Character Art

Wizard Money

I was reading a bit of Harry Potter to just relax and enjoy, and he was at the ice cream parlor studying for hours. So I was thinking, well he must have had to buy something to stay there so long. So I was curious, how much would it cost if he had to buy...say, three ice creams minimum for him and his two friends. What an absolute rabbit hole!

First I had to use an inflation calculator to work out what the price of an ice cream would have been in 1992. Then I went to figure out the exchange rate from dollars to galleons, but of course it only had GBP to Wizard money lol.

So I used the inflation calculator to work out the price of an ice cream in USD in 1992. Then I had to convert it to pounds using the exchange rate from 1992 ($1.77/£ average closing price). I multiplied that by three ice creams.

Then I had to convert pounds to galleons at a rate of £5.14 per galleon. Then I converted galleons to sickles (1/17) and sickles to knuts (1/29) and got a decimal number so I rounded up to the nearest whole which was divisible by three, because it makes more sense to price them individually and then three of them versus the alternative of always selling three together at an odd number.

Anyway, I worked it out to 79 knuts/ice cream or 237 knuts total. Easy peasy. Now you have to do the same thing backwards. Divide 237/29 which is a reasonable number that anyone would be able to do in their head at the front of a long line while their ice cream is melting and there are children crying behind them.

The cost of the purchase comes out to 8 sickles and 5 knuts, so you pay that. Except you don't have exactly five knuts. Wizards hate bills for some reason, so everyone's got coin purses. Those are heavy, you brought as few coins as possible. What'll you do?

You can pay with a galleon, and they'll give you change, right? Easy. But here's the thing, they all use magic and so there are no cash registers to calculate your change for you because magic interferes with technology or smth. So the cashier has to do the math for the change in their head. No big deal, right?

Except it is a big deal, because none of the ratios are logical, and even if they were, the cashier went to Hogwarts. It's the finest wizarding school in Europe (aside from the two other Wizard schools in Europe). Surely they'd prepare students for everyday situations like this, right? Except no, they don't, because they don't teach any amount of basic arithmetic at their fancy wizard school. You'll have to remember the specific spell to turn a salamander into a rabbit or reverse that one jinx that makes your teeth grow huge, but mathematics is just like totally out of the question. Don't worry, though, you can take numerology...

Anyway, you owe 8 sickles and 5 knuts and all you have is a galleon. Your change is supposed to be 8 sickles and 24 knuts, which is—quite frankly—an ungodly amount of coins.

Congratulations, you bought three bowls of ice cream. You did way too much math, because their money isn't in base ten because they're really just trying to be quirky and not practical, and now you have two pockets full of random coins that are going to pull down your pants and make a lot of sound when you walk. Now go try and purchase an expensive racing broom or pay your rent.

(Also, Harry bought a pair of binoculars at the quidditch World Cup for like $265.50 and used them once and then literally never again...)

It's 2 am where I live, and I just spent 20 minutes doing that on a Saturday night, so you can tell what kind of wild life I lead.