I sorted a pile of change (accumulated from random exchanges that we can't remember anymore) according to their year and denomination, and made a few observations that I didn't expect:
First of all, most of them were made between 1999 and 2003. That one's not surprising at all, given that's around when countries started using the Euro.
The 5 cent, 10 cent, and 20 cent coins all have one year each when they appeared way more frequently than other years, and that year was 2001, 2000, and 2002 respectively. Did the Finnish mint focus mostly on one of these denominations per year in the beginning, or what happened?
@vurpo that’s because we’re poor enough to actually use them
@xerz Yeah but why are they all from 2008
@vurpo that’s the year the crisis hit hard
@xerz Interesting, and if that really is the reason I have a ton of Spanish 2008 1 cent coins here on the opposite side of Europe, I also wonder if that's the same reason I have no coins from 2009
But it's quite funny as even spending Euros in Germany or Slovakia I see Spanish coins more often that I would expect them. Or it's just autosuggestion, dunno
@naruciakk @vurpo I mean, 2018-2020 was a decent enough period that it was rather weird to see anyone moving around calderilla, but until then it’s been quite harsh to sustain a decent lifestyle for a lot of people, so we tried to save up whatever we could, and figure out later where to spend it back or convert it to higher units.
And yeah, notice they’re all from 2008, a very specific year where very specific things happened.
@naruciakk @vurpo As for why shouldn’t there be lots of Slovakian coins: the Spanish economy is simply orders of magnitude bigger, and especially was back in 2008 when everything popped. Money supply had to be sustained to keep inflation low, as demand for such low units dramatically increased.
Sure I don’t have a PhD on this, but from first experience that’s my opinion.
And notice the big pile of 1 cent coins in 2008. All of those are Spanish. Why are 2/3 of my 1 cent coins Spanish coins from 2008? 🤔 This was the biggest surprise to me.