'BROWN' coins landing in charity piggy-banks on bar and shop counters may be history by some time in 2022, depending upon the outcome of a Eurozone-wide opinion poll.
By the end of 2021, the European Commission will decide on whether or not to phase out one- and two-cent coins if it considers they are not used enough to justify continuing to mint them.
Firstly, the Commission will need to carry out full research to work out the impact on household and commercial finances, since eliminating the two coins of the smallest denomination of the euro would inevitably mean prices rounded to the nearest five or 10 cents.
Already, Finland, Italy, Belgium, Ireland and The Netherlands have approved legislation covering rounding up or down, but the remaining Eurozone countries do not have any specific laws.
This is likely to cause widespread debate, as the lowest incomes could be the hardest-hit: The most common non-rounded price seen anywhere ends in 99 cents, an age-old marketing trick designed to make a consumer think goods are cheaper than they are by paying attention to the first figure only.
Prices of, for example, €5.99, are viewed almost by reflex as being €5-and-something, rather than, effectively, €6.
Rounding up if one- and two-cent coins are scrapped means an extra cent added onto anything with a price ending in 99 cents; also, other random prices could rise by more.
In Spain, for example, the typical cost of a supermarket own-brand litre of milk is 57 or 58 cents, sometimes with the lower of the two applied if buying them in a box of six litres – this could mean an extra two to three cents a day per person added to the shopping bill for milk alone.
For a four-person household, just the milk bill could increase by €10.95 a year, without totting up all the extra rounded-up prices.
Items costing 56 cents or €5.22 or €2.51, as a guide, would typically go down, but these are much less common except in the weigh-your-own fruit-and-veg counters.
Whilst most middle-income households would not notice the difference, those at the lower end of the income scale would see an impact.
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