> > The reason? Way back when the euro was first introduced, the Finnish bank made its most idiotic decision ever: The 1 and 2 cent coins, while still recognised as legal tender, were cut off from the circulation in Finland. All cash sums are always rounded off to the nearest 5 cent coins, to prevent customers from ever getting 1 or 2 cent coins from anywhere else than banks.
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> If this is going to turn into a debate over the existence of the penny, I think all Canadian and US prices should be rounded to the nearest nickel and the penny should be removed from circulation.
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> I don't care whether it costs more than a cent to mint a penny. I just don't want them in my pocketses. They're not preciouss enough. They're just heavy, bulky and jingly for no good reason.
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> When I was in Israel, about 12 years ago, all prices were rounded to the nearest 0.05 Shekel. The cash registers did it automatically. Their 0.01 Shekel coin was effectively out of circulation.
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> The weird thing, though, is that some stores still had prices ending in .99.
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> If you think about it, not many people would complain if they had to pay 1 to 4 cents extra for every purchase (not every item purchased, just once on the total). Nobody makes buying decisions based on single cent price differences, and small items or items sold in bulk are no problem because you just round the total.

What I think is idiotic about the Finnish bank's decision is not the mandatory rounding, but the fact that they still chose to mint the 1 and 2 cent coins, and purposefully keep them as elitist collectors' items.
Way back when we still had the Finnish markka and penni, the single penni (0.01 markkas) was recognised as a logical monetary sum, for example in bank accounts, but the smallest physical coin was 10 pennis. This was the smallest coin that *EXISTED* - not the smallest coin *IN CIRCULATION*, as is the case today. That's a big difference in my opinion.