“Teuro” was selected by the Gesellschaft für deutsche Sprache as the “Wort des Jahres” (Word of the Year) in 2002.

Teuro is a so-called “Portmanteau” and is made up of the words “teuer” (expensive) and “Euro”.

It refers to the feeling that people have in Germany that things became more expensive after the Euro was introduced at the beginning of 2002.

Part of the problem is caused by people dividing by 2, whereas the exact exchange rate was 1.95583.  But in many areas – eating out being one of the most common examples – the prices were noticed to have gone up considerably.  It is often commented, that the prices were almost the same figures in Euro as in DM – just with a different currency sign.

Another factor is that price rises since 2002 go much faster, as increasing a price by 1EUR is a lot more than increasing by 1DM.

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Whilst I may now be filling up with bio-ethanol, I am still interested in the price of normal (95 octane) petrol for my wife’s car. And having just written 3 blog entries about the prices of things going up, I went back through the log book to see if this was true of petrol as well.

We tend to see the price of petrol as something that goes up and down, although more up than down, especially in the summer months.

Actually, it started the year at 1,239EUR/litre and finished off at 1,369EUR/litre – no question about that being a price increase then.

But in-between it reached 1,419EUR/litre (or even more, but we didn’t fill up when it did!) in May, returning to 1,289EUR/litre in August. So even if there was an overall increase, it did go back and forth during the year.

How we long for the Summer of 2003 when we first bought the car, and paid as little as 1,034EUR/litre!

Every year I have the feeling that our electricity bill has gone up.

The electricity company estimates at the beginning of the year how much you are going to use, and then charges you monthly based on this estimate. At the end of the year they either refund or charge you the difference to your actual usage.

Normally they estimate quite well, but I still end up paying a difference at the end of the year because the price of the electricity itself has gone up.

Now the Tagesschau news has reported that prices have indeed gone up – by 50% in the last 7 years.

It seems to me that the electricity companies are making huge profits, and still passing on price rises, eg. in the oil price, to their customers. My supplier even has a bonus card scheme where you can get discounted entry to theme parks etc.

I don’t want discounts! I just want to pay a reasonable price for my electricity without the big shock at the end of each year!