, Britain
On Monday 15 February 1971 a shopkeeper in Hull opened up with two prices on every shelf. The float in the till was new money, and almost everything on the shelves had been bought, delivered and ticketed in the old.
The first customer of the morning put down coins that had been in her purse since before the war, and waited for change in coins that had been legal tender for about an hour.
The national story of Decimal Day is a story about coins. The shopkeeper's version is a story about tickets, and about a queue that has to be got through while the sums are still unfamiliar.
The awkward coins had gone before the day did
By the time the shop opened on the fifteenth, the difficult denominations had already been taken out. The half crown, two shillings and sixpence, was withdrawn at the start of 1970, more than a year ahead, because it converted to nothing anybody would want to hold in their hand. That is a large part of why the day itself went as smoothly as it did. The hard part of the currency was removed in advance, quietly, while nobody was watching.
What could not be removed in advance was the price list. A coin either exists or it does not. A price has to be a number somebody is willing to say out loud across a counter, and every one of them in the shop had to be chosen by the person standing behind it.
Threepence, the commonest small price in a shop like this, came out at one and a quarter new pence. There was no coin for a quarter and there was never going to be one. So the ticket became a penny or three halfpence, and whichever you picked, you had picked.
The rounding happened at the bottom of the basket
This is where the argument of 1971 actually lived, and it was an argument about the cheapest things in the shop.
The smallest coin in the old money was the penny. The smallest coin in the new money was the half new penny, worth one and one fifth old pence. The grain of the currency got coarser at exactly the end of the scale where a corner shop does most of its business.
Convert the price of a joint of meat and the answer is close enough that nobody looks twice, because the error disappears into the pounds. Convert a threepenny line and you are moving the price by a fifth in one direction or the other, on something bought daily, by people who are counting their change on the way out. Do that across a shelf of cheap goods and the direction you picked becomes the most visible decision you make all year.
The shop most exposed to this was not the dearest one in town. It was the one selling the smallest things.
Dual pricing was work, and nobody paid for it
Every shelf edge had to carry both prices, and in a shop with a few thousand lines that is a few thousand small acts of handwriting, done between customers, in the evening, by somebody who is also doing the ordering, the banking and the deliveries.
The two currencies did not move in step on the buying side either. Suppliers converted their own price lists on their own timetables, so for a while the cost of a case coming in and the price of a tin going out were quoted in different money, and the margin between them had to be worked out twice to be trusted once.
Staff had to be taught the new arithmetic. In a corner shop the staff is frequently one person, and that person is the owner.
And every transaction took longer. That sounds like nothing and it is not, because a queue moves at the speed of its slowest sum. A shop that added fifteen seconds to every sale through the first fortnight lost trade at its own door on a Saturday morning and never saw it go. The shops that came through the changeover best were very often simply the ones that had practised.
Which lines you round down on is the only real decision
Take away the publicity, the conversion tables and the years of preparation, and what was left for a shopkeeper was one commercial choice, repeated a few thousand times: on this line, up or down.
A shop that rounded down on the things people bought every day, the bread, the tea, the milk and the cigarettes, and made it back on the slower lines nobody had memorised, kept the argument out of its own doorway. That costs margin on the highest volume goods in the shop, which is the expensive place to give it away, and it buys something that never appears in the accounts.
A shop that took the extra halfpenny on the daily lines collected it on every single transaction from the first week. That is real money, immediately, and it is collected from precisely the customers most likely to notice.
Neither is the wrong answer. They are two different bets about how long a customer's memory is, and 1971 was a long year in which to find out.
Where this shows up in the game
The New Money is a historical start. It puts you behind the counter of a convenience shop in Hull trading as Pearson's Stores, beginning in February 1971 and running for a year at medium difficulty. You are scored on reaching £95,000 of annual sales, measured as trailing twelve month takings in today's money at the end of the run.
Month one forces the decision the whole scenario is built on. Every price in the shop is repriced, and you choose whether to round up, round down or hold. Rounding up lifts the ticket straight away and costs you standing with the people who buy from you every day. Rounding down does the reverse, giving away margin now for goodwill later. The effect fades either way, so this is a choice that pays back late or does not pay back at all, which is precisely the bet a real shopkeeper was making in that fortnight. Nothing else is stacked against you at the start: you have the shop, the shelves and the fortnight, and the run ends if the shop closes or the twelve months finish short of the target.
The seed is fixed at 600001, so everybody who attempts it meets the same Britain, the same customers and the same weather, and the scores mean the same thing when you compare them. It runs under ironman rules: one save, and what happens happens. The New Money scenario page sets out the start, the objective and the rules in full.