Numismatic

On most days, I leave for work way too early. Not only do I get less sleep than I might prefer, but I pass the newsstand prior to the delivery of the morning dailies. I may get these papers later in Lucea, but only if I have time to run in for lunch. On most days, I enjoy a fine prepackaged repast in the company of my desk chair, contemplating the stunning view of my laptop. This paucity of paper purchases results in a build up of small coins in my pocket, and so much recently that I began to walk with a slightly jingling limp.

So yesterday I began my mission to reduce the coinage levels in my pants. Not exactly an impossible mission, but arduous, nonetheless. My first step was to glean out the twenty, ten, and five dollar coins, depositing them in a small container in the van. This left me with a dozen and a half of the almost worthless one dollar coins, a completely worthless Jamaican ten cent piece (current value: US$ 0.0021), and four or five tokens for the uniformly unlevel pool table at the yacht club.

The bill at the grocery that very evening was JA $1,077.15. I gave the nice lady an even JA $1,100.00 plus seven of the near worthless aluminum micro-ingots. My plan then, cunningly developed on the fly, was to receive in change thirty Jamaican dollars, most suitably composed of two coins, one of ten dollars and one of twenty dollars.

What I received instead was six five dollar coins, as they were out of all other coinage. I laughed as I left the store. I should have expected that my plan to rid myself of seven small coins would be thwarted by the receipt of six larger ones.
Anyway, the more mathematically critical reader may question the above and wonder about the missing fifteen cents. Good for you.

The answer is: we forget about them. The single dollars are annoying enough, so who would want to deal with something one hundred times smaller? Not the Jamaicans, it seems. The beggarman stationed at the grocery tries to hit me up for twenty or fifty dollars - not a single dollar - and certainly not for coppers. In fact, I regularly find one and five dollar coins (red money) in the very lot in which he plies his trade.

I have never seen a penny here, except for a couple of large old pence left in the apartment by the former numismatic resident. The ten cent coin, about the size of a wafer thin shirt button, appears on the ground with some regularity, but I have only received one as change. The same with the quarter dollar. They may not even be legal tender anymore.

There used to be twenty dollar bills. I have one tucked away, from our early days here. These were all recalled in lieu of the shiny new twenty dollar coin, a nice two-metal thing with a crisp rendition of National Hero the Right Excellent Marcus Garvey on the face and the Jamaican crest (“out of many, one people”) on the hind side.

The latest addition to the local monetary system is the JA $1,000 bill, featuring the Right Honorable Michael Manley and Jamaica House, where he lived as the first Prime Minister selected by the current Party ‘N Power. At today’s exchange, it is worth roughly twenty one Yankee dollars. This is the largest bill on the island.

Imagine, if you will, finally deciding to buy that used Corolla you have had your eye on. In stark white, with little active suspension remaining, it would make the perfect robot taxi, and it is priced at a very reasonable JA $342,000.00. Add tax and bumper mounted goat deflectors, and the price comes to roughly JA $400,000.00, or four hundred individual copies of the largest bill on the island (since few people have access to, or even accept, cheques). This is a wad to fill a Lada bag.
My grocery adventure actually could have been worse. As in - at least they had coin at all. Too often, this particular establishment has no dollar coins, and will offer a piece of candy instead of the correct change. What can you do?

Sometimes the bank in Lucea will be out of change, or large bills, or small bills, or tellers. It is just a little trying to stand in line for an hour with fifty others, waiting for one of the three available tellers manning one of the ten available teller windows, only to be informed that there are no $1000’s or $500’s, and would you please accept a bushel of $100’s instead.

If I am lucky and the bank does have all of its cents about it, I make sure to withdraw funds in all of the denominations. My usual lunch haunts could never change a large bill, nor could the market people or any roadside beer vendor, so one must be prepared with exact change whenever possible.

I have a theory about this lost change. If you would rather not hear it, just skip down seven paragraphs, to the one that starts, “I have spent,…”

Unlike the States, everyone on Jamaica does not own their own car. As well, people do not learn to drive until such time as they have access to a car, so we see a lot of adults idling their way down the peninsula near home, hands clamped to the wheel of the driver education vehicle. The lack of personal ownership of vehicles is a good thing in one respect – the existing transportation system offers little room for more cars. The roads are crowded enough in town, mostly with taxis and minibuses.

When the footbound Jamaican needs to travel, she can take a variety of public transports. The government runs a bus service for the transshipment of school kids, and has some scheduled routes around Kingston. Minibuses connect the rural towns with the larger burgs. Taxis pick up the slack.

And there is a lot of slack on Jamaica.

And all of it is cheap. At least, compared to our wage, it is for the locals. If we white folk were to hop a taxi from the house to Doctor’s Cave Beach, the tourist price could be JA $200 to JA $300 or more a head. The local might pay JA $30 to get to the transit center in town, and another JA $20 to complete the trip.

As most of the traffic is locals traveling locally, the taximen collect huge numbers of fares in the twenty to fifty dollar range. Since the typical taxi guy is driving for fourteen hours a day, he has no time to deposit these monies into a local bank, and he ends up hoarding piles of small bills in his mattress, until such time as he decides to trade in the ol’ Lada Riva wagon and buy that white Corolla with the iffy suspension that he has had his eye on. Then he presents the seller with seventeen Lada bags full of fifties, hundreds, and assorted coin, which the seller takes to the bank, and on that day they have change.

Change is inevitable. Read More......