Despite the many serious security issues facing Israel on a daily basis, Israelis are as aware as much of the world is that often it is all about the economy.
Many years ago, Israel’s inflation rates were skyrocketing and personal savings were plummeting, Israel attempted to rejuvenate its economy by creating the New Israeli Shekel (NIS), as compared to the old shekel that had been its currency. Each new Israeli shekel consisted of 100 agurot.
Long ago, people stopped thinking of the agura (single form of agurot) as anything other than an inconvenience. Shekel was the term and the currency. Several years ago, the one-agurot coin was banned as being simply not practical and so even though stores still priced things according to shekels and agurot…whenever you paid in cash, it was rounded up or down to the nearest 5 or 10 agurot.
Now the Bank of Israel has proposed taking eliminating the five-agorot coin after they conducted a survey that showed that most of the public finds it a bother. The humorous part of this is the simple mathematical equation – it costs 16 agorot to produce each five-agorot coin.
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