muckefuck | Worthless

Entry tags:

china,
travel

Worthless

I was buying a snack from the vending machine at work just now (I know, I know, I need to get my ass to the store and pick up some more healthy trail mix soon) when I noticed that one of the "nickles" in my pocket was suspiciously thin and dull. With a glance, I took in the pompadour on the portrait and the word "sentimos" and immediately thought to myself What banana republic is so hopeless that they can't even spell Spanish correctly on their money? A moment later it occurred to me that it probably wasn't Spanish at all but Pilipino. Sure enough, the full phrase is "Dalawampu't limang sentimos". Somewhere, sometime yesterday, I got slipped a twenty-five cent piece from the Philippines. (Current value in US money: about 0.6¢.)

Incidentally, this reminds me that one of my souvenirs from China is the most worthless paper bill I've ever received as change[*]. The face value is one jiao, that is, one tenth of a yuan or just over US 1¢. Strangely, the Chinese seem even more coin-averse than the Americans. Sure, they have a one yuan coin in circulation, but that's their largest and it still has an exchange value of only 13¢. (The €2 coin, for comparison, approaches $3 at our current sucky rates of exchange.) Even so, we rarely got our hands on them; everyone seemed to prefer bills for amounts of half a yuan and up. (We tried to get rid of all our wu jiao bills, but I think we still got stuck with a few.)

Some cashiers took interesting steps in order to avoid having the cash drawer overflow with singles. A common solution at more informal venues was to origami-fold stacks of five one-yuan notes into triangles (rather like the paper footballs we used for tabletop games in study hall back in high school). I first came across this at a spring-roll booth on a "snack street" near the Wangfujing Bookstore; unfortunately, someone had assembled them a bit too hastily and worked a five into the triangle they handed me, meaning that I got more back in change from that exchange than the cost of my food.

[*] I do have a bill denominated in PLZ, the Polish currency in use before the 1995 redenomination which knocked off four zeroes, but this was simply handed to me by a Czech clerk because I found it amusing.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Remind me to give you some Transdniestrian rubles next time you're in town - I don't know what the current exchange rate is, but I think it's something like 2 billion per $1. I've got a 10,000 ruble note around somewhere.... it was 10, but was overprinted at some point in the '90s as hyperinflation took over.

Who on earth's portrait is the obverse motif?

Suvorov, I'm guessing? Let me find some online...

I have an Uzbek 50 Sum note, which is worth about 4¢, and, due to bad planning, a whole bunch of UK 2 pound coins, worth $4.16 apiece. You beat me on the worthless note front.

Why does the US hate coins, so? The various $1 coins are annoyingly similar in diameter and heft to quarters - I can't help feeling it's a form of passive resistance on the part of the treasury department. That said, I find the British and Euro methods silly, because the coins get big and heavy in your pocket. Bring back pieces of 8.

If the passive resistance is coming from anywhere, I think it's the private sector. Around here, none of the manufacturers of vending machines, parking meters, coin-operated washers--any of the places where a dollar coin would be especially useful--have bothered to make the necessary modifications in order to accept the new Sacs. Perhaps they're mindful of the limited success of the Susan B., but if so their lack of faith became a self-fulfilling prophecy. Or can we bounce the blame back onto the Treasury for not making sure more companies were on board before the huge attempted rollout?

If the passive resistance is coming from anywhere, I think it's the private sector. Around here, none of the manufacturers of vending machines, parking meters, coin-operated washers--any of the places where a dollar coin would be especially useful--have bothered to make the necessary modifications in order to accept the new Sacs.

There are no such modifications-- the Sacagawea has the same characteristics as the Susan B. as far as vending machines are concerned. (That's one reason it's the same size.) AFAIK, there are no technical obstacles to any vending machine made in the last generation accepting them.

Which isn't to say there isn't resistance-- sometimes not all that passive. When the Sacagawea came out, they worked in the campus vending machines. Shortly thereafter, the machines were fitted with a plastic insert that would accept a quarter, but not a dollar coin. So they were willing to make modifications, all right-- to avoid taking the new coins.

I'm skeptical that the size is the issue, though. The Canadian loonie is exactly the same size as American dollar coins since the SBA dollar, and it did fine. And the differences between the Sacagawea and the SBA seem to have been a matter of imitating the loonie to distinguish it from the quarter (gold colored, different edge). But the key seems to be discontinuing the bill at the same time-- and possibly Canadians' greater willingness to go along with such changes. (See also the metric system.)

Whether that's worth doing is another question-- it would save some money, but the US public has a pretty strong revealed preference for the bills, which it's arguable their government should respect. I'd personally be fine with it (and with getting rid of the penny-- a nickel is now worth less than pennies were when I was a kid, and we didn't need 1/5th cent coins then). But I'm not sure how much political capital it's worth to rationalize cash when transactions are going more and more electronic anyway.

Speaking of coins, I have what I hope is the most worthless coin in the world: a Hungarian pengo. When it was demonetized in 1946, the exchange rate was about 4,690,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 pengo = 1 dollar. (Since I paid something like fifty cents for it-- at a flea market outside Budapest-- it's probably also the item I've most overpaid for.)

I like the comment about pieces-of-eight moeny. That was a very popular Spanish coin. Back in my youth, a half-century ago, the term "two bits" meaning a "quarter" was still popular. "Shave and a haircut - two bits." Gone are those days!

Chuck

I rarely use "two bits" to mean a quarter, but I found myself doing so in China because two yuan were worth about 27 cents. So I found it rather convenient to think of RMD as "bits".

BTW, my favourite rhyme involving "two bits" is one from the George Hamilton cheesefest Zorro, the Gay Blade. It goes:

Two bits, four bits
Six bits, a peso
All those for Zorro
Stand up and say so!

Both Cambodia and Vietnam use all paper money. I thought I may have had you beat with the 100 Dong note,but when I did the math the result was $.006, a tie. I forget what the lowest denomination of the Cambodian Riel is but I have always thought of that as the most worthless currency because the largest denomination available is the 5000 riel note, which is worth about $1.25. As a result Riels are only used as change and USDs are used to buy things.

I found it depends on the location, in Shanghai and Hangzhou the coins were more popular, and people would avoid one yuan and jiao bills, but in Beijing the bills are more common, and people prefer them to the coins. A matter of what people are used to, I guess. :)
Personally I think the most annoying thing is when the prices are set so that you need one jiao to pay the exact sum (for example something costing 6 jiao), since both the one jiao coins and the bills are really small and the hardest to find in my pockets. :p
Moa

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only