Egypt's one-pound frustration

Ask any Egyptian if there’s any minor inconvenience in his daily life, and he’ll probably mention the new one and half pound coins. Since they’ve appeared, they’ve been a major source of annoyance and frustration.
It started in 2005, when the government decided to stop printing paper one and half pound notes and issue coins instead. It makes business sense. In Egypt, nothing is more valued in our daily life than loose change. The more you have the better. Whether you’re going to take a taxi, hop onto a bus, buy a can of Coke or have a snack, change is priceless. Walking around with nothing but a single hundred pound note is like walking around with no money.
The smaller bills circulate through hundreds of hands each day, making them last for less than six months. I can’t count the number of times I saw a woman pull a soggy one pound note out of her bra, or a man on a bus picking his teeth with a half pound. Consequently, more bills have to be printed every six months or so to make up for the damaged ones. On the other hand, a single coin can last for decades before it needs to be replaced.
None of this matters with Egyptians, though. They couldn’t care less about saving the government’s money. To them, it’s just another plan officials have cooked up to make life that tiny bit harder. When I first started using the coins in 2005, I would routinely get strange looks from shop owners as if I had just given them a ten piaster coin or some foreign currency. In most cases, they refused to take them, protesting that “it isn’t real money” or that “nobody accepts them when we return them as change”.
As a result, nobody used them and they soon disappeared. People rejoiced, thinking the government had realized the foolishness and high cost of such a venture and changed its mind. One taxi driver said “they’re so stupid. It’s obviously cheaper to print money than to make metal coins”.
An unpleasant surprise was in store for Egyptians when the coins were released again in 2007, in lighter and smaller form. This time, they were here to stay. The Central Bank of Egypt is no longer printing one and half pounds. The coins were met with huge opposition. Nobody could buy anything with them without an argument. It was as if the coins were designed to be used only in big supermarket chains. The moment a cashier at a small shop would see a coin emerging from a customer’s pocket, he’d say “don’t you have any paper?” No amount of persuasion could convince him that the paper pound was leaving for good. In the end, they either grudgingly accepted or were willing to break a ten or twenty to avoid the coins.
The coins were also the cause of a number of fights between minibus drivers and passengers. Passengers refused to accept them as change and so drivers refused to accept them as fares. Last March in 6th October City, a passenger attacked a driver with a knife upon receiving nine pounds in coins.
Many people complain that they’re too heavy to carry. “What’s easier? To carry ten pounds in coins or paper? There’s no wallet to carry all that” one student says.
Taxi drivers hate them for different reasons. The way they see it, holding out your money for a couple of coins just diminishes the value of the money. If you give a driver three pounds in paper, he won’t object. But try giving him three coins and it makes him feel like he’s not getting enough money.
Lots of women find a hard time with the coins because if they’re taking from or giving money to a man, they end up touching his hand. To avoid this, they’ve devised elaborate ways of holding out their hands for the money rather than taking them from a man’s hand. All this sounds trivial, but many have complained about it. Of all women, those most upset are the niqabis. They dress up in black from head to toe so men don’t see them, so they’re not very happy when they have to touch a man’s hand to accept change.
Egyptians regularly complain that the coins fall out of their pockets when they pull their cell phones or keys out. And because they’re so small, they’re impossible to find once you drop them.
When the coins returned in 2007, numerous shouting matches erupted on public transportation, too. Passengers refused to accept them, often making hilarious excuses like “my pocket is full of holes!” Once, I saw a passenger get out of his seat and pull out his pocket to prove his point. Others offered reasons like “they are ripping my wallet apart” or “how am I supposed to carry those? In a bag?”
Egyptians consider public transport the best place to get rid of money they don’t want. The conductor doesn’t care what the money looks like because at the end of the day it enters the government’s coffers and not his pocket. I saw a very funny encounter take place when a bus passenger tried to get rid of a one pound coin by using it to pay for the journey. The conductor, well aware of this trick and not prepared to be made a fool of, returned the change in the form of a half pound coin (he had a lot of paper, but wanted to make a point). The grumbling passenger, unwilling to admit he wanted paper just for the sake of it, returned the coin and said “could you give me two quarters? I need the change”. The conductor was well prepared for this attack too. Rather than hand over two quarters in paper, like the passenger wanted, he pulled two quarter pound coins out of the depths of his pocket. A fight was about to take place, but a fellow passenger offered to relieve him of the cumbersome coins in exchange for paper.
Time hasn’t taught people to be fully accepting of the coins. Cashiers are still on the lookout for angry reactions when they offer a handful of them in change, always apologizing beforehand. Minibus drivers still exact their revenge on that annoying passenger who breaks a ten to pay for a one pound journey by giving him nine pounds in coins.
It’s better than in 2007, though. All shop owners accept the metal burdens, and all customers except the most nitpicky have learned to deal with them as a part of everyday life. Mohamed Ahmed, the famous fuul and falafel restaurant in Alexandria, has an enlarged newspaper clipping hung above the cashier’s head. The article is entitled “Goodbye to the paper pound”. Whenever a customer objects, the cashier silently points to the article.
Taxi drivers reluctantly accept the coins now, after rumors circulated that one minibus driver got jail time for refusing to accept the coins as payment.
Rumors abound that the Central Bank is planning on releasing five and ten pound coins. When this happens, we’ll be back to square one.
BM