“Dirty, crumpled like rags, torn, glued many times. Like the economy, like the money,” complained the editors of “Przekrój” in 1990. I could add a handful of economic indicators to this quote and write that at the turn of the 1980s and 1990s. inflation reached one thousand percent in Poland. But my father-in-law's anecdote would be better.
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Opposite the Western Railway Station in Poznań, there was an electronics store with the charming and contemporary name Wizex. Residents of neighboring voivodeships were supplied with VCRs and TV sets there, so the revenue each day amounted to several dozen million. My father-in-law once asked the owner of a salon if he was not afraid to carry bags with money to a car parked nearby in the evenings. The man just shrugged and replied:
Bags are for thieves anyway. Not a month goes by without someone snatching them from me. But there are only hundreds there. I keep millions in my backpack under my coat.
A queue in Pasaż Śródmiejski in Warsaw in the mid-1980s. A few years later, the goods were already available, but inflation was rampant National Digital Archives
Oatmeal with iron
Generation Z associates the term “old money” with pompous influencers who talk about the rules of wearing tuxedos. Meanwhile, millennials' associations go to bundles of colorful banknotes. They may have taken up a lot of space in your wallet, but you couldn't buy much with them. Olga Drenda, a cultural anthropologist and researcher of Polish transformation, remembers this well.
– When I was in primary school, I really liked Disney's Polish-English dictionary. Colorful, full of famous cartoon characters, simply every kid's dream – recalls Drenda. – The publishing house wasn't cheap, so I saved up my pocket money. When I collected the necessary amount, it turned out that the man selling books at the market just threw up his hands helplessly. Within a month, prices had gone up so much that with the contents of my piggy bank I could buy at most half a dictionary – laughs the author of “Polish Duchologia”.
All this money could buy a cassette tape or a few liters of gasoline Aleksander Przybylski
Not only were they paid in large amounts of banknotes, but they were also very diverse. There were as many as a dozen denominations in circulation.
– You always had to reserve this hour for the evening counting of takings – recalls Marcin Kręglicki, who in the late 1980s founded a Shared the iconic Mekong Asian restaurant in Warsaw. – People employed in trade and catering have probably lost the ability to count money “commonly” today, i.e. quickly, under the thumb. Additionally, these were the times when receipts were written out on carbon paper. One for the customer, one for the kitchen with the order and finally the third one for the tax office. We always had to keep a reserve of cash for paychecks and unexpected purchases in case a woman with veal visited us – laughs the restaurateur.
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