BERLIN, June 1: Germans welcomed in the single currency along with 11 other European nations on January 1, but now the honeymoon is over.

Spurred by a campaign in the popular press, German shoppers are growing ever more bitter about the hidden price hikes that some retailers slipped by them when the euro was introduced.

The phenomenon quickly found a name here: Teuro, a play on words combining euro with the German word for expensive, “teuer”.

Point paper in the local press, the tabloid Bild, quickly named a “Teuro-Sheriff” and charged him with following up on some 3,000 letters a day sent in by angry readers.

A recent report by Spiegel-TV showed Brost on the telephone with an ice cream vendor in the central city of Eschborn who had dared to raise the price of a scoop from one mark to 70 cents — a 37 per cent increase.

Hello, the Teuro-Sheriff speaking. Have you heard of me? said Brost. After a moment the embarrassed owner replied: Maybe you should talk to my wife.

The weekly magazines Focus, with its “Teuro Scandal” headline, and Stern, “The Euro Thieves”, followed in Brost’s footsteps.

One moment they denounced the price of Berlin’s ever-popular Turkish kebab, which rose from five marks to three euros or 17 per cent, the next the price of parking at Hamburg airport, up 30 per cent from three marks to two euros.

Damned Teuro! Robbery Abroad as Well!, screamed a Bild headline on Sunday with an article revealing that the price of mineral water in Mallorca, a home away from home for German tourists, had risen by 83.3 per cent.

The outcry comes in the middle of a campaign for general elections in September and the politicians have finally begun to react.

The first into the fray was Finance Minister Hans Eichel, who admitted that the introduction of euro notes and coins had been accompanied by more price hikes than the government had expected.

Eichel thought that it had been “perhaps an error” to rely totally on promises from the private sector that businesses would respect pricing during the changeover.

Unlike France and the Netherlands, Germany had no law forcing retailers to provide tags in euros and marks.

My family and I often have the impression that the conversion was done on a one-for-one basis, Edmund Stoiber, conservative candidate for next chancellor, said recently.

Determined to finally get things moving, Germany’s minister for agriculture and consumer protection, Renate Kuenast of the Greens party, called retail sector representatives Friday to an Anti-Teuro Summit.

Their round-table resulted in the creation of a “Price Watch Forum” charged with collecting information on any pricing abuses and making them public.

But the scheme has its critics and retailers are not taking the public outcry lying down.

The state does not have the right to attack our freedom to fix prices, said Hubertus von Pellengahr, the president of the HDE retail federation, adding that free-market competition would make the outlaws see reason.

However one paradox remains. According to economists the “Teuro” seems to have had almost no effect on the 1.9 per cent inflation recorded in the first quarter of 2002.

Never before in Germany, they say almost unanimously, has the impact of inflation felt by the tax-payer been so much more than inflation in real terms.

Paul Michels, prices and markets director at ZMP, says that while prices have remained the same on average, many of those that consumers have to pay on a daily basis, like food prices, have effectively gone up.—AFP