On pennies, agorot, and dirhams

Having been reminded earlier this week that the Canadian penny will no longer be distributed after February 4, 2013 and may or may not be accepted by retailers thereafter has given me an excellent entree to sharing an old story.

When I lived in Doha, Qatar in 2004-2005 there was a regular problem in getting change.  In Qatar the currency is called the riyal (like dollars) and dirhams (like cents). According to Wikipedia dirhams come in denominations of 1, 5, 10, 25, and 50. I've only ever seen 25 and 50 dirham coins. What's more, dirhams always seemed to be in short supply. Especially at the grocery stores; and, especially at the Carrefour at the City Centre Mall. So whenever you rang up a bill that was QR XXX.25 or QR XX.50 or QR XX.75 you could never get your change in dirhams. Instead, you got chiclets. Yup, that's right, chiclets like you used to collect in your pillowcase from trick-or-treating on Hallowe'en. They came in 2-piece packages. For 25 dirhams you got one pack; 50 dirhams 2 packs; 75 dirhams 3 packs. Attempts to refuse chiclets (have you chewed that stuff in the last 30 years?) were pointless as you weren't getting anything else and you certainly weren't getting your dirhams. Anyway, I had a running joke about the Qatari chiclet economy and how could you really take a country seriously when the National Mint couldn't seem to keep enough dirhams in circulation? Maybe it was a ploy of grocery store management to keep its chiclet distributor happy, who knows? And, of course, I could have avoided this by paying electronically with credit so I wouldn't have needed change, but for some reason I regularly bought groceries with cash.

Fast forward to this fall in Israel. Here the basic currency is a shekel (yes, right out of the Bible), more precisely, the New Israeli Shekel (NIS) eventhough it's been around since 1986. A shekel is made up of 100 agorot. Agorot coins come in 10 and 50 (the 1/2 shekel coin). Fortunately, there is no shortage of agorot coins -- there are no chiclets for change in Israel. When you rack up a bill that ends in a unit of .01 shekel, since there isn't a 1 agora or even 5 agorot coin, somebody eats the difference to the closest 10 agorot (unless it's an electronic transaction).  So, here's what happened when I bought a toothbrush and toothpaste the other day:

Total bill: NIS 33.79

Following the rules of rounding, I got 20 agorot back with my sixteen shekels. This is how it's going to work in Canada. And, while I can see the benefits of rounding to the nearest nickel (now that a penny costs more to make than it's worth it's hard to argue with its demise) I, nonetheless, think I might miss the penny.

There will be no more copper in my change purse, only gold and silver coins.  No more putting a penny on the railroad to have a train run over it and flatten it out. (Okay, I have never done that, but my gramps used to do it and it was a total delight when I was wee to see the stretched out penny the train left behind.) And, what of the maple leaf motif on the tail-side of the penny? The nickel has a beaver; the dime, the Bluenose; the quarter, the caribou; the loonie, well, you know; the twoonie, polar bears.  It seems fauna are well represented, but what of Canadian flora? With the demise of the penny how will Canadians be reminded of the country's plant legacy? (Ya, the botanist in me rises up every once in awhile.) Maybe we need to displace the Bluenose? Or the beaver?


And by the way, can you believe it's 25 years since the loonie was issued?