The Aerie

Time is Money, Life is Change

As mentioned, we had a wonderful time on our recent trip to Europe. A glance at my blog homepage "Features" bar will reveal that I have collected the photographs and links to the blog entries into a Germany 2006 album.

However, upon our return home we learned a surprising thing: nobody in town will exchange dollars for Euro coins. We checked with the Minneapolis Chamber of Commerce, the University of Minnesota travel office, the
airport currency exchange, and a number of local banks. The only place that would accept coins at all was U.S. Bank, and they wanted $15 to do so.

You can exchange paper Euros just fine, but nobody wants the coins. This is regrettable, since Euro coins come in eight denominations, beginning with the cent and two-cent piece, all the way up through the two-Euro piece, which is worth about two and a half or three dollars. We found ourselves in possession a little over thirty Euros in coins worth a around $40.

So if you're traveling FROM Europe, be warned: change those coins for paper money before getting on the plane!

Fortunately an e-mail to our church mailing list elicited a number of future travelers who wanted to have some change on hand when arriving in the Amsterdam airport (always a good idea), and I was able to unload the coins by giving a generous 1:1 exchange rate.

Now I know a lot of people think that the U.S. penny is a worthless coin that ought ot be scrapped, but these people haven't encountered the Euro 2-cent coin. Given the existence of the 5 cent and 1 cent coins, the 2 cent Euro coin is my candidate for Most Useless Coin in current use. Exactly what benefit is to be had from a 2 cent coin? Let's see: if I have once cent, I have a penny. Two cents, okay, a twopenny coin. Three cents? Well, I either have three pennies, or a 2 and a 1. Four cents? Either two, three or four coins. Five cents? A nickel.

Now, if I don't have a twopenny coin option, I end up with either one, two, three, or four pennies, then a nickel.

The existence of the twopenny coin reduces the risk of carrying four worthless coins by half, and the risk of carrying three worthless coins by about a third. That's about it. On the other hand, the risk of having a pocketful of worthless coins - to wit, twopenny coins - goes up about 1000%.

The Euro penny is itself a stupid thing, because it is so tiny as to be almost unusable, being only 16 mm across. I have perfectly capable fingers, and yet getting ahold of a Euro penny coin is about as easy as picking up a tiny piece of ice off a tile floor. And woe to the nailbiter, for the penny shall remain on your floor forever.

In keeping with this theme of uselessness, the Euro has a 20-cent denomination but not a 25 cent denomination. Again, largely useless. Everybody needs a 1, and everybody needs a 50-cent piece, but in between, ya gotta have a quarter. Why? Because otherwise you need three coins - two 20's and a 10, to make up a half Euro. And what exactly is the point of that?

Now, I'm not saying we're any too brilliant in the U.S. I think our Quarter is the most useful coin we've got, and beyond that they're all crap. Quarters I collect to use in parking meters, every other coin goes into the peanut-butter jar until it's full, and I take it to the bank to exchange for about $14 in actual money.

We HAVE half-dollar pieces, but good luck finding one.

And of course there is a little-known Constitutional Amendment that insists that only certified morons are permitted to design our various one-dollar-coin incarnations. That's why, try as we might to come out with a dollar coin, they always turn out to be about the same size and weight as the Quarter. The little-known Moron Design Amendment.

No, they may be coming out with new dollar coins and maybe even a two-dollar coin, but I think such efforts are doomed. Everyplace you go takes plastic anyway, and no doubt we'll soon see gumball machines that have little card-swipes on the side. The advantage to such systems is that not only do you not need to carry cash, but the government can track your every move that involves money, so really everybody wins. Except you of course.

I think the idea makes cents.

Posted by Albatross at September 17, 2006 1:03 PM | TrackBack