Re: Types of numerals

Julia "Schnecki" Simon wrote:
> There are probably some sort of rules, though: something along the
> lines of "shops may refuse to accept payment of sums exceeding 1 EUR
> in one-cent coins, exceeding 2 EUR in two-cent coins, ..."; or maybe
> simply "shops may refuse to accept amounts of coins exceeding 100 as
> payment for any single purchase". I'm pretty sure I remember rules of
> this kind from pre-Euro Germany; I don't know how binding they were,
> though (AFAIR they weren't part of an actual law, but I may be wrong
> about this), and of course I don't remember any actual numbers.
I don't know about the Eurozone, but in the US, merchants are free to
accept or refuse any currency they choose*, and some places refuse to
accept $50 and $100 bills.  I've never heard of any store refusing
pennies themselves, but some do have policies such as not accepting
large numbers.

*Legal tender in US law means only that it must be accepted in payment
of a debt.  As merchants possess the right to refuse service to anyone
(provided that such refusal isn't on forbidden grounds such as race), it
would be a moot point to require the use of a certain denomination.

Hmm ... according to the Wikipedia article on Legal Tender, under the
section on the Eurozone, "Individual jurisdictions may however impose
restrictions as to maximal amounts that can be settled by coins or
notes."  It mentions Ireland as limiting legal tender to no more than 50
of the same denomination.  No mention of Finland, however.

> On the other hand, we don't have any one- or two-cent coins here in
> Finland -- at least not officially. They do mint them, but only in
> small numbers, and the coins aren't used as currency; they go directly
> to the numismatic stores (where they're selling them for much more
> than their nominal value). Prices in shops are usually
> something-point-something-zero or something-point-something-five, and
> those that aren't are rounded (prices ending in 1, 2, 6, or 7 are
> rounded down to the nearest 0 or 5, and prices ending in 3, 4, 8, or 9
> are rounded up). If you use cash, that is; if you use a credit card,
> for example, you always pay the exact price. I assume that some
> reeeeeally clever people out there take great care to use their credit
> card for anything that would be rounded up and pay everything else in
> cash, and then they brag about all the pennies they're saving. ;-)
That'd be downright pathetic.  :-)

> A friend of mine, a fellow German-living-in-Finland, travels between
> Germany and Finland quite frequently, so she usually has insane (to
> Finns, anyway) amounts of one- and two-cent coins. When some
> salesperson annoys her (with sloppy service or whatever), she uses
> these coins to annoy them right back... Even in Finland these small
> coins are legal tender and have to be accepted as such. (You still
> have to pay the rounded prices, though.)
Really?  So, if the price were, say, 23.78, a 50-cent coin, a 20-cent
coin, a 5-cent and three 1-cents wouldn't cover it?

> My friend seems to enjoy
> fighting with salespersons over whether or not they have to accept her
> "funny foreign" money -- well, of course she does, since she
> inevitably wins these fights... after gleefully watching her opponents
> look up obscure financial laws in thick books, phoning the bank, and
> so on. ;-)
Oy.  That's downright sadistic.  Though, why would they even make such a
big deal?  Personally, if some customer of mine made a big fuss over a
few cents, I'd let them have those cents.  Not worth going to such
trouble over.  (Of course, I'm also a coin collector, so, in fact, I'd
be very happy to take "funny foreign" money :-)  I've acquired a few
such coins that way, a Swiss half-franc and a British 5-pence, for
example, both of which I received in place of a dime, which is about the
same size)