One of the banes of my existence in London has to be items stupidly priced ending in odd pennies like £4.98, £5.99, etc… In Oz these would have been sensibly rounded up or down to the nearest five cents. Not so in the UK – which inevitably loads me with dirty, near-worthless penny coins. In the past I tried the Coinstar machines (which took a 10% cut) or donating them to the charity boxes (which are overflowing with 1p’s and 2p’s anyway). But eventually I’d still be left with a hundred or so of these coins sitting in a jar at home.
So anyway, one day I learnt a pretty darn good method from another blog which was quite simple and effective – go to a automatic self checkout machine, scan your purchases, then start feeding whatever shrapnel you have and then pay the remainder on a credit/debit card. Brilliant! So, armed with this knowledge, I took ALL my pennies to the Hammersmith Tesco. I was determined to test the limits of the number of coins it would take, as vending machines back in Sydney have had a limit of 20 coins per transaction. And with 10 checkout counters I won’t be holding anybody back in the queue anyway. To my surprise, the machine took all my coins, £1.48 worth of pennies (yep, thats over 100 coins) and I paid the remainder on card. : )
Now I’m penny-free, except for those holey Norwegian Kroners from my last trip!
