Still getting used to the new currency, and I don’t think I’m the only one. You still see people letting the cashier pick out the money they have to pay; and you hear stories about customers tipping way too much or not enough. All this will pass with time. Problems with the bills being too big for my wallet (they are slightly larger than the old Austrian money) will also pass once I buy a new billfold. Currently, my largest problem is that I am amassing huge quantities of coins, making my pockets bulge and my wallet hard to fit into my pocket. I thought at first that this was due to poor planning and design of the coins and their denominations, but now I think this too will pass; when the Euro was introduced, stores were prohibited by law from rounding up their prices, in order to prevent a wave of inflation resulting from the Euro. This naturally causes odd prices like 17.234 euros etc, because it is a rare Austrian shopkeeper who will voluntarily round down. As soon as it is legal to increase prices again, we’ll get nice round numbers and the change problem will be solved.
wow. that’s really odd to think about and perceptive of the european conglomerate to have thought of that. although, all you older countries just seem to think more about effects. wisdom of age, possibly.
Petition against the Czechs, yeah, nearly a million signatures, not bad in a country of 8 million eh? Sponsored by the far-right party here, ostensibly out of concern for the dangerous design of the Temelin nuclear plant (same design as Chernobyl), in fact (because opposition to the plant is understandably high here) a populist ploy to gain voter support with an eye to breaking up the current far-right/right coalition and holding early elections, in the hopes of either improving their position (that of the far-right) in any future coalition with the right, or with another party. Or maybe something else. I mean, nothing like politics in Belgium, right? I don’t think any sane person here actually imagines that Czech EU membership can be blocked, without completely stopping the EU expansion (which the far-right, coincidentally, opposes) (it would have to stop expansion, since it is an all-or-nothing process, either all 8? candidate countries are accepted, or none are) and harming Austria. The far-right also doesn’t like the Czechs because of the Benesch decrees, according to which the Sudeten Germans were kicked out of Czechoslovakia after WWII and all their property confiscated, among other things. It’s all tied in there, behind what looks like a sane referendum on the surface.
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Well, the price-fixing is largely, like Bauke said, only temporary and to prevent people (feeling) cheated in the course of the introduction of a new currency. So you’d have to imagine the Feds setting prices while replacing the dollar with something else at the same time.