...or, in this case, mo' betta nedas!According to the Wall Street Journal, supermercados chinos in Buenos Aires are about to start printing their own monedas.
This weirdly echos another WSJ story by Geo. Selgin and my response here back in January. The best thing about Selgin's article was a description of an even more serious shortage 200 years ago in Great Britain. Back then merchants started to mint there own coins and it looks like it worked out just fine... until the government called it illegal.
I responded that I didn't think that Argentina would give a damn about ...my example ...supermercados printing off coupon-like chits good for your dime or quarter if they were short of coins. My doubt however, was that people would accept them. After all, the only place in town guaranteed to give a stranger coins back from his purchase is: a big chain supermarket.
Lo and behold, Yanqui Mike's Chinese readership here in Capital has decided to give my idea a try!
"The Argentine Chinese-Owned Supermarket Chamber, or Casrech, which groups together more than 5,700 markets across the country, plans to issue tickets when their tills are short of the coins needed to provide change."I'm still a bit leery as to how yer average Juan Perez will respond. I also don't know if it will be voluntary ...I mean, are they just going tell you "screw you, there's no coins; take a coupon!"? Or will they offer a "ticket" to anybody that prefers a coupon to coins? I don't know how they're going to manage that but I'm interested to see what they come up with.
To sweeten the pot, their tickets will be worth 110% of the coins they don't give you.
Now if only the collectivos would accept them...
Yanqui Mike Alert: there's been some interest in starting a regular poker game here in town. I've been thinking that a good Texas Hold 'em session could be made even more interesting ...if it were played ONLY for monedas! No paper money, no chips, no IOUs! Any interest? Lemme know. Hmm... I guess we could include Supermercado Chino tickets too!
5 comments:
They give you 10% interest. That´s even higher than the official inflation rate.
Sounds like a good deal to me, as long as you are a consistent consumer, and they even treat you better than the banks do.
Ok.
Monedas y tickecitos chinos.
You in?
Nah, not a poker player, but if I was I would do it.
aaat's ok...
...you can just send yer monedas.
We'll pretend you played like a champ!
Hee hee!
Mike
Mike, as an argentinian I ll accept this deal because some coins won't be a big difference if I can use them afterwards. The problem is where we will get coins to commute as chinese supermarkets are one of the places where I'm used to getting coins like other argentinians.
Right now, being 0:33 am, i don't know how I will go to work as i don't have any coins.
Post a Comment