New money in 2006?

My wife tends to be the person who does our family grocery shopping. If you wanted to talk to me about inflation you could ask about industry, wages, transport; but food shopping passed me by.

Imagine my shock a couple of days ago when I went to a shop to buy a short list of items for my wife who was preparing a New Year’s meal for our guests. The lines at the till were long and I had to queue for ages. I’ve never been very good at queuing and it wasn’t long before I was grumbling about the slowness and inefficency of the teller with the person standing behind me. No one in the queue had a trolley of items – it was all baskets – and there was no reason for the long delays and slow service.

When I got to the counter the truth hit me. The poor teller’s fingers were dropping off from the amount of money she had to count with every sale. Every basket of goodies required a fat wedge of notes to be counted; she couldn’t keep up. The next shock came when she told me the price of my purchase. Just before I had left the house my wife had called to me, “make sure you take enough money” and she’d also said, “there’s money in my handbag if you need it”. But I had what I thought was a brick of money in my pocket. In fact, I had so much that I’d had to split it accross various pockets in my clothes.

It wasn’t enough. Can you imagine my annoyance after all that time and frustration when I realised I didn’t have enough money to pay for the few items in my basket!!

So back home I went (wasting precious and expensive fuel) to fetch more money. My wife handled it diplomatically – her only comment was “Now you know why I asked for a bigger handbag for Christmas”.

As I drove back to join the queues at my local shop for a second time I thought that I would definately buy her that handbag. But if the price of margarine is anything to go buy, I think I might need a suitcase with wheels to carry the money required to pay for a luxury item like a handbag!

Our largest note here is a Z$20,000, but it’s a joke! There’s not much you can buy for less than Z$20,000 these days.

I now understand why I keep being told that ‘money counting machines’ would be a good business to get into. One friend was quoted Z$85 million for one (85 million amounts to 4250 Z$20,000 notes – try counting that and see how long your fingers last!)

But even as we joke we figure that it won’t be long before the government printing presses start turning and more paper money is spat out. I’m curiously waiting to see whether it’ll be a Z$1 million note, or will they have the foresight to go bigger.

Wallpaper might be a better business venture – any bids for a room papered with money…?

Happy New Year everyone!

Technorati Tags: Zimbabwe, New Year, 2006, Inflation, Economy, Poverty, currency

This entry was posted by Just Business on Sunday, January 1st, 2006 at 4:39 pm. You can follow any comments on this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.