If you travel you more than likely needed to exchange some of your cash to local currency?

When it's handed to you have you ever just looked and doubted it was real or just said to yourself why would they bother?

I lived in the Bahamas in the early 90's the currency was pegged to the US dollar at a par level, the first day I went to the bank to exchange US dollars for Bahamian dollars I was handed a handful of colorful bills and in amongst them were these?

...and I doubted if they were real, and they are!

photos.smugmug.com

When riding through Texas years ago with a friend we stopped to see a guy he knew who had a motorcycle shop near the US/MX border. He told me the majority of his clients were rich Mexicans who would ride over the border to get their BMW's serviced.

I commented, "sounds like good business".

He responded, "I guess, now I'm not a billionaire anymore I need to make money somehow!' and he laughed, my friend laughed, and I obviously looked bemused.

Go to the toilet, you'll understand, and he points to a door on the other side of the shop, right as I walk through the door I get the joke!

photos.smugmug.com

I'm sure some of you have had similar experiences...

Equador did it even better. They are a sovereign nation, but they use US currency for their paper money, although they do mint their own Equadorean coinage. I’m not certain what the US government’s position on the issue is exactly.

If I had not been in Guayaquil on my way to the Galápagos Islands I would have not believed it.

Outsourcing the Money SupplyWhat money tells us about what makes a state a state.www.usnews.com

There are more than a few that do this, stability.

More than two dozen countries and territories use the US dollar as currencyThe US dollar is used as official currency in several countries besides the United States, including Ecuador, El Salvador, and Zimbabwe. In other countries, such as Panama and Cambodia, use USD alongside local currency.www.businessinsider.com

I spent quite a long time in Ecuador in the last few years and a friend of mine had a challenge, go shopping and come back with less coins than you start with. Difficult to do as the US $1 bill is in short supply so there is a 50 cent and in some areas $1 coins

My first experience with The 1 yen coin was kind of that way. There's nothing that looks fake about it, but they're made of aluminum so they're super light. It almost felt like toy money. But I came to appreciate that. The US needs to stop wasting money on using copper for pennies.

The smallest paper money they have is their equivalent of $10. At first I thought it was weird to have coins for $1 and $5, but they made a lot of sense for vending machines, which are abundant in Japan.

I forget which country I was in but a similar experience with an aluminum coin with a hole in the middle...really.

...and to go along with the Bahamian paper money (shown above) they have square coins and multiple fluted edge ones

Canada switched to $1 & $2 coins with great success, loonies and twonies, so did the UK, but are governments looking to eliminate cash?

Have you been to Denmark, I walked into a bank to get some cash on entering the country, the tellers' response "we don't use cash in the bank, we don't have any you'll struggle to find any anywhere!"

Well, I guess one thing you don't have to worry about then, is a run on the banks currency in Denmark.....

Canada ditched pennies too, didn't they?

Why has Canada killed off the penny?Why it makes sense for Canada to eliminate its smallest unit of currencywww.economist.com

The “Penny Problem”

According to the 2018 United States Mint Annual Report, it costs 2.06 cents to produce, administer, and distributed a one-cent coin, up from 1.82 cents a year earlier. In fact, both the one-cent coin and the five-cent coin cost more than face value to strike and issue, with the “nickel” costing 7.53 cents each to produce, administer, and manufacture in Fiscal Year 2018 – up from 6.60 cents a year earlier.

Looking back over the cost of making the penny and nickel since the dawn of the 21st century, both denominations have lost money since 2006.

However, the majority of Americans in various surveys still love the United States one-cent coin. According to a 2019 poll released by Americans for Common Cents (ACC), 68% of Americans wish to keep the penny. These figures are similar to other findings in recent years; in 2014, an ACC poll found 68% of Americans wished to keep the one-cent coin, up one percentage point from a 2012 ACC survey finding 67% of Americans wanted to keep the penny.

in Canada we switched to $1 and $2 coins to save money. Reprinting the destroyed bills cost a lot of money. Here’s our old $1 bill:

When I first went to Turkey in 1996 a kebab cost 180,000 Lira, that was my first encounter with silly money. When I went back in 2002 a kebab from the same shop cost 750,000. The shop keeper told me 20 years earlier 750,000 would have bought a house.
Inflation got so bad that like Zimbabwe the numbers on the notes got silly and in 2006 Turkey revalued their currency by chopping 6 zeros off.

Revaluation of the Turkish liraNew Turkish lira Yeni Türk Lirası ( Turkish) New lira banknotes and coins ISO 4217 Code TRY Denominations Subunit  1/100 new kuruş Symbol YTL Banknotes 1, 5, 10, 20, 50, 100 new lira Coins 1, 5, 10, 25, 50 new kuruş, 1 new lira Demographics User(s) Turkey (to 31 December 2008) Northern Cyprus (to 31 December 2008) Issuance Central bank Central Bank of the Republic of Turkey  Website www.tcmb.gov.tr Valuation Inflation 10.61% (Turkey, June 2008)  Source Central Bank of the Republic of Turkey, Inflation report 2008-III This infobox shows the latest status before this currency was rendered obsolete.en.wikipedia.org

On the subject of coins, New Zealand ditched 1 and 2 cent coins in 1990 and 5 cent coins in 2006 so our smallest coin is 10 cents.

Also in 2001 we introduced $1 and $2 coins and phased out notes for those values.

After the 1 and 2 cent coins were removed all prices were rounded to the nearest 5 cents using the Swedish Rounding method, this continues to this day so all prices displayed end in a value of 5 cents. e.g. $4.95 even though the 5 cent coin no longer exists.
If you are paying by card you pay the actual value, if paying by cash the price is rounded to the nearest 10 cents using Swedish Rounding.

Cash roundingCash Rounding or Swedish rounding ( New Zealand English) occurs when the minimum unit of account is smaller than the lowest physical denomination of currency. The amount payable for a cash transaction is rounded to the nearest multiple of the minimum currency unit available, whereas transactions paid in other ways are not rounded (for example electronic funds transfer like credit cards, or negotiable instruments like cheques).en.wikipedia.org