h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

>Ah but £1.99 looks cheaper than £2.00

Funny that; it actually is cheaper than £2, isn't it? Anyone who would rather pay £2 for something rather than £1.99 has to be mad. Yes, I'm the person who falls for that trick every time

If you saw a penny on the ground, would you bend down and pick it up?

In percentage terms of course it is 0.5 %.

If the mortgage rates went up by that much there would be much wailing and gnashing of teeth

Sometimes I do pick them up. Sometimes someone else does.

"If you saw a penny on the ground, would you bend down and pick it up?"

All day you'll have good luck if you do...

If I saw a penny on the ground, I would be quite perplexed as to why it was there.

I would definitely pick up a penny off the ground. However I am quite tight

Hmmm...you could be on your way to riches Skanky.

Assuming everybody in the UK loses a penny at some point (which is probably a fair enough assumption), and nobody apart from you can be bothered to pick them up, that leaves about 60 million pence / £600,000 all for you!

Of course, the problem is finding them all....

Skanky behaviour makes riches. Perfect

In New Zealand the smallest coin is 5c, so they round up like in Finland, but if you pay by card you pay the exact amount, so it can be (ever so slightly) cheaper to use plastic.

Of course, since 5c NZ is around tuppence you'd need to be pretty hard up to worry about it


I've always advocated the introduction of a universal ONE BEER coin - a unit of currency that will buy the bearer one beer anywhere in the world. It would make life so much simpler, and give world markets a common denominator to deal in.

<< they're planning on getting rid of the 1 p and 2p coins soon.>>

They did that in NZ in 1989, and it's been horribly inflationary, as anyone could have predicted... If you pay cash, shops 'round up', though they're supposed to use a system which means the customer wins *some of the time*.

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There are heaps of people who can't afford to treat 5c coins so carelessly. In NZ, Treasury are going to do away with 5c coins in 2006, which IMO is going to be an even bigger disaster than getting rid of one and two cent coins! People with a whole shedload of money can afford to say 'get rid of them', but not people earning minimum wage, or pensioners.

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Sadly, some of us are!