Pennies In The Capital

I went to the 7-11 next door, this morning, to pick up a salad and a fruit bowl for breakfast as I woke up feeling guilty about my dinner the night before that didn't have a single shred of vegetable or fruit.

The 泡菜 from last night's 臭豆腐 doesn't count lah.

Anyway, as with all supermarkets, they have the most absurd type of pricing and I ended up with a 2-cent change.

A penny in QQland is SGD 0.002 (note: It's not 2 cents. It's Zero Point Two cents) and I was like "Dude! WTF?? What do you want me to with with 2 QQland cents?"

And it just so happened that the xmm behind bought something that totaled like RMB 17.02 (What is with all the weird decimals? It made no cents sense (ok... I couldn't resist that pun. Sorry).

So taking a penny and giving a penny, I handed my two-cents worth (Sorry!!!) to the cashier and settled my headache as well as the xmm's.

In the past, supermarkets here give you a piece of candy in lieu of every 10 cents' worth of change. This practice was subsequently outlawed and these supermarkets being giam kanas, refused to round it down as a gesture of goodwill like other supermarkets in other countries.

Guess I will be stuck with these almost worthless coins for a while. If you give them to a beggar they probably also don't know what to do with it or worse chastise you for being a cheap bastard.

Imagine a parent coming home to empty his pocketful of change for his kid's piggy bank everyday. After three years of frugal feeding of the piggy bank, the kid finally breaks the pig to enjoy the fruits of his savings only to realise it totaled like what? RMB 18.32?

I think the kid may go kill himself after that.

Le sigh.

- Voxeros