So, now that we’re in London, we have to adjust to British pounds. It makes you think about how money is designed.
The euro is a very new currency, and it was clearly designed by currency snobs. Coins come in 1, 2, 5, 10, 20, and 50 cents, plus €1 and €2. Bills follow the same 1-2-5 strategy: €5, €10, €20, €50. 1, 2, and 5-cent coins are copper-colored and increase in size proportionally. The 1-cent euro coin is so tiny and cute that we have to keep some as souvenirs. 10, 20, and 50 cents are gold. 1 euro is a small circle of silver ringed by a larger circle of gold. 2 euros is a small circle of gold ringed by a larger circle of silver, plus it’s larger. The edges are also textured such that a blind person can easily distinguish coins by size and texture. The paper bills are also scaled in size proportionally to value, which starts to get annoying once you hit €50 notes.
Now you hit the British pound, a currency which evolved more than was designed. Coins also come in 1, 2, 5, 10, 20, and 50 pence, £1 and £2. The 1p coin looks about like our penny. The 2p coin is also copper-colored and ENORMOUS (ie about the size of a quarter). 5p is silver-colored and about the size of a dime. 20p is silver, smaller than a quarter, and has seven sides. £1 is also smaller than a quarter, gold-colored, and REALLY thick. £2 looks sort of like the €2 coin. (Oh, and the £20 note is larger than the €50 note and peeks a good half-inch over the top of my wallet.)
The point to all of this is that without a lot of drilling to recognize coins on sight, you’re going to fumble around for minutes with your change, squinting at the little numbers and annoying cashiers, when you try to pay for things. Getting into the swing of the money was so easy in Spain and so difficult in the UK that you can see that currency design really does matter.
Accepting that I can’t possibly be objective, I’d say that the US currency is somewhere between pounds and euros in the bizarro unpredictability factor. A lot of that is just that we don’t do so many coins. We don’t really do silver dollars or 50-cent pieces anymore. Pennies are copper, nickels are way bigger and thicker than the tiny dimes, and quarters are a nice respectable size for their value. And once you get to paper money, it’s just a matter of looking at the numbers for anyone. We don’t do the brightly colored, variable-size paper bills that seem to be all the rage over here, but I admit that I don’t think it makes that much difference for usability except perhaps for the blind.
Don’t forget, we also lose points with the international community for having coins that say things like “one dime” and “quarter dollar” instead of “10″ and “25.”
Agreed. British coins have “one pound” and “one penny” in tiny type, which is on the long list of things that screw me up. The other coins seem to have clearly marked numbers.
I need to go back and change this post to say that the 2 pence coin is the size of a 50-cent piece, though, not just a quarter. That thing is huge. I’m still stacking up coins because I can’t make change smaller than a pound in real time.
Fair, but I have to say that we’re still better off than farthing, penny, shilling, florin, crown, guinea, sovereign, bob, quid, unites, laurels, …
What’s the date on the tuppence you’re looking at? I was sorting through all of the British currency I (and my relatives) had collected over the years and discovered that with each new design (as Elizabeth II shows up then gets older) the coins are smaller. So an old tuppence is HUGE, while a new one is merely really big.
I have what looks like a younger Elizabeth on a 1989 coin and an older one on 2004 and 2006, but they’re all the same size.
I shudder to think of how large the tuppence coins must be from older than that!