You have 25 cents in your pocket and that’s all. No cell phone, no charge cards. What can you buy with it? You must pay taxes if applicable.
If you are European, you have a 20 Euro-cent coin or perhaps a 20 pence coin in the UK. Japanese coins are in 1, 5, 10, 50, and 100 yen denominations (plus others). There is no 20 or 25 yen coin in Japan, so they can’t play this game.
People from other countries can adapt this question if there’s a comparably valued coin.
Long ago, Cecil noted that the penny had lost its commercial use. I’m wondering about the extent that we could say the same about the quarter. Yeah, I know about vending machines and parking meters. I’m just wondering where the US quarter is on its life cycle, ignoring the demise of cash.
There’s a 20 euro cent coin (€0.20) and a 2 euro coin (€2). I presume you mean the former?
To answer your question, the only thing I can think of offhand is a gumball (or other “penny” candy) or increment of time for a parking meter. Maybe an extra condiment packet at a fried seafood counter. Or an old legacy arcade game or pinball machine that never bothered to increase the price.
Some years ago one could have said that the most useful thing you could do with a quarter would be to use a pay phone and call someone to bail you out of whatever fix you were in. Today, there are two problems with that. There are hardly any pay phones any more, although there are still a few in various odd or rural locations. The other is that the cost of a local phone call in most places is now 50¢.
My carwash has an old-fasioned gumball machine w the big glass sphere in the waiting room. The gumballs are ~1/2" diameter.
It takes two US quarters, so USD 0.50 to buy one gumball. As a child 60 years ago I might have bought penny gumballs. Definitely nickel gumballs.
IMO the USD 1 bill is 99% obsolete. All US coinage could be cancelled tomorrow with no actual impact. Except RW nutbag screaming. I’d pay money to watch that.
Parking meters remind me of a story that I’ve probably told before. I drove to city hall years ago to pay my property taxes – this was long before you could do stuff like that over the internet. It pissed me off that in addition to being ripped off for property taxes, I was also being charged parking fees for the privilege of being ripped off. So I refused to feed the meter, rushed in, gave the clerk a cheque, and left. But there was already a parking dude out there writing me out a ticket.
I was so totally pissed off by this point that as he put it under my wiper, I pulled it out and tore it to shreds in front of him. The look of surprise on his dumbass mug was very satisfying, but he did manage to blurt out “you just doubled it”.
No, I did not! Whether he wrote the ticket out in a hurry because he saw me coming or whether it was just an accident, the dumbass got the license plate wrong. I’m glad I stuffed the torn-up ticket in my pocket instead of dramatically throwing it on the street (I didn’t want to be charged with littering) because I found the mistake when I looked at the pieces of it at home later.
You might be able to buy a variety of things in the bulk flour/nut/candy section of a store. A handful of popcorn kernels or a shot glass worth of salt or sugar.
