Am I lonely in my embarrassment over this crap?
I’m hearing it on the news right now.
Death threats! Criminy.
Peace,
mangeorge
NBC Nightly News?
Or not. I’ve clicked the link to find it goes to CBS.
“This is the United States of America, not the United States of Mexico,” one e-mail read. “Quit catering to the damn illegal Mexicans,” demanded another.
Do illegal Mexicans just walk around with pocketfuls of pesos the whole time they are here and then make the walk or smuggle back whenever they need more pesos? That seems like a pretty good way to tell which people are illegals if you can just check their pockets.
I’ve been known to carry a fair amount of Canadian money after returning from Canada. (Why change it, when I’ll need Canadian money the next time I cross the border?) And I’m not an alien.
A lot of people cross the borders(s) both ways every day. The casual acceptance of both currencies benefits everyone. The only down side I can see is feeding our junk to the mexicans. That’ll teach them. Let them eat pizza, eh? 
But death threats?
I am finding the comments on that site interesting. The even-handed, “yeah, what’s the big deal” ones appear to be written by normal human beings. The OTHER ONES, who are HAVING FITS because they think this is somehow tied to ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION, appear to have been written by JACK CHICK.
I am entertained.
Shit, I’ve got prob’ly $15 worth of pesos I never exchanged from a trip to Puerto Vallarta three years ago. My toddler uses them as play money. Did I miss the memo that only illegal aliens have pesos?
Moving thread from IMHO to The BBQ Pit.
I can see doing this near the border, but what puzzles me is why they make a big point of accepting pesos 700+ miles away.
I’ve got a couple thousand Jamacian from a trip a few years ago, when will places start accepting those is what I wanna know! It might be enough to feed the family pizza one night.
Enjoy,
Steven
According to the company owner, since he is going head-to-head with Pizza Hut, Dominoes, etc., he needs an edge. The (legal*) Mexican community is an untapped demographic that he hopes to claim. During many holidays, a lot of Mexican workers return to Mexico and then come back to work in the U.S. (bearing pesos) when the holidays are through. Since they tend to work in areas contiguous with his marketing area–even hundreds of miles from the border–he has made it a compny-wide decision, rather than a local or regional one.
- Workers who are regularly passing back and forth across the border at the times of holidays are presumed to be more likely legal, as the hassles of hiding and getting caught are more likely to make such transits very irregular.
Y’know, with all the hand-wringing that goes on in some quarters about how the Mexicans are “shoring up their economy” with direct shipments of dollars to Mexico, you’d think that they’d be grateful that one company has found a way to recover 0.00000000000001% of that, bringing it back to the States.
Why not? It’s simply a business ploy. Much worse has been done in the name of free enterprise, eh?
I would think that one of the first thing a potential sub-rosa immigrant would do is to swap all currency to that of the host country. I’d check the papers of the people flashing greenbacks.
I assure you that when the bars and casinos in Detroit accept Canuckian dollars ‘on par’, there’s not a peep of dissent. It’s more like, “Thank you for coming to our city and spending money!” And it doesn’t (and shouldn’t) matter whether or not those visiting Canucks are there for a meal or to work, or even to go to school as many Windsorites take classes at Wayne State as commuters.
This is about the biggest non-issue I’ve ever heard of. Who cares? If they can make money, why not? No one’s hurt by this. It actually brings money into this country from Mexico. Sheesh.
The thread title has The Refreshments’ “Banditos” going through my head.
I think the pizza chain should use that song for a commercial, done from the customer’s POV, changing the lyrics to:
Everybody knows
that the world is full of hungry people
so meet me at Pizza Patron,
we’ll pig out there.
Everybody knows
that the world is full of hungry people
Well, they’ve got the pizza
and they’ll take our pesos,
yeah, that seems fair.
For what it’s worth, Pizza Patron is really awesome cheap, cheap pizza. Absolute pizza of choice for feeding herds of teenagers. So as long as they keep on taking sweaty, crumpled dollar bills as well, it’s all good.
They accept Canadian coins (though probably not the looney or the tooney) at businesses in Michigan without question. What exactly is the difference?
I think that if a business establishment wants to accept payment in chickens or playing cards, that’s their business.
But I wonder if there could be a problem with using non-US currency as “legal tender”. Are there any laws that prohibit this practice?