Ask a homeowner the difference between a 2% loan (euro price) and 5% (local currency) and you’ll understand why so many countries have opted for the Euro.
It was specifically for Bulgaria, the only EU country to use the Cyrillic alphabet. Eurozone membership was a distant thought at that point, but they knew they'd be in eventually. Now's the time!
At least - that was my experience spending a couple months there 2-3 years ago.
But on the other hand, anything that reduces the domination of the US dollar is welcome.
Isn't this kind of what the US is doing though?
Could you elaborate on what you mean? I've not run a business, but from the people I know who do complain similarly about cross-EU and cross-US-state business.
Like the company based in Texas who got their first employee in New York. Suddenly they needed some sort of presence in New York State, get a separate insurance, and accountants for New York State. (federal, state, and city income tax). They have to really want that employee.
From what I've heard, selling across state lines is fine in either case. Getting employees / expanding into new state is in both cases a big deal. Withdrawing (presence, not sales) from a US state is spoken about similarly to if it's a new country.
For employee relocation, that's definitely true. Even moving from Hawaii to Alaska is less of a life change than Spain to Poland. Or hell, probably even Spain to Portugal.
I'm surprised to hear you say selling would be that hard, though. It'd be interesting to see a comparison. And there's also both B2C and B2B.
For the Lev to be independent we have to exit the currency board but this is madness, since our exports are already adjusted to EU countries where the currency is EUR anyway.
It's still hilarious to me how upset people are at this (or at least pretend to be).
It's similar to free plastic bags or deposit system for bottles. Inconvenience is so tiny that no person genuinely complain about that (not for social karma/attention), but economically when there were millions of bags and half a million bottles sold every day...
To put it into HN-themed metaphor, reducing error log verbosity matters too, when you have millions of lines.
Are you 80 or something? It takes two tries to adjust and understand that it is much superior to unattached cap.
The whole thing is a big meme to make fun of EU, because there’s barely anything else to complain about.
I don't get why people don't like it.
I even find myself vaguely annoyed now whenever I drink from glass bottles, that those caps are loose.
> People are upset because it shows Brussels disfunction
Reminds me to that meme where the debated point is what OS is better, and the conclusion is that normal people don't talk about operating systems. The only people I ever hear mention Brussels unprompted are rightwing grifters.
To paraphrase this differently: if I as an investor gave you 100M EUR and 24 months, would you be happy to spend it for changing a frigging cap on the bottle or would you rather invest that money and time+people resources on something else?
Not what I said.
> in the context of the global situation, not really efficient at all in making the quality of life of EU citizens any better?
Why would all decisions have to be this massively efficient slamdunk of an idea? Things can even be downright specifically bad yet still be generally useful in the grand scheme of things. Things can also be just kind of a stinker sometimes. You don't normally skewer something large over a minor issue. Critique is fine, but then "I don't like it" doesn't hold much weight, certainly not more than "well I do".
> would you rather invest that money and time+people resources on something else?
Are the levers I can and am expected to pull on the same as the EU? I don't think so.
It's exactly what you were questioning and which is why I gave you the concrete example why people get attached to this particular non-problem.
As for the rest of your comment, I think it went a little bit over your head.
My remark about most people who bring up Brussels unprompted being rightwing grifters really was just that, and nothing else.
It is not lost on me that like anything, they can and should be critiqued as well.
It's just not really being done, and when it is done, it's usually coming from a place of ulterior motives and ill faith (for now), and so is fairly uncommon. So it's a strange thing to claim that that's what "people think of". No it isn't, not unless you're in the aforementioned circles, which is not the general populace at all.
> To paraphrase this differently: if I as an investor gave you 100M EUR and 24 months, would you be happy to spend it for changing a frigging cap on the bottle or would you rather invest that money and time+people resources on something else?
Grifter 101 – “think about what we’d be able to achieve if you did X instead of Y, comrade!”.
Let me clarify here, cause the editing window for my comment upstream from this has already passed:
> People are upset because it shows Brussels disfunction in a nutshell.
This is what I was reacting to when I said that in my experience people who bring up Brussels like this "are rightwing grifters".
It wasn't in the sense that I was pointing at the person above or anyone else in particular here with this label, but rather, that I was taking an issue with the claim that this kind of thinking (Brussels this, Brussels that) is a people at large thing ("people are upset because"), rather than just something prevalent in those aforementioned circles.
This does sort of imply that I think the person above my comments belongs to those circles, but that really doesn't need to be true, nor was that really my intention to suggest necessarily. I guess this is as good of a lesson for me as any why engaging in labeling (particularly negative one) can be detrimental to discourse, regardless of context. Apologies.
The new lids are harder for kids to use, bother you when drinking, get in the way when pouring and are a general nuisance.
How? Just rotate it by 90 degrees. It's really not that hard, and in return you will never lose a cap again and we reduce litter by quite a bit. It's a pretty good trade-off imo.
Eurozone doesn't know how to manage the economy successfully. The euro has been a failure. We went from somewhat parity with the US in 2006 to lagging quite behind them 20 years later.
My bank account disagrees.
This benefits the bigger economies, at the expense of the smaller economies. Any fiscal policy is dictated by the bigger countries, and with identical currencies, the only policy left for Bulgarians is to cut wages in public sector. This will impact local economy, and ripple through their society becoming poorer. And the bigger foreign corporations can ransack the place. Brilliant.
Over the years I've seen a lot of missinformation on this topic that follows pretty much this exact train of thought. Why would countries join the EU and the Euro if it didn't benefit them?
The baltics have all grown massively since the 90s when they became independent, and even though they all were on nice trajectories they still all decided to join the EU and the Euro.
Bringing up the UK as some model for all other "small" european countrie sounds odd. The UK joined the EEC specifically because it had slower economic growth than the other large EU countries.
The UK, and specifically the city of london, with its huge international financial pull has a very different place in the global economy than Bulgaria...
Joining benefits the country's elites, rather than its general populace -- and it's these elites who decide whether to join.
Bulgaria joining will weaken the Euro, which benefits big, export-oriented economies such as Germany and France. This is how the Euro has always worked: the big economies dilute their trade surpluses at the cost of smaller European countries.
That's bullshit. The decision to join is made via referendum.
Also, the addition of Bulgaria means it's almost possible to travel from Spain to Greece entirely through the Eurozone, with only a thin sliver of Serbia or Macedonia in the way. (Assuming we include Montenegro and Kosovo in the Eurozone: technically they aren't, but for all practical purposes they are.)
It'll also be interesting to see who's next. Czechia is not far off but doesn't seem to be in a hurry, while Romania wants in but still seems to be a ways off. Poland and Hungary will stay outside unless there are major political changes.
For certain definitions of "success". The 2010s weren't such a great time:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euro_area_crisis
The EU isn't as integrated (e.g., labour mobility) as other currency areas, and so problems in one region are harder to fix.
My experiences in non-Euro, Schengen countries is that all payment terminals offer me the choice to pay in Euro or the local currency. In many cases in tourist areas (of Czechia, Poland, and Bulgaria) I only encountered terminals that asked for payment in Euro.
However, the benefits of a single currency go beyond cash. It's also about understanding prices. You see a sign for coffee and it's 1199 Hungarian Forint -- or it's 14.99 Polish złoty. It's not clear at all what those numbers mean. Sure it's possible to pull out a currency calculator app to see what the rate is today and what it means in euros. It's not an insurmountable problem, but it is bigger than a mere inconvenience. It's constant friction on not really understanding what's going on. If those coffee prices were instead 2.99 € vs 3.53 €, you would immediately see that the Polish coffee is 20% more expensive.
--
As for the payment terminals offering to pay in Euro, as others have already noted, that's a scam. There is a hidden fee, usually around 3.5% - 5.0% of your total, that you get charged for this "convenience". Refusing this and paying in the listed currency will mean that your own bank will do the conversion, which is basically always going to be far cheaper.
Unfortunately this currency conversion scam is so lucrative that even big brands engage in it. Amazon for example asks what currency your card is in. If you select some currency other than what this sepecific Amazon's listed prices are in, well, you're in for another juicy hidden fee, this time to Amazon.
Granted, I haven't recently been to any EU country without the Euro, but my main bank charges extortionate conversion fees, 2.sth%, with a ridiculous minimum per transaction.
A few months ago, I've ordered something off Amazon UK (while in the UK) and the conversion they offered was very close to the official GBP / EUR exchange rate, way below my bank's minimum. The price wasn't high, either, on the order of 10 €.
Also in Europe people use the likes of Revolut to set up virtual native currency accounts on the fly (with IBAN) with FX free transactions up to a certain level per month dependent on tier.
It's not about passports, it's about border controls within the area. Before Schengen you would have to wait for hours and hours in a queue at the border. Now that border check doesn't exist anymore. The check doesn't exist regardless of what passport you have, there's just nobody there.
The lack of direct documentation/instructions or link in the terminals to official rules strikes me as horrible ux. You basically just have to be in the know or know who to ask?
In Germany, there was a sliver of time where stores essentially taped a piece of paper to terminals with instructions and big red arrows to select a specific scheme because that would benefit the store (and not cost the consumer extra). It didn't really stick, however. I suspect because it was two extra button presses and the consumer wouldn't notice either way.
When it comes to exchanging cash, avoid currency exchanges at places like airports, tourist hotspots, etc. as they will usually offer worse rates than elsewhere.
Only problem is that there are no deadlines and it's up to the country to make a plan for adopting the euro.
All EU emitted debt goes towards specific projects.
Cost is loss of key economic levers, price increases, and potentially less competitive exports.
I don't think a blanket statement like yours holds. Ot works for Germany (unsurprisingly) but some countries suffered.