12-sided...
So I was told there was a reason why the 20p and 50p had an odd number of sides, something to do with mechanical detection.
Was that bollocks or when you get to 12 sides is it close enough to a circle that it's not worth worrying?
In agreeable news for those readers who can remember when it was all trees round here and you could get an enormous paper bagful of gobstoppers for thruppence, The Royal Mint has unveiled a decidedly retro 12-sided design for Blighty's £1 coin. The proposed 12-sided pound coin. Pic: The Royal Mint The mint reckons that a …
Why not bury a RFID tag in them? I know this would put the price up by a penny or two but wouldn't that be a difficult one to duplicate/fake, make the fakes easier to spot using a reader and it might come in handy when you want to know how much you've got sutffed down the back of your piggy bank/sofa.
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The Chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osbourne, enthused: "...paying tribute to the past in the 12-sided design of the iconic threepenny bit." before continuing with the astute observation that this is also a quite fitting tribute considering that the new £1 coin of 2014 will also have roughly the same purchasing power as the iconic threepenny bit of 1953 had in its day.
Do you have a reference for that? It sounds like a hell of a lot to me. The ONS suggests an average wage of £9.30 but neglects to mention if that is a mean or median average.
http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/about-ons/business-transparency/freedom-of-information/what-can-i-request/previous-foi-requests/labour-market/average-gross-weekly-earnings-in-1953/index.html?format=print
9.30 times 52 weeks a year = 483.60 per year. That's specifically for manual workers, so the population average is likely to be somewhat higher, although less than double surely.
Anyway, 9.30 works out at 744 thruppeny bits a week. If, as posted by someone else, a modern pound is equivelent to about 8d in 1953 money, that means the 'average manual wage' in 1953 was equivalent to about 14,500 pounds a year in today's money.
So that's how far living standards have risen in over half a century. Isn't progress nice?
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Buying power... That was my first thought, when I read the article.
My other thought was, introduce the Euro, it is already a 2 metal coin, you'd get a good deal on them as well, 1.2 Euros for every pount - if it goes like the rest of Europe, the shops would then also be able to double the price of all goods over night.
"the shops would then also be able to double the price of all goods over night."
No, it could be beneficial on balance because shops like to round prices up to the next multiple of £10 and then take 1p off to make silly shoppers think it's cheaper. €9.99 is less than £9.99.
"This was originally introduced as an anti theft procedure when electronic tills were introduced- it gave the customer a reason to hang around and see the sale registered cos they were waiting for their change."
I'm sure there were prices such as £2 19/11d (one old penny short of an exact £3) long before there were electronic tills.
According to the Bank of England Inflation Calculator (http://www.bankofengland.co.uk/education/Pages/inflation/calculator/flash/default.aspx) £1 in 1953 has the buying power of £23.64 in 2012, or, if you prefer, £1 in 2012 had a value of 4p (or about 8d) in 1953.
Back in the '50s, 3d was the price of a Mars bar. Thanks to "Mr. Rising Price" Mars bars got proportionally smaller as the years passed. Sometime around 1960, Mars finally restored the size, but upped the price to 4d. Using the Mars bar standard suggests that the present day pound is a bit more valuable than 3d in 1953. (A normal (58 g) Mars bar is now about 60p.)
Foreign readers please note that there are no nuts in a Limey Mars Bar, d=denarius, the standard abbreviation for the old penny that was 1/240th of a pound:) and 3d was, of course, pronounced "thruppence".
Beer: A nice pint of Massey's, with a proper head, to toast those pre-Grotney years when you could buy a round with a ten bob note and still have change for fish and chips.
"Some of the fakes are pretty good"
Indeed they are. I've only had a handful over the years which I've suspected to be forgeries, and I suspect have had more I didn't even realize were fakes. Although, apparently, the quality is getting worse. There's an article on the BBC today on how to spot a forgery.
That's my point, though. Surely there's a high cost to manufacturing a decent forgery? And how do you spend them in bulk? I imagine you could get away with handing over 3 or 4 at a time in the pub (or mixing them with real ones, if they were good enough), but walking into John Lewis with a big bag of 800 shiny coins to buy a new TV would look a little suspect.
I think it doesn't really help that they change the design on coins and banknotes so often. There are so many designs in circulation now that I don't necessarily recognise them all and I'm not that surprised when I see a new one. If I got given a pound coin with a picture of Mickey Mouse on one side, I'd probably assume it's some stupid attempt to commemorate Walt Disney or something.
So now I suspect the fraudsters could start minting 13-sided pound coins and still get away with it. People would just assume it's a new official design.
" 3 per cent? That sounds like a lot."
Depends where you are - I've seen quite a few poor quality forgeries, and quite a few that I couldn't tell weren't but looked "different" to all the other pound coins in my pocket. Luckily the criteria for judging authenticity in the shop is basically size and weight, so it's an open door for forgers.
Having said that, I'm most disappointed with the pound coin forgers - there's so many different designs on pound coins there's a fantastic opportunity to get their own design into circulation, with a latin edge logo something like "less dishonest than bankers".