http://www.thenational.ae/news/uae-news/great-uae-mystery-of-the-disappearing-fils Great UAE mystery of the disappearing fils
Well, it wasn't very hard to find the damn things. a little simple math shows exactly where they are. The Dirham is worth 27c so a 10f coin is worth a mere 2.7 c and contains 6.2c worth of metal. They are being melted because they are nearly worthless and in large bunches they make excellent alloy and chill scrap. The crazy thing would be to make even more of them. Even nuttier would be making them out of toxic zinc. What they should do is just make a little aluminum 12.5f. It would circulate with high velocity and be used widely. It would be a highly collectible coin in a quarter century.
They are talking about 1 Fils coins == 0.0027 US$ = 0.27 cents. I do not think they are being melted because they are difficult to find in any quantity, as the said nobody asks for them ..
Like everything reported in the press the story is confused and ambiguous. But the author strongly implies the shortage is not limited to 1f coins; "But the Central Bank is adamant there are plenty of small-value coins in circulation: as of last month, three million 1 fils, nearly 40 million 5 fils and 45 million 10 fils coins, worth nearly Dh7m in total. So where are they all?" The 1f coin is even more impossible to circulate because for one thing it has no value at all as currency; the value is only about a quarter of a cent which wouldn't pay for the food needed to lift your arm to tender it and even worse is that it has twice as much copper per unit value as the 10f. Without government interference such coins can't circulate. Imagine if the US started making golden dollars out of solid gold tomorrow. How many of these would you get at Walmart? My guess is that the banks don't issue the coins because they are worth too much to "sell" for only face value. It's too profitable for the stores to round up to 25f and the people don't care enough to make waves.
I didn't notice that they switched to a new smaller size in '96 (and apparently discontinued issuance of the 1f). Krause doesn't list a weight for these but they appear to be small enough to be worth about the same as currency and copper. Perhaps it is largely just that people don't want to fiddle with little coins. 10f isn't much money but I wouldn't want to be shorted this much on every transaction. This would add up. Maybe the author is closer to the truth (in a confused and ambiguous way) than it appeared at first blush.
I am not sure how it goes in UAE, but here in neighboring Bahrain credit card companies rounds up 5 fils up to 10 "e.g. transaction 65 fils == 70 fils", if you call they will refund the 5 fils, but the call will cost you more than that so it is ignored .. if this happens 30 times per month it will cost you 150 fils == can of coke., this is unlikely to happen because people generally do not use credit cards that often.
I was going to say 150 fils == 1.5 liter premium fuel then decided to change it to coke so that not to make you envious So, 1 gallon = 3.78 liter = 378 Fils = 1 US$ I think in UAE it costs ~ 2 US$ per gallon, in Saudi Arabia it is less than 1 US$ per gallon.
But this is not the market value, fuel is subsidized heavily by governments in the region, the prices are fixed at these levels.
