"EUROS ACCEPTED" SIGNS POP UP IN NEW YORK CITY
Wed Feb 6, 2008 4:09pm EST
NEW YORK (Reuters) - In the latest example that the U.S. dollar just ain't what it used to be, some shops in New York
City have begun accepting euros and other foreign currency as payment for merchandise.
"We had decided that money is money and we'll take it and
just do the exchange whenever we can with our bank," Robert Chu, owner of East Village Wines, told Reuters television.
The increasingly weak U.S. dollar, once considered the king
among currencies, has brought waves of European tourists to New York
with money to burn and looking to take advantage of hugely favorable exchange rates.
"We didn't realize we would take so much in and there were
that many people traveling or having euros to bring in. But some days, you'd be surprised at how many euros you get," Chu said.
"Now we have to get familiar with other currencies and the
(British) pound and the Canadian dollars we take," he said.
While shops in many U.S.
towns on the Canadian border have long accepted Canadian currency and some stores on the Texas-Mexico border take pesos, the
acceptance of foreign money in Manhattan was unheard of until
recently.
Not far from Chu's downtown
wine emporium, Billy Leroy of Billy's Antiques & Props said the vast numbers of Europeans shopping in the neighborhood
got him thinking, "My God, I should take euros in at the store."
Leroy doesn't even bother to exchange them.
"I'm happy if I take in 200 euros, because what I do is keep
them," he said. "So when I go back to Paris, I don't have
to go through the nightmare of going to an exchange place."
(Reporting by Angela Moore, writing by Bill Berkrot; Editing
by Doina Chiacu)