Pavel's Blog

Finland uses the European Union's common currency, the "euro", and that's pretty easy for Americans to get used to. Right now, the exchange rate is about 1.2 dollars to the euro, so you can get along OK thinking of the prices as being like ones in the US, but more expensive. Norway isn't a member of the EU, so of course it's still using its own currency, the kroner. There are currently about 6.5 kroner to the dollar, and that's much trickier for us. I'm constantly trying to divide by six (conservatively, to round up the rate), and the arithmetic isn't helped by the fact that food prices are unexpectedly high here. A packaged chocolate muffin is 23 kroner (over $3.50), a slice of cake in the hotel lobby is 55 kroner (almost $8.50), and a chicken entree at a mid-range Oslo cafe is 190 kroner ($29.25)!

The really odd thing about the Norwegian kroner, however, is not the exchange rate itself, but what that implies about prices. With a single kroner worth about 15 cents, it makes sense that most products are priced as an integral number of kroner. Indeed, the smallest Norwegian coin is the copper half-kroner. Grocery stores, though, like more precision than that coin can afford, so they still price everything in units of a tenth of a kroner (e.g, 24.90, 8.30, etc.). So what happens when you get to the checkout stand and the total comes up as 75.70 kroner? How do you pay that last 0.20 kroner when the smallest coin is 0.50? Simple. The cash registers automatically round all totals to the nearest half-kroner. Sometimes you win a few tenths of a kroner, and sometimes you lose, but always the grocery pricers get their illusion of fine-grained control.