www.SilentMajority.co.UK/EUroRealist
EUro John Smith HERALD TRIB 20011116.rtf
International Herald Tribune
John Schmid
2001 11.16
F
RANKFURT: Will Jenssen nearly fell victim to the price gouging that is sweeping Europe ahead of the introduction of euro notes and coins in January.
Mr. Jenssen, a die-hard James Bond fan, was shopping for a DVD of the film "Licence to Kill" at his favorite online outlet based in the Netherlands. To his surprise, the thriller was priced at 65.95 guilders ($26.34), a 20 percent increase from the price Mr. Jenssen paid for "The Spy Who Loved Me" in December. Mr. Jenssen immediately clicked over to a British Internet shop, which lies outside the euro bloc, and bought the DVD at the price he had been accustomed to paying at the Dutch retailer.
Mr. Jenssen and other consumers across Europe are finding unwelcome price increases these days at their butchers, bakers and online vendors. With the debut of euro notes and coins less than two months away, businesses are converting prices from their national currencies to euros. In the process, some are taking advantage of a chance to round up - liberally.
No goods or services are immune, from toilet paper to banking fees, according to finance ministries and state consumer agencies across the 12-nation euro bloc. Some modest price increases are justified. Businesses are facing higher costs from the conversion to euros - whether for additional training for workers or for upgrading computer systems and cash registers. But many businesses are taking advantage of the switchover to jack up prices beyond reasonable limits.
"I felt tricked," said Mr. Jenssen, a management consultant from Apeldoorn. "If I had paid the other price, I'd have felt robbed."
Robert Verhoef, president of Rovision BV, where Mr. Jenssen had shopped loyally for DVDs until the prices shot up, made no apologies. "It is very simple," he said. "Our suppliers increased prices because of the euro, so we have to go along with it."
Other Dutch music outlets confirmed that they, too, had encountered sizable euro-denominated price increases from their wholesalers.
Among high-profile companies, Unilever, the British-Dutch consumer-products giant, freely admitted that it had accelerated increases to avoid confusion during the euro handover. The state-owned French railroad company SNCF pushed forward its annual increase to September from January. The Bavarian Hotel Association openly urged its 16,000 members to implement any planned increases soon.
A study by the Finnish statistics agency found a 7.8 percent average euro-linked price rise in a special basket of goods in May. Those increases have continued since then, said Ilkka Lehtinen, department director at the Statistic Finland agency. He added that few prices - if any - in the special euro-inflation subbasket went down in the May study.
Now sticker shock is attracting the ire of politicians. Finance Minister Laurent Fabius of France recently railed against "scandalous" euro-camouflaged markups. "There are some abuses, with the euro often serving as a false pretext," he said, citing laundry detergents and dairy products.
Fearful that euro-gouging is in full swing, the French government rushed to impose monthly price checks on 20,000 products. Mr. Fabius has vowed to fine businesses that raise prices blatantly. But his pledge was more an expression of his concern about the practice than any enforceable threat.
"There is no way to penalize those people because prices are free in France, they are not fixed," a Finance Ministry spokeswoman conceded.
Nonetheless, Mr. Fabius's message was acknowledged by big French retailing companies that had agreed to leave prices unchanged between November and March. The Finance Ministry is awaiting data from its price checkers for November to determine whether the retailers have kept their word.
But the French magazine 60 Million Consumers is skeptical of any pledges from businesses. It contends that opportunistic retailers are skirting their commitment by accelerating price increases.
"Certain manufacturers and distributors have anticipated the transition to the euro by boosting prices in major supermarket chains," the magazine wrote. Among the products it identified were detergent, mineral water, milk, yogurt, butter, shampoo, beans and flour.
Typically, businesses will round their euro prices up to a psychologically appealing number that ends in either a 9 or 5. For instance, the inflated price of 65.95 guilders for a James Bond DVD converted to E29.95.
Sometimes retailers will resort to crafty measures to camouflage their price increases. A study by the Federal Statistics Office in Germany, released last month, revealed a new trick. Some stores evidently have put up prices in Deutsche marks well in advance of E-Day, but at prices that overshoot typical euro prices rounded to a 9. So when it comes time to convert prices, stores can round downward to give the illusion of a price drop to an attractive euro level. As an example, the report cited a 1.99 DM box of noodles, which would be E1.02, that was raised to 2.19 DM, or E1.12.
"It remains to be seen if at the start of next year these noodles will be converted at the attractive euro price of E1.09," the agency said.
The statistics office has found it so difficult to distinguish between economically justifiable price rises and euro-linked inflation that it has now given up trying to quantify the euro's effect on prices, a spokeswoman said.
But the agency did discover one thing: "The increases from the euro conversion outweighed the discounts," said Nadin Engelhardt, a statistician at the Wiesbaden-based agency.
Not surprisingly, many Europeans fear they will be victims of price shenanigans ahead of the Jan. 1 changeover. According to the European Union's latest "flash Eurobarometer" poll in October, 64 percent of the citizens in the bloc harbor "fear of abuses and cheating over prices." That figure rose steadily from 53 percent in March 2000 and peaked in September at 67 percent.
Stunned by the poll numbers, the EU is considering more stringent price monitoring, such as a weekly index. But that would come next year at the earliest, if at all, EU officials said.
Even with the price increases, the weak global economy is limiting overall inflation. Downward pressures on costs such as low oil prices are offsetting the increases in consumer goods. Inflation in the euro-zone cooled to an annual rate of 2.4 percent in October from 2.5 percent in September. The European Central Bank insists that inflation caused by the euro switchover will be negligible.
France reported that its consumer prices edged up in October partly because of rising air travel cost. But other retail prices rose, too, which some economists said was the due to the impending introduction of the euro.
"Some have estimated that the changeover will add 0.5 percent to 1 percent to consumer price inflation," said Jacques Cailloux of Deutsche Bank Global Markets Research. He called such estimates "an overstatement" but added that increases will be spread over time and coincide with other inflationary forces, making it impossible to separate euro-linked price exploitation from other sources of inflation. That means that euro-linked inflation cannot appear in the statistics all at once.
"In smaller areas, where there is less competition and only a few big shops, the risk of inflation is biggest," said Caroline Hayat, an official at the Brussels-based European Consumers Organization. The irony is that the euro was meant to stimulate price competition.
"In a market economy," Ms. Hayat said, "competition should play its role, and so it should not be a problem. But look at what is happening."
To help keep Dutch merchants in line, Consumentenbond, the national consumer protection agency, posts an online black list of those suspected of pushing up prices. Fashion boutiques, travel agencies and restaurants have all landed on the "euro miser" page (www.consumentenbond.nl). The agency's investigators have been busy for months tracking down complaints that come to its "euro SOS" hot line.
"Retailing groups promise not to push up prices," said Rainer Wezel, director of the Cologne-based Institute for Applied Consumer Research said. "But you can document that they are going up." 
THE END

To Date (2001.11.16) Not a single reputable politician of ANY stature and substance has given a single solitary benefit for Britain adopting The EUro which compensates the downside risks and massive disadvantages.

Should any Politician of stature care to refute this I challenge them to a 30 minute debate – one to one - on prime time Mainstream TV, where thewy as highly paid professionals can provide just sound plausible honest argument, in favour of Britain surrendering the Pound to the EUro and our economy to Foreign centralised undemocratic control, giving me, an unfounded amateur, equal airtime to prove the opposite.

Regards,
Greg
Lance - Watkins

There is NO CopyRight on this document, which is one of many 1,000s of items freely available on http://www.SilentMajority.co.UK [some 20Mbs.] & 10s of 1,000s of items on The SilentMajority CD [with over 80Mbs.] which contains the entire web site & hosts other web sites also, 1,000s of apposite quotations, Articles, Speeches, Commentaries, ArtWork, & The FULL text of The EU Treaties, Several Related Books, The British Constitution, The American Constitution & Numerous related Items.
SilentMajority nor any associate thereof does NOT vouch for the veracity of the documents hosted on its site or CD nor any foreign language documents thereon & advises you consult your own solicitor on legal details as we do not accept liability for, nor presume to give legal advice ourselves.
For a copy of the CD please mail payment of £20.00 for UK deliver or £25.00 for ALL other Countries payable to:
Greg Lance – Watkins,
Glance Back Books,
17 Upper Church Street,
CHEPSTOW,
NP16 5EX
Monmouthshire,
GREAT BRITAIN
For delivery of 2 x CDs
one for your own use
+ one for on selling or donation to an individual of influence (media, politician, activist etc.)

IF YOU wish to use the Material Above, which is freely provided
Please have the Courtesy to Print It out in its entirety from start to finish with NO alterations, as displayed.
To This Point
.