Dunno about Belgium but what I notice in French supermarkets is that prices aren’t rounded at all. 10k SKUs will have 10k different prices (ish).

Plain frozen pizza? 4,62 EUR.

Same with pepperoni? 4,92 EUR

Domestic 500mL beer? 1,14 EUR

Fancier beer? 1,81 EUR

They really hammered this in. It was even a question on my exams.

I've only checked the data for Italy but real inflation stayed pretty much constant while perceived inflation absolutely blew out of proportion.

So essentially people noticed some minority of shops raising their prices talking advantage of the little confusion around the exchange rate and never shut up about it since

I mean and also the US, but the key difference here is that those are also cohesive countries where wealth transfers between different areas is the norm. Much less problematic if a policy is better for New York than Alabama if you know for sure that the federal government is going to make sure Alabama doesn't get screwed.

In the EU you have the opposite problem: policies that benefit rich countries will result in the rich countries complaining about how they support the other economies and moralizing.

This is ludicrously wrong of India, and I understand enough of human nature and economics that I’d be surprised if it were true of China, though it may be more suppressed.

Monetary policy is government policy. The ruling party is seldom uniformly popular across their entire domain. Perhaps you’re more familiar with US politics: broadly, rural is Republican, urban is Democrat. In India, the ruling party BJP has a lot of the north, but not so much of the south or east. Accordingly, you should expect dissent from regions with a different state government. And as for socioeconomic disparity between states, rich may complain if they seem to be subsidising poor, poor may complain if they don’t seem to be getting enough attention.

[1]https://jacobin.com/2025/07/yanis-varoufakis-on-the-legacy-o...

Also, under under the Communist rule supported by USSR, they indoctrinated people into a version of history that Turks are the absolute evil, and Russians are the absolute angels saving them from the ottomans.

I.e. in pre-EU era it was called Ottoman slavery, later they start calling it Ottoman era as it was more accurate as Ottoman’s system was based on collecting taxes and resources from the conquered places when giving them plenty of autonomy. Obviously not ideal but far from slavery.

For anyone who is new to this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2005_French_European_Constitut...

Only problem is that there are no deadlines and it's up to the country to make a plan for adopting the euro.

However, the benefits of a single currency go beyond cash. It's also about understanding prices. You see a sign for coffee and it's 1199 Hungarian Forint -- or it's 14.99 Polish złoty. It's not clear at all what those numbers mean. Sure it's possible to pull out a currency calculator app to see what the rate is today and what it means in euros. It's not an insurmountable problem, but it is bigger than a mere inconvenience. It's constant friction on not really understanding what's going on. If those coffee prices were instead 2.99 € vs 3.53 €, you would immediately see that the Polish coffee is 20% more expensive.

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As for the payment terminals offering to pay in Euro, as others have already noted, that's a scam. There is a hidden fee, usually around 3.5% - 5.0% of your total, that you get charged for this "convenience". Refusing this and paying in the listed currency will mean that your own bank will do the conversion, which is basically always going to be far cheaper.

Unfortunately this currency conversion scam is so lucrative that even big brands engage in it. Amazon for example asks what currency your card is in. If you select some currency other than what this sepecific Amazon's listed prices are in, well, you're in for another juicy hidden fee, this time to Amazon.

The euro has benefited countries like Germany a lot but not necessarily all countries.

At least - that was my experience spending a couple months there 2-3 years ago.

The euro has depreciated more (in both real purchasing power and against other currencies) than the Deutsche Mark.

The DM was seen as one of the strongest and most stable post-WWII currencies, while the euro has struggled with crises and inflation.

Bulgaria pegging to the DM in 1997 meant anchoring to a much harder currency than what the euro has become.

Joining benefits the country's elites, rather than its general populace -- and it's these elites who decide whether to join.

Bulgaria joining will weaken the Euro, which benefits big, export-oriented economies such as Germany and France. This is how the Euro has always worked: the big economies dilute their trade surpluses at the cost of smaller European countries.

Eurozone doesn't know how to manage the economy successfully. The euro has been a failure. We went from somewhat parity with the US in 2006 to lagging quite behind them 20 years later.