This could be a comedy sketch if anyone had filmed it, paying for £40 worth of Tesco shopping with twenty, ten and five pences.
I don’t like it when my purse is full of small change, so I keep the pounds and fifty pence pieces in a small piggy bank, while the twenty, ten, and five pences go in one tall silver container until it’s full. Well I finally counted out this tall silver container several weeks ago and had about £40, which I bagged up into ten pound (twenty pences), five pound (ten pences), and four pound bags (five pences). I think I took about ten bags with me filled with mostly five pences.
Forget about the pounds and fifty pences. I had about fifty pounds of them, which was going to the milkman the following day who delivers our raw milk (yes, completely safe and creamy delicious). Tesco was not going to get my juicy pounds and fifty pences. It was getting my small change.
I thought I would experiment paying for my Tesco shopping with these bags of money containing small change. Well it worked. It was a very heavy bag of small change. I was at the self-cert checkout for about thirty minutes putting tons of my five pence pieces inside the machine, the machine spitting them out as fast as I would slot them in. I hear people saying that you can’t pay for stuff in supermarkets with one or two pences, or they can refuse to serve you unless you pay with notes or bigger money etc, but money is money. It certainly takes time to slot the coins in and most it will spit out, as it appears discriminate against the one, two, and five pences.
Did it feel embarassing, you may wonder? Not in the slightest, although I think the staff were laughing at me because I had been there so long, and I suppose I was suppressing Tesco’s sales figures too, as think how many customers could have used that same cashier in the time I was there. I was there for an experiment.
The self checkout loved the twenty pences. If I remember, I don’t think it spat out one. It also loved the ten pences. However, it seemed to hate the five pences and spat a lot out. I thought these computer machines were meant to be smart! I commented to the staff that the machine spitting out my five pences made me feel like the money I was using was counterfeit. She could see the money was real, yet this staff member actually used some of her own money to pay the last £1.59 it kept spitting out, and she didn’t even ask for my money, so I returned with a bag of cash. Yippee!
So paying for Tesco shopping with small change works, and I can’t wait to try it with two and one pences in the future, but I have a long way to go in filling up my large whiskey jar. It might have been more difficult with a cashier as they would have to count out all the money, but I paid for my £40 shopping with twenties, tens, and five pences.
It’s all cash!
