Christopher Rhoades Dÿkema
Ulhas Joglekar wrote:
> The Hindu
>
> Sunday, July 08, 2001
>
> Euro-fear
> Most people are quite simply petrified at the thought of using the new
> currency. Vaiju Naravane on the travails of the French in switching to the
> euro.
> JANINE POUSSIN owns a busy bread and cake shop in Paris. The turnover is
> very quick, especially at peak hours when there are long queues of impatient
> customers waiting to buy fresh, crusty baguettes. ``We have to work
> extremely fast and all the calculations are done in the head. The sums are
> modest and we deal in a great deal of small change. I was worried about how
> we would cope with the switch to the euro and, last Easter, instead of
> giving the customary chocolates to my employees, I bought them europoly
> board games. The girls used the paper money to conduct transactions in euros
> and we are now extremely proficient at using the new money,'' she says with
> justifiable pride.
> She is of a rare breed, however. With the introduction of the single
> currency less than six months away, most businesses in France have still to
> come to grips with the euro and studies show that most people in France are
> quite simply petrified at the thought of using the new currency.
> ``One fine morning I saw all the four figure amounts in my account reduced
> to three figures and I did a backward flip. I almost got a panic attack
> figuring out how I'd managed to spend so much, wondering where the money had
> gone before realising that employee accounts at the bank had been converted
> so as to give us a head start,'' recalls Ms. Anabelle Madeleine of the
> Credit Lyonnais. ``More seriously, we do expect a certain dislocation to
> take place. People seem to be gripped by paralysis and the information
> effort seems inadequate,'' she says.
> New regulations introduced a month ago oblige shops and businesses to
> display prices first in euros and then in Francs. However, the rules go
> largely ignored. ``I cannot do that. I don't want to scare my customers
> away. In any case, we will have to deal with the problem in six months time.
> Why break our heads now,'' asks Mehmet who sells groceries in his ``Arab
> corner shop''.
> Genevieve is conducting a ``euro class'' at an old people's home in Paris.
> She has distributed small euro converters, real euro notes and coins and is
> asking her pupils (average age 76) to fill up a shopping basket. The class
> is held in the gardens of the Maison Ste Jeanne with a blackboard erected
> against a tree. Most of her pupils are in wheelchairs.
> ``I would like you to buy me a kilo of red mullet, six eggs, a kilo of
> spinach, two litres of milk, two baguettes, a packet of salt, a roll of
> toilet paper and some soap,'' she tells the class. Alfred, a spry
> 80-year-old former schoolteacher, is at the top of the class. ``For all that
> I will have spent 21.6 euros or 142 francs,'' he says enthusiastically. But
> most of the others are bemused, at a loss. ``I just don't know,'' confesses
> Annie and blushes a tomato red.
> ``Children of course are very quick to learn and they have no problems at
> all. Its older people who put up resistance because they are simply afraid.
> I conduct adult literacy class as well and there too, my students struggle
> very hard,' Genevieve says.
> Dominique Duhem is Mister euro at the Bank Credit Mutuel. ``From the point
> of view of the banking sector we appear to be on tack. At the Credit Mutuel
> alone, for instance, we have distributed one million euro chequebooks and
> will have to send out another five million in the next few months. We are
> having some difficulty convincing businessmen to invest in `euro' business
> machines. Right now, we are transferring all the savings accounts from
> francs to euros. The next five months are going to fly past and I fear there
> will be a shortage of trained staff to deal with the inevitable last minute
> rush of clients who have left things too late. Problems could occur in the
> dealings between individuals and shopkeepers and that has to be watched
> carefully.''
> Indeed economists fear an inflationist wave. ``I am worried that shopkeepers
> will take advantage of the switch to the euro to jack up prices. Who will be
> able to check whether the French prices have been retained? For the Germans
> and the Italians everything is a lot simpler because they only have to halve
> or double the sum - more or less. In France, one euro is equal to 6.559
> francs and that makes calculations complicated. The shopkeeper is then
> tempted to ``round off'' the figures in euros and of course, it is going to
> be an upwards rounding off. We have tried to hold talks about this with
> shopkeepers' associations and they have given us certain guarantees. But we
> fear that the consumer will be made to pay for an inflationary spiral,``
> says Ms. Rebecca Schneider who works for the National Consumer's
> Association.
> According to Mr. Jean Claude Hassan, the French Finance Minister's top
> ''euro`` adviser, the problem is simple: ``As of January 1, 2002, we will
> mint just one currency, the euro, in which all transactions must be made.
> The closer we get to that situation as of now, the better it will be for us.
> I applaud the decision by the French electricity company EDF to start
> billing in euros. Other large billing organisations such as phone companies,
> banks, insurances houses should emulate this example. The Government has
> decided to pay its employees in euros as of this month. Our research shows
> that while most people have absorbed the fact that at midnight, on December
> 31, 2001, all transactions in Francs will cease, they have yet to realise
> that it will not be possible to use francs after February 28, 2002. We have
> given people two months to get used to the switch. After that the franc will
> become a museum piece.''
>
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