New Zealand money is fun. The bills are made of a polymer material, are of different colors, have pretty pictures, and each bill has transparent sections. (A Wikipedia article gives details of these anti-counterfeiting measures.)
The only bills are the $5, $10, $20, $50 and $100. There are no singles; instead they use $1 and $2 coins. These are fat and solid-feeling.
The only other coins are the 10¢, 20¢, and 50¢ pieces. No pennies or nickels. How do they make change? They don't! All unit prices are in multiples of 10¢. When items like groceries and fuel are priced by weight or volume, the calculated price is rounded off to the nearest 10¢. This seemed very sensible and we'd like to see it done here, as well. Get rid of the nickels and pennies.
Credit Card PINs
One difference that came up every day, sometimes several times a day, was the way credit cards are used in NZ. Every business that takes them has a little 10-key numeric pad on the counter, connected to their credit card validator (the "swipe here" thing). NZ natives never sign for a credit card purchase. After swiping their card and hitting OK to agree to the price, they key in a PIN. It's much faster than signing a receipt.
We couldn't do that; our US credit cards don't have PINs associated. So we'd hit the Enter key instead and the clerk would give us a receipt to sign. And almost always, they would check the signature against the card.
Prices
Marian very correctly says you cannot make a reasonable price comparison when you don't take into account salaries, tax structures, etc. etc.
We did not keep records of what we paid for things and we did not agonize over (or indeed, pay any attention to) any prices under $20. We bought a couple of larger items—Marian's jade pendant, David's merino sweater—and in each case, gave the price enough thought to realize, "that's a good deal."
Just the same, there was a general impression that common things cost more than at home.
Fuel did, for certain. Similar to European prices, diesel cost $1/litre, plus or minus a penny. (Gasoline was closer to $1.50/litre but fortunately our van used diesel.) That's us$3.80/gallon (us$5.60 for gas).
Today (16 Nov) David went online to woolworth.co.nz (Woolworth runs a chain of supermarkets in NZ) and got the prices of some randomly selected grocery items that are similar to their US counterparts. Then he got prices for the comparable items from safeway.com.
All prices were then scaled to dollars per liter or dollars per kilogram, as appropriate, and nz$ converted to us$ at the rate of nz$1 == us$0.75. Here are the results (details on request if anyone cares).
| Product | NZ price | US price |
| Chicken | us$12 | $11.95 |
| Bread | us$4.20 | $6.89 |
| Ketchup | us$7.03 | $3.69 |
| Coke | us$2.19 | $1.69 |
| Milk | us$1.15 | 0.79 |
So there you are. Coke, milk and Ketchup cost quite a bit more, bread is quite a bit less, and chicken is a wash. So there's no clear evidence that Kiwis pay more or less, on the average, than we do.
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