What does “afronding” mean on Dutch receipts?

Dutch shops tend to round to the nearest 5 eurocents, so a bill coming to €4.89 would be rounded to €4.90. This is shown as afronding – literally, “rounding” – a correction of up to two cents either way.

The net result is that 1 and 2 eurocent coins in the Netherlands are rare (although they are still in circulation).

I’m not sure quite when the decision was made to do this; I’ve been aware of it for a few years now and, frankly it’s a great way to cut down on coppers.

If the price was, say, €4.87 then it would be rounded down to €4.85 – ie. the customer “gains” two cents. This should balance out but I suppose it depends on the use of psychological prices (the whole 99 cent pricing strategy clearly works in the shop’s favour) and how many items you buy (three items at 99 cents each would benefit the customer).

Somebody, somewhere has earned a PhD from this I’m sure!

I would be curious to know if there have been other effects of this. Are charity pots (not that I’ve seen any) less full as a result?

“This site is running TeamViewer”

Beware if you decide to use TeamViewer, a remote control app. It appears to launch a webserver on port 80 I think for some kind of NAT/firewall detection. In any case, if your computer is also used as a webserver this will cause a few issues 🙂

The solution I have found (for Teamviewer 5 Windows) is to close the program (right click and exit; make sure it’s completely closed). Then open the registry editor (Start menu > Run > regedit) and find your way to the following registry entry:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Teamviewer\Version 5\
and change ListenHttp from 1 to 0.

You must close Teamviewer first, I found that if you change it while Teamviewer is still running, the setting will be reset (back to 1) when the program is next closed.