Great Western Coffee Shop

Thanks to the Man in Seat 61 at https://www.facebook.com/seatsixtyone/posts/pfbid0SLQ6qtizpC6A5bWYYYthcrpFUf4TMhohCB7ANmS5gX3mbCdgQeBYGG2aDQ9kvpEEl  for this

There's the 70min flex fare too.....but that work around is cheaper.

Is this less fare simplification and price gouging.

It reminds me of my childhood watching TV about the end of the halfpenny.   

Tinned beans and tinned spaghetti both cost eleven pence halfpenny at the time (11.5 pence) and it was explained - probably on Blue Peter knowing my age - that beans were going up to a shilling (12 pence) and spaghetti was going down to 11 pence, so that it balanced out and was not a price rise.

2.5 million tins of beans a day were eaten in the UK (2017 figure).  No easy comparable figure for spaghetti - an old article from the Daily Mail (https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3300658/Tinned-spaghetti-hoops-white-bread-potatoes-menu-British-families-culinary-dark-ages.html)


but even in the '60s and '70s far more beans sold than (tinned) spaghetti?

I never, ever, understood the nonsense of any decimal coinage that started with a half penny.

They replaced the easily understood historic currency of pounds, shillings and pence with a unit of currency based around multiples of ten - but retained the half-penny.  ??? ::)

In order that no one could claim a price rise on conversion....

A 0.5p was still 1.2d. I worked the school shop in 1970/1 and was well versed in both systems including the two forced equalities in each shilling.

Keeping a smallest coin close in size to the old penny was seen as essential, to avoid driving price changes. The halfpenny was always going to be lost, which was already being seen as pushing up prices.

So the choice was between a primary unit of £1 with half pence, or a 10s unit without. I thought at the time that the latter was a better idea, as it meant 1s became 10np, and that made conversion from shilling amounts easier. My logic was that those people whose limited numeracy meant any change would be difficult did almost all of their transactions in shillings not pounds. Remember that, at the time, prices up to £5 were commonly quoted in shillings.

I was very surprised when I saw Jim Callaghan explaining on TV, with a straight face, why they chose the £1 option on the grounds it made conversion easier! (That would have been in 1966.) Of course it was really to please those in the City who worried that changing the pound for something else - it would need a new name - would risk confidence in Sterling.

Incidentally, my father was part of a project team to computerise the Post Office Savings Bank, starting work while the decimalisation plans were still being worked on. They chose to use a base unit of £1/1200, converting £sd amounts into multiples of that during the initial transfer. Conversion to an effective base unit £1/200 and then £1/100 was done later on, and could be explicitly based on a policy decision.

I venture to disagree there, stuving.  The smallest coin, the half-pee, in the new dismallised decimalised currency was a mere fraction of the size of an old penny.  However, the intention was for the value of the new half-pee to be as near as it could be to the value of an old penny.  ;)

Heading off topic here: in the late 1960s it could be curious to a child that when paying for e.g. bus fares and receiving the change in pennies, it wasn't unknown for the change to include some worn relic or other that turned out to be, say, a penny from the 1860s or 70s, in circulation very much outside said child's timeframe:  an object that had passed in everyday use through many tens of thousands of hands.

Even at age dot, I'd look at this thing, put it in some historical context or other.

Nowadays this might be 'Oh, this coin, worn smooth by countless hands and jangling pockets, it could have been used to pay for a ticket for a train on the opening day of e.g. the Mid Wales Railway' or the line across the Severn Rail Bridge - or indeed used to pay a member of the workforce that built that structure, paid the staff on the two barges that hit and fatally damaged the structure, losing their own lives in the process, paid those that demolished its remains, or perhaps it was used to pay one of the tolls for the myriad of transactions on the Aust ferry, or pay those that worked to build the 1966 Severn road bridge, and then of course the flow of coins through the toll booths for that, perhaps it passed that way.

Coins could certainly lead very busy lives.

Mark

(https://i.postimg.cc/76VX5cL9/Severn-Rail-Bridge-looking-west-through-large-span-1000.jpg)

(https://i.postimg.cc/W3X6Nk9f/Severn-Bridge-span-beneath-800.jpg)