Word: euros
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...gets rolled up for snorting drugs, or lost for years under sofa cushions. Shop clerks and bank tellers at the end of the day have to scrub off the black grime money imparts to their hands. But last week, when 12 European nations rolled out the single currency euro notes and coins, those intrinsically cheap little tokens - inoffensively illustrated with maps or imaginary monuments - managed to make Europeans feel they were part of something rather grand. Maybe never one great nation, and not yet a proper state, but for once a real community...
Even better, it all pretty much went according to plan. In the hours leading up to the Jan.1 switch, there were still a few nagging anxieties that the euro could turn out to be a Y2K-like disaster for real. But those visions of self-destructing cash machines and riots in supermarkets didn't materialize. True, the banking network was stretched pretty thin. Banksys, the group that operates Belgium's atms, recorded some 600 cash withdrawals a minute in the first two hours of the new year. Two hundred Dutch post offices, which also function as banks for many small...
...there were plenty of long lines. In France, motorways backed up as drivers eager to break their francs into euro-change skipped the credit card and electronic "smart-pass" lanes and flooded tollbooths. Meanwhile, some small shopkeepers have resisted government urgings to get the old currency out of the system by giving euros in change for deutsche marks, francs or pesetas. "I am not a bank," gripes a vegetable seller at the Place d'Aligre outdoor market in Paris...
...even a measure of civic-mindedness. A national French bank tellers' strike scheduled for Jan. 2 - widely viewed even in union-friendly France as an opportunistic shakedown - fizzled out after almost everyone showed up for work. And those much-photographed queues outside some banks were strictly voluntary displays of euro- enthusiasm, since in most countries the old currencies are still good for at least another month. The Creditanstalt bank in Vienna opened for five hours on New Year's Day and found itself swamped with customers trading in their schillings for euros, even though almost no stores were open...
Naturally, this had led to worries about merchants taking advantage of the confusion by sneaking in price hikes, or just rounding up their prices with the conversion. At Bar Pamphili in Rome, a single espresso costs 1,100 lire, the equivalent of 57 euro cents. Pay in euros and the same cup costs 60 cents. "We rounded all the prices, some up and some down," owner Giuseppe Scaramuzzo is quick to explain. "Anyway, today is just the first day. It's like an experiment." The early evidence is that most businesses have played fair, with a little cajoling from watchful...