The European Commission yesterday appealed to shoppers across Europe to use banks rather than shops to change their old currencies into euro notes and coins, as retailers braced for the first Saturday of shopping after the launch of the new currency.
The Commission said it was "concerned" by what it called minor problems with the supply of small-denomination notes across the eurozone, due to the demand for change in euros from customers using high-value old and new notes. In the Netherlands, the central bank was last night organising the emergency delivery of additional supplies of euros to retail outlets that were running out.
Dutch banks will also open some branches today to provide businesses with the currency after it emerged that some supermarkets were being forced to give guilders in change, having run out of new currency in the right denominations. Police cars with sirens blaring were escorting armoured vans from the gates of the central bank in Amsterdam yesterday evening as the unexpected top-up mission began.
"This is not worrying systematically, but this is an issue, particularly when it comes close to Saturday, when the retail turnover will be much higher," said a Commission spokesman. "So far people have been trying to get rid of the currency they have and this has worked quite well but customers who still have large denomination bank notes should try and exchange them in the banks and not go to the retailers."
According to the Commission, some 40 per cent of purchases in the eurozone yesterday were paid for in euros, rather than in national currencies.
Although there were no overall figures for change in euros, the spokesman said some 96 per cent of retailers in France and the Netherlands were handing back the new notes and coins.
"It's hard to have a complete picture right now," said Mr Xavier Durieu, general secretary of Eurocommerce, the European retailers association. "But in France some shops have received only a third of the cash they requested from the banks . . . and in Belgium the banks haven't helped some retailers get euro notes." Mr Durieu estimated that the proportion of payments in cash in the eurozone had risen despite predictions that electronic payments would increase because people were trying to unload their old currency.
Mr Henk Kok, director of RND, the Dutch retailers' association, blamed the banks for putting too many high-value notes in their automated teller machines.
"The volume of change that shops had in their safes was based on people having small currency," he said.