others would just make everything + €1, so €1.99 becomes €2.95 and so on.
You shouldn’t force the economy to change prices if you don’t see them illegally changing prices. Because everything will be getting unnecessarily more expensive then. Enforced pricing should always be a price decrease.
Bundesbank didn’t do foreign currency last time I checked. But yes, they’ll exchange Euro coins for notes
At least they still exchange Deutsche Mark…
They are annoying. I save up a big jar of just 1 and 2 pieces and go to the marts that have self checkouts and take coins and just dump em all in. Otherwise useless
Do you know if there is such a mart in Germany?
self checkouts are less common than in other countries, but larger REWEs and Kauflands and often Edekas have them.
Ah okay, I know a few places, never realized I could just threw coins in there. Definitely going to check that out, thank you ;)
It’s slowly coming, finally.
Kauflands have them
Never seen one in my local Kaufland, but will keep an eye open next time I’m there.
