Why Krakow's "Ration Chits" Make No Sense

[swaghauler]

As many of you know, I spent 10 years driving armored cars and servicing ATMs while I worked for the Sheriff's department. One thing I always questioned in the Free City Of Krakow was the use of "Ration Chits" to buy stuff.

How were these "Chits" made? They would need to be durable to withstand constant recirculation so they had to be plastic, wood, or metal. They would also have to include some form of "anti-counterfeiting" mechanism or someone would just churn out a bunch of fake chits that would destroy the system. Add to that the fact that wood, paper, and metal are all VALUABLE resources in a post exchange world. So how and why did these chits evolve?

I would put forth an alternative that is actually accounted for in COG (Continuity Of Government) planning. Currency. Not paper currency as it is too fragile to survive the Exchange. Coin, however, is NOT. Coin is also difficult to counterfeit, has an established "hierarchy of value," is already embedded in the country's culture, and is fairly common in distribution. Why reinvent the wheel? I think that the Free City would just use existing coinage as a currency alongside Barter as a method of exchange.

The US Treasury also follows a similar ideology. I have seen a COG paper delivered to a bank that would substitute coinage for paper currency in the event of a major disaster that disrupted the nation as a whole. Under this plan;

- Pennies equal Dollars.
- Nickles equal Fives.
- Dimes equal Tens.
- Quarters equal Twenties.

and so on.

The issuing authority would collect and "inventory" a region's coinage and institute the new scale. Merchants would be given "product" in exchange for the coinage collected and be "encouraged" to take coin for "product" during a civilian sale. This would start the cycle and help build confidence in the currency again. I have Krakow operating under a similar system and it works fine. The only thing I didn't do (and regret now) is that I didn't use POLISH currency as we were unfamiliar with it and the internet didn't exist as it does today.