MSE News: HSBC to dispense more £5 notes

kriss1977 · 7 September 2010 at 11:16AM

agrinnall wrote: »

I think we need a major overhaul of our currency - get rid of coins below 10p and add a £5 coin to replace the £5 note.

Getting rid of coins below 10p may be all well and good for people with cash to splash but suddenly all the items out there priced at e.g. £4.95 or £10.99 will go up in price!

Or worse still, the situation will be the same as New Zealand or Australia where they advertise a price e.g. $4.97 but at the till this is rounded up to $5 anyway. If you pay on card there, you pay the actual price but if you pay in cash, your total is rounded up or down (mostly up on my shopping bills) leaving me feeling completely ripped off!!!

Everyone knows that £4.99 is basically a fiver you're spending but from a psychological angle it feels like a far better price to pay £4.99 than paying £5.01 for an item even though the difference is a matter of pennies. This is good for retailers as it encourages us to spend and is psychologically good for the customer too!

For those of us where every penny really does count, these differences are important. I agree all that change can be annoying but stick it in a pennies jar and take it to the bank once you've saved a round amount. It's interesting that it's my comfortably well off friends who are dismissive of small change and embarrassed if I pick up discarded small coins on the street and the ones who are in the same position as myself who wish they'd seen it first! More than half of my 'pennies' jar comes from discarded coins not my own purse and I usually bank between £10 and £30 a year this way! :rotfl:

From another angle, I recently moved into a new house where I was told the bills are £70 per month. When I asked to see the breakdown, I was told actually the £70 was a rounded up figure and they're more like £68.26. When I totalled the breakdown for myself I found my housemates had miscalculated and it is £67.84 per month. It's not that they were trying to rip me off at all, just that they had rounded things up all the way through. I know it may not be much to some but for instance I have been able to buy - and have change - from an 18 pack bag of crisps in Lidl (£1.49) which accounts for nearly 3 weeks of 'treats' in my packed lunch for college that I otherwise could not have bought! :beer: