In Kosovo, if your bill does not end with a zero or a multiple of ten cents, you are unlikely to get exact change. You are also unlikely to get an apology or an explanation: no one has pennies. Sometimes the cashier rounds the total in the store's favor; sometimes in the customer's. Sometimes - in lieu of money owed - the cashier will hand you a piece of cheap candy from a bucket by the register. More often they don't even acknowledge the missing coins. I guess that, after five years, I've lost a couple bucks here to this practice, but I'm not really sure. So, for at least the next year, I'm going to track it here...

Read the full introduction here
in conclusion

At the end of four and a half months, I've acquired a deficit of 22 cents. I'd like to make some assumptions now about what this means for the rest of the Kosovo economy.

First, let's round the time spent in Kosovo down to four months: we spent a couple weekends away. Then let's assume that I – as an international with a reasonable family income – am not as frugal as many local people may be. But then let's counter that with two facts: 1) I only tracked my own purchases, not my wife's, and 2) our family is only two people: well below the local average. In other words, many locals probably live on less while simultaneously buying greater quantities of groceries. Additionally, many Kosovo citizens purchase their groceries in small stores and marketplaces where prices are more likely to be rounded to even 5s and 10s.

Taken all together, I think these considerations largely cancel one another out. But regardless, in the end this experiment does not track the amount I spend or what I spend it on: it tracks the amount of income that certain stores (or cashiers) do not claim.

At this rate, my deficit in a year would be 66 cents. Assuming that the major supermarkets that I frequent in Kosovo would have at least several thousand regular clients a year, we are talking about thousands of undeclared Euros. This money is either going to the cashier when she balances her register at the end of the shift, or to the store's owner. Either way, it's thousands in untaxed income.

To me this represents a sort of soft corruption. I know it's not the kind of corruption you want to talk about. But THIS kind of corruption is the kind that encourages the OTHER more extravagant kind, because THIS kind is the kind that permeates every aspect of Kosovo society.

We say – and they say – “It's only two cents! It doesn't matter!” But clearly, mathematically, it matters. This is not a give and take of loose change. This is a gradual but steady march in one direction, and it adds up to a lot of money. And this money—whether it comes out of my pocket, the cashier's or the store owner's—is supposed to help yield the taxes that should be paying to fix this place. And that's what citizens are losing here: their income, their social payback, and their responsibility in this exchange.

It's the same with the undeclared coffee sales at nearly every cafe, and the so many other ways that people have of making money here. That money goes in their pocket off the books, and the one who buys is the one who loses – they lose the little bit that's supposed to go towards their country with every purchase. But hardly anyone cares, because most people receive the same way they give – with a little bit off the top for themselves. It's a cycle that involves nearly everyone, and it's pervasiveness represents a much greater level of corruption than those men in suits in dingy offices with tobacco-stained ceilings trading tenders for new cars, houses and cash, those men we imagine when we imagine corruption in Kosovo.

This doesn't just bug me because I am a taxpayer in my country who knows that my own tax money so often gets wated overseas—in Kosovo. It doesn't so much bother me that my tax money pays for things here that Kosovo's tax money should be paying for. What bothers me more is that people don't recognize this for what it is: corruption. The cashier dumps my change on the counter without looking at me or acknowledging in any way the deficit she's arbitrarily imposed. I'm fined, daily, because the store's owner has decided not to put pennies in the till. He could round the prices up to an even 5 or zero, but for him it pays to keep it off the books. For Kosovo, it costs. And, yes, it costs for me too.

There are a lot of ways in which this place can wear down your sense of trust, and this is admittedly a small one. But you can't blame the politicians for all of society's woes if you participate in this soft corruption, and you do: we all do. The least we can do is call it what it is. Two cents or two million: corruption is corruption, and we're all involved.

Tuesday, August 16, 2011

August 16, I am owed 3 cents


6 cents is, in my experience, actually an unusually large deficit. The cashier at Maxi offered me a chocolate coin wrapped in gold paper, but did not consider fronting me the 4 cent difference in my favor instead. Now, I might have considered the chocolate coin a fair deal... had I not already been buying chocolate.

A couple hours later I paid 70 dinar for a 73 dinar tab buying baked sweets by the kilo in a bakery in north Mitrovica, this generosity somewhat lessening the sting from my earlier loss. Lessening it by half, to be exact. There was no receipt for that one.

For the time being we'll let one dinar equal an even Euro cent.


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