They’re not worth anything, never were but even less through the years with inflation.
If a store wants to sell something for 99 cent, they can either just take 1€ or 95 cent.
Maybe even 5 cent pieces? But that would be a bit radical.
I am a bit annoyed that easy ideas like this are never discussed in politics, or wherever. It would make our lives just a little bit easier, and having them achieves NOTHING.
I don’t have them when paying with my Amex… And if I have too much of them, I’m kindly asking at the drinks store if I can throw them into their coin counter for payment when not many customers are there. If everything fails I wait until I have 11800 one-cent coins or a mix with 2 cent to pay that €118 every 10 years for ID card and passport. Which astonishingly is machine-payable with One and Two-Cent coins.
If you need ways to get rid of them:
- gift them to me, :D Or I’ll PayPal it back to you.
- have a bank account at one of the old, expensive classical banks here in Germany, they usually take them. Don’t have the cheapest account there. Take their kind of all-inclusive account model.
- Go to your nearest “Deutsche Bundesbank” and take your foreign coins and banknotes with you, they have to exchange it for you as long as all the money you bring is or was valid payment money somewhere.
- supermarket self-service machines
- Get to your nearest Späti (in Berlin) or kiosk store and ask the owner if he needs 1 Cent coins. Some give a small discount for you being the person, making sure they’ll not get into trouble with missing 1 Cent coins. And some just trust that the thousands of coins you bring is roughly what you counted.
Avoid:
- Coinstar, 10+ % fee (or any other machine that’s not a self-service cash register)
- rush hour on counting machines not fully used as self-service – ask the store when it’s okay to come with so much money – those machines take some time to count your thousands of coins.
So in conclusion: Stores would want to do €,99 prices, because that’s why you can steal a whole other Euro for every item the customer grabs. Doing .95 would change that unless everyone does it or is forced to do that. Because the lobby from these businesses is too big, we will not see the 1-cent and 2-cent pieces disappear. Milk business will complain that they can’t afford selling at 4 cent less and all the others would just make everything + €1, so €1.99 becomes €2.95 and so on.
You shouldn’t force the economy to change prices if you don’t see them illegally changing prices. Because everything will be getting unnecessarily more expensive then. Enforced pricing should always be a price decrease.
Bundesbank didn’t do foreign currency last time I checked. But yes, they’ll exchange Euro coins for notes
