When 150 Becomes 100: Conversions and Denominations In Grocery Shopping

When 150 becomes 100: Conversions and Denominations in Grocery Shopping

This paper explores two aspects of expatriate money practices with Russian rubles, focusing on everyday shopping: conversion rules of thumb and denominations. The Russian ruble is a currency whose base denomination is one hundred (100) rather than one (1). Many expatriates living in Moscow are accustomed to currencies like the United States dollar, the Euro or British pounds sterling, whose base denominations are one not one hundred. Conversion becomes a way of managing 'sticker shock', a means of making sense of how a can of coffee can cost 800 currency units (rubles in this case), and coming to understand new regimes of value and price for everyday goods. Yet even expatriates from countries with a currency whose base unit is 100 – Japanese yen, South Korean won, Swedish krona – talk of curious conversions that shift, so that a rule of thumb that 150 of one unit equals 100 of another eventually becomes a 1:1 ratio. Learning to use rubles, especially in buying daily necessities, means not only developing a handy conversion to assess prices, but also adjusting to new arithmetic based on different monetary denominations, even when the base unit may be the same. I will argue that conversions are slowly adjusted to better match not official rates of currency conversion, but notions of worth and value that are linked to available denominations of money at 'home' and abroad.