Monday, March 1, 2010

Best served cold

It's no Zimbabwe, but with an exchange rate of 343 Ugandan shillings to 1 NOK (about sh2000 to a dollar), you quickly find yourself carrying around large denominations of money. It doesn't take much to become a millionaire here. That said, it's amusing to see how small denominations some places use.

This shopping market called Shoprite for example - the only place that seems to operate with prices that require them to use ten-shilling coins. That's correct. Ten.

A friend of mine and I went to the management and told them how inconvenient it was of them to price in this manner, when no other shops accept coins like that. We were perhaps a bit naïve in our hopes of being taken seriously; we found ourselves being shooed off.

Not to worry, I have a plan. Every time I go to Shoprite, I'll be exchanging my 500's and my 1000's for these coins. Once I have enough, I'll come back and pay for my mass shopping using a huge pile of ten-shilling coins.

Go ahead. Count them.

2 comments:

  1. Doesn't always work too well.. :P

    http://www.break.com/index/8800-penny-prank.html

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  2. A ten-minute video on a 16 kbps connection. Thanks, Einar :P

    I daresay pennies are different. Shops accept pennies. Shops don't accept ten-shillings. The very point of this is to show how impractical these coins are.

    In fact, I _want_ them not to accept them. That would be them admitting, finally, that these coins of theirs are not fit for use.

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