`Useless' euro penny set for an early retirement

It's less than three years old, but the euro penny seems headed for early retirement in parts of Europe.

Following lead of Finland, Belgium and the Netherlands have moved to ditch production of their one- and two-cent coins, whose purchasing power and size both have been deemed by the market to be untenably tiny.

"That's a great idea, those coins are completely useless," cafe owner Aristoteli Arkoulis said Friday.

"I've got a big bag of them that I don't know what to do with, they just take up time," he said at his Kafeneio bar which serves thick black coffee and honeyed pastries to homesick Greeks working at EU headquarters.

Waitress Saida Achbouk agreed with her boss. "Look at all this I have to carry around," she said, showing a pouch full of the irritating coins. "I'm ashamed to give them to customers."

Many, though, say it makes no sense to have no cents.

Consigning small change to the piggy bank of history, they say, will force consumers to pay more as stores round up prices to the nearest five cents.

"When we switched from the escudo to the euro the prices were always rounded up, never down. Now we fear that this could happen again if these little coins go," warned Jorge Morgado, secretary-general of the Portuguese consumers' organization DECO.

"It hits little things like a cup of coffee, a cake or the daily paper, but it all adds up," he said from Lisbon. "It's better to keep them for a while longer at least."

As the debate over the fate of coins rages, the Belgian government has taken the side of those who find the mini-money a pocket-filling irritation.

"Making new coins of one or two cents has no use ... We will not produce any more," Finance Minister Didier Reynders said Thursday, adding that the mint will cut production in the new year.

In the Netherlands, the private sector has already taken the initiative. The Association of Dutch Retailers says around 40,000 of the 120,000 retail shops already round off to the nearest 5 cents, including most of the big chains.

The association estimated Dutch stores will save a collective US$36 million each year in time spent counting the coins and transporting them to the bank.

"And that doesn't account for the inconvenience on both sides of the cash register while people fumble with small change," association spokeswoman Anouk Achterberg said when the rounding up plan started late last year.

A poll across the euro zone published by the EU last October found 81 percent of Belgians wanted to drop the 1 cent coins and 72 percent were fed up with the 2 cent piece.

Sixty-one of those questioned wanted to see and end to the 11.276 million 1-cent coins currently circulating. Fifty-five percent felt the same about the 9.5 million 2-cents.

The most fervent supporters of the little coins were the Portuguese, Austrians and Germans. In Germany, many still hanker for the pre-euro pfennig and fear that scrapping the cent will send prices up.