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Post by phoneman on Jul 13, 2014 21:00:32 GMT
Thanks, MC. Rob, it's no further for them to deliver it than for me to pick it up. What ever happened to service with a smile?
Laughingly, I feel like I'm the one on the far side of the pond on this forum.......
Ken
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Post by Rob on Jul 13, 2014 23:15:42 GMT
Import taxes is what happened to service with a smile :-)
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Post by phoneman on Jul 13, 2014 23:38:23 GMT
The only British money I have is shillings and pence. (Many having the picture of the king.) Is that still legal tender? If not, I may have to purchase my MDF from my local Lowe's store about a mile away.
Ken
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Post by Rob on Jul 14, 2014 14:36:23 GMT
MDF hadn't been invented when shillings and old penny's got replaced by decimal currency. Half a crown got replaced by 10p. Ten bob became 50p....got really boring. I still miss threepenny bits :-)
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Post by phoneman on Jul 15, 2014 1:05:50 GMT
Sadly, the last time I was in your neighborhood was in the "quid and bob" era. I'm sure "new pence" are more practical, but I found the old system charming. Hopefully your pint hasn't gone metric......
Ken
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Post by Rob on Jul 15, 2014 13:49:43 GMT
you're safe with the good ol' British pint Ken. They wouldn't dare go anywhere near that :-)
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Post by phoneman on Jul 15, 2014 16:48:44 GMT
the most sacred of sacred cows..........
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mcb
New Member
Posts: 47
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Post by mcb on Jul 16, 2014 7:04:27 GMT
MDF hadn't been invented when shillings and old penny's got replaced by decimal currency. Half a crown got replaced by 10p. Ten bob became 50p....got really boring. I still miss threepenny bits :-) Half a crown was worth 12.5 new pence. I have some silver threepenny bits somewhere. I still use guineas MCB
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Post by Rob on Jul 16, 2014 7:58:52 GMT
Half a crown was indeed 12.5p and a crown was 25 of course. But if you remember, retailers jumped at the chance of "repricing" everything that was close in value to goods that were actually more expensive. I always remember things that had been say 10p under a pound, were suddenly exactly £1 in new currency. Total rip off.
But my local sweet shop used to do a bag of sweets for half a crown. They rebranded the bag to only 10p in decimal currency. Hurrah :-)
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mcb
New Member
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Post by mcb on Jul 16, 2014 14:34:16 GMT
Half a crown was indeed 12.5p and a crown was 25 of course. But if you remember, retailers jumped at the chance of "repricing" everything that was close in value to goods that were actually more expensive. I always remember things that had been say 10p under a pound, were suddenly exactly £1 in new currency. Total rip off. But my local sweet shop used to do a bag of sweets for half a crown. They rebranded the bag to only 10p in decimal currency. Hurrah :-) You are probably a lot younger than me (since you were buying sweets in 1971) but it wasn't long after so-called decimalisation that things that were three shillings before February 1971 became 30 new pence and nobody noticed. Did you check that your 10 penny bag of sweets contained the same weight as the half-crown bag? Decimalisation was actually centesimalisation (since one pound was divided into 100 pence NOT ten). Some time ago, I bought a reciprocating saw (priced at £24.99) from Aldi when it was marked reduced. I asked how much it was reduced and the boy on the checkout said, after some time, “you can have it for half price”. ”£12.50?“ I asked. “How did you work that out without a calculator” he replied. So, decimal currency hasn't made it easier for many people!! MCB
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Post by Rob on Jul 17, 2014 0:16:44 GMT
That's so very sad. That such simple mental maths is out of reach. Mind you that might say more about Aldi's hiring policy than anything else. I mean...they're not the sharpest bevel in the toolkit are they :-)
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Post by Pete on Jul 17, 2014 7:48:25 GMT
Some time ago, I bought a reciprocating saw (priced at £24.99) from Aldi when it was marked reduced. I asked how much it was reduced and the boy on the checkout said, after some time, “you can have it for half price”. ”£12.50?“ I asked. “How did you work that out without a calculator” he replied. So, decimal currency hasn't made it easier for many people!! MCB First off I had to think hard on how many pennies 99 pence would work out as, but as you rounded it out I gave up and almost settled on £12,10shillings but then I realised that there was no such thing as a reciprocating saw in 1971 let alone one sold in supermarkets Half crown bag of sweets! the penny bag was quite full as I remember it, and half crown was my weeks school dinner money. Ah when I were a lad... Strange thing is the older generation manipulated 48 farthings to a shilling, 240 pennies to a pound, 14 pounds (lbs) to a stone, 112lbs to one hundredweight? But ask them to work out binary or hexadecimal and that's modern techi stuff way to complex
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Post by Pete on Jul 17, 2014 7:54:39 GMT
BTW £24 19' and 8pennies was my calculation on £24.99 pence... but I was only 11 when we switched over and don't really remember the "just under" pricing, if it existed
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mcb
New Member
Posts: 47
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Post by mcb on Jul 17, 2014 18:28:37 GMT
Some time ago, I bought a reciprocating saw (priced at £24.99) from Aldi when it was marked reduced. I asked how much it was reduced and the boy on the checkout said, after some time, “you can have it for half price”. ”£12.50?“ I asked. “How did you work that out without a calculator” he replied. So, decimal currency hasn't made it easier for many people!! MCB First off I had to think hard on how many pennies 99 pence would work out as, but as you rounded it out I gave up and almost settled on £12,10shillings but then I realised that there was no such thing as a reciprocating saw in 1971 let alone one sold in supermarkets Half crown bag of sweets! the penny bag was quite full as I remember it, and half crown was my weeks school dinner money. Ah when I were a lad... Strange thing is the older generation manipulated 48 farthings to a shilling, 240 pennies to a pound, 14 pounds (lbs) to a stone, 112lbs to one hundredweight? But ask them to work out binary or hexadecimal and that's modern techi stuff way to complex The reciprocating saw business was a few years ago, NOT pre-decimal. If an elderly person needed to do sums in hexadecimal every day, I'm sure that they would be able to do so The issue is familiarity. There never used to be any difficulty in calculations using base 12 and base 20 when we had £sd. Nobody used calculators then. Tills in shops did not add up and tell the assistant how much change to give. I despair sometimes MCB
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Post by Rob on Jul 17, 2014 19:03:48 GMT
Darts...that's where my mental arithmetic came from :-)
I also remember fruit salads and black jacks at a ha'penny each. 2 for one old penny. Wonder what they would cost now if of course they even existed?
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