I see that even Americans are now clamouring for change. They voted for it in Iowa, according to Barack Obama. And according to Hillary Clinton, they voted for it in New Hampshire too - except this time they were serious. Clearly, the mood for change has become an international phenomenon, writes Frank McNally
So again I ask: how much longer will Irish banks get away with stocking nothing but €50 notes in their ATMs? Yes, I know I used this joke before, as recently as last year's general election campaign. Then, the mood for change was also palpable, until polling day. But a minor incident in my local convenience shop recently set me thinking about the issue anew.
I was buying a newspaper, or something, and yet again had to offer the shop assistant a €50 note. For the umpteenth time, I heard myself saying: "Sorry I have nothing smaller". And for the umpteenth time, I resented the embarrassing, unpaid, money-laundering work that we consumers are forced to do on behalf of the banks, so that we can feed parking meters, or so that we will have one of the smaller notes in our pocket when the office collection for that person we never met comes around.
On this occasion, however, my discomfort was added to by what was happening at the next till. There a man who had been begging in the street outside was attempting to pass off a fistful of small cash in exchange for a six-pack of beer.
He didn't say: "Sorry I have nothing bigger". But whereas my assistant waved away my apology with a "No problem", his assistant called the manager, who waved the customer away instead.
It may not have been the colour of his money they didn't like. Maybe they just didn't want him coming in buying drink. Either way, the unfortunate man had to go off and do some reverse money-laundering somewhere else. If I'd met him a few minutes earlier (maybe I did: he was probably the one sitting beside the ATM, whose eye I was trying to avoid), we could have worked something out.
The irony is that the shop was full of things priced €4.99, and €9.99, and €19.99: that old retail trick. On more expensive items, there might have been five cents lopped off the round figure, so as not to insult our intelligence completely. But many of the prices were such that to pay the exact amount would require a fistful of change such as the one they had just rejected.
It occurred to me then that we would all be better off if the shops and banks swopped policies. This would involve the former rounding up their prices, for honesty's sake, and the ATMs issuing €49.95 every time you asked for €50. I for one would happily pay a higher commission, if necessary, to avoid the time and embarrassment involved in always having to break up large notes myself.
Transparent as it is, the retail scam of shaving a cent off the price to make it look like the nearest round figure below rather than above obviously works on customers, or else the shops would hardly persist. Not that shops are the most blatant users of this tactic.
In my local filling station, where regular unleaded petrol is currently priced at exactly €1.79 a litre, I am often tempted to ask for a single litre and insist on the exact change. But of course I never do. I let them away with their little ruse by ordering in bulk, thus allowing them to round off the total. The upside of the deal is that it now takes about €55 to fill my tank, which in turn allows me to pay with two €50 notes and say: "Sorry I have nothing smaller".
(Interesting aside: One of the products never priced at anything.99 is a whipped ice-cream with a Cadbury's flake stuck on top. So how, I hear you ask, did such confections ever come to be called 99s? Well, apparently it goes back to Italy and a time when the king of that country had an elite guard of 99 soldiers. The number eventually became short-hand for eliteness in anything - and Italy is of course a big cheese in the ice-cream industry. So when Cadbury's brought out a short flake in the 1930s, especially for cones, they called it the "99". I thought you'd like to know.)
The ice-cream connection is hardly lost on the evil geniuses in retail marketing, as they play us for saps with their pricing. Not only do their 99c suffixes convince us of good value; they probably also make us salivate; and no doubt this makes us buy more.
It's not just shops and filling stations that do the 99 cent thing, by the way. Politicians do it too, in their fashion. Did you ever notice how the Dáil always returns from its summer recess in the last week of September? It might as well be October as far as the consumer is concerned, but the association of September with the end of August suggests better value.
The TDs will be at it again later this month, when they return from their Christmas recess on January 30th. Which is February, as near as dammit. But this is the calendar equivalent of 29.99, so it looks like a special offer. Of course the big question is, whatever date the Dáil comes back, can we expect change?