Inside the world’s most annoying economic crisis, on a shortage of coins in Argentina. “Factoring in the 50 centavos he had already handed over, this effectively reduced the fare to 13.50 pesos, which, for reasons I’ll get to in a moment, is actually more than 14.50 pesos.” Hat tip: Paul Kedrosky.
Matt, did you have this problem when you came to Argentina?
Thanks for the article, it’s always interesting to see how people from other countries look at yours. And, as anyone would expect, they don’t understand us! :p
The saddest part (don’t get me wrong, it’s true, but sad) was: “It was no surprise that the cab driver tried to rip us off. We’re in Buenos Aires, Argentina, after all, and we’d made the rookie error of requesting a vague destination instead of giving a precise address—naturally he interpreted this as a license to take us from La Boca to the Plaza de Mayo by way of southern Nicaragua.”
Nope, didn’t have it at all.
It’s a nice article (except the end mentioning Eva Peron). This moneda problem occurs only in Capital Federal. In the city where I lived till this year, there is a different system using proximity cards (you charge it first with as much money as you want, and then you use it in the bus). This system is faster than any other system I’ve seen.
The current bus machines use a slow system for coins. There are many companies, so it’s hard to get a unified system using something like proximity cards here.
And it’s crazy, you feel lucky when you get a coin. Once I needed to buy a soda because I needed one peso, and it took me three places to success. Nobody gives coins, specially street shops.
How well you survived this no-coins issue when you were here?
I never noticed it when I was there, maybe it hadn’t started yet?
The most annoying thing is that it is here to stay with us for at least one more year ( as experts says)
I think that a shortage of coins in argentina is a very inportant matter. Because with a shortage of coins people may be forced to work over christmas. Which could cause family stress and cause people to go on strike.
Any bbPress updates?
It’s all I want for Christmas 🙂