Swiss currency

I've included a picture of what some bills look like in Switzerland. As I mentioned before, the currency is very colorful. Each demonination is a different size so that you can tell what you've got by touch. (There's a case working its way through U.S. courts right now that might result in the U.S. having to redesign its currency so that people with disabilities can tell the different demoniations apart. That would be interesting.)


















Large denominations are much more common around here than in the U.S. When's the last time you paid for something in the U.S. with a hundred-dollar bill? Here, though, we toss around one- and two-hundred franc bills without thinking about it. I'd be a little embarrassed in the U.S. to make a small purchase with a large bill, but around here, no one cares.

They've done a cool thing in Switzerland that we should do in the U.S. (but we won't): get rid of the penny. Everything you buy here ends in a 0 or a 5. The smallest coin we use around here is the Swiss version of a nickel. Another nice thing is that tax is already figured into the posted price of goods, so if you see something on the shelf that costs 2.05, it really costs 2.05--no more tax is added in.

For those of you who are really curious, here are the coins (bear in mind that "rappen" are the Swiss equivalents of cents): 5 rappen, 10 rappen, 20 rappen, 50 rappen, one franc, two francs, and five francs. Here are the bills: 10 francs, 20 francs, 50 francs, 100 francs, 200 francs, and 1000 francs. (No, I haven't tossed around a thousand-franc bill yet.) I'm not fast enough yet to be able to tell the differences between the coins based on size, so I just have to hope that the cashier is being honest in giving me the right amount of change. In Switzerland, that's a pretty safe bet.

Given the fact that you get coins for everything up to five francs, you can guess that the abundance of coins can result in an unmanageable amount of change kicking around in one's pocket. Stace, for some unknown reason, embraces the coin lifestyle. She likes to accumulate them. I try to spend them as soon as I get them. Once in a while, I help her out by taking all of the 10- and 20-rappen coins out of her purse, going to a bus ticket machine, and dropping in 25 or 30 coins to get a bus ticket. She'll be overwhelmed with gratitude at some point when she realizes how much good I'm doing for her.