Good news for those who hate the small copper coins that fill our pockets but are difficult to spend. Ireland is ditching one and two cent coins and embracing the rounding policy.
This change is made after the remarkably goodresults from a trial that was held in Wexford in 2013. According to the results, 85 per cent of the consumers were happy and a whopping 100 per cent of the retailers were happy with the rounding policy. According to the Central Bank’s Ronnie O’Toole, the overall reaction to the new policy has been fantastic.
Other euro countries like Netherlands, Belgium and Finland and few other EU countries like Sweden, Denmark and Hungary have already scrapped the small change and adapted to the rounding policy and the people are generally happy with it.
So it seems that it’s about time the change is made. Producing one cent coins is not profitable as it costs 1.65 cent to make the coin and the production of two cent coins barely pays off as it costs 1.94 cent to make one. The Dutch bank De Nederlandsche Bank has calculated that it saves yearly about €33 million in production costs by just giving up the two coins.
It has been argued that rounding would do no good to the retailers as prices like €1.99 look cheaper and better than €2.00, but the countries that use rounding have found a solution to that too: only the final bill will be rounded and it only applies to cash purchases too.
However, charities fear that scrapping the change would hit donations and would cause losses of millions. Change For Charity is campaigning for people to bring the change to collection points near them so the soon -o-be useless coins would make their way to the charities.
Sonja Sjogren
Image credit: Chai Brady
Leave a Reply