America is pretty strict about maintaining a monopoly over minting its coins. BTW, remember who supposedly had millions and millions of fake British currency printed?
I’ll bet that these tokens would not work in a vending machine. The vending industry is smart enough to check the metallic content of whatever is inserted. (So for example, the coin-op washing machine in my apartment building rejected a Canadian quarter, despite looking superficially like a US quarter.)
I just saw these tokens for the first time here in Canada the other day. Doesn’t seem to be a problem here, and it’s not like our government is just fine with counterfeiting or anything. They don’t look anything like real loonies, and I’d be very surprised if they worked in vending machines - the vending machines in my office reject American quarters and dimes and sometimes even reject ‘special edition’ Canadian loonies and quarters, so they are obviously sophisticated enough that they don’t just accept anything that is the right shape and size.
Ha, I was referencing Bubbles from The Wire - but this works too!
Aldis (spelling?) in my area uses them. Like you said, any cart left out gets put back by someone who wants the quarter. When I lived in Germany, these were the only kinds of carts that I saw anywhere.
Ref the $20 carts for take home… I’m surprised that the grocery store doesn’t just sell them at the store. Around here, they’re hard to find for sale unless you go to the flea markets. A lot of people don’t want to face the crowds at the flea market, but would probably by the carts if they were sold right there at the grocery store.
Google it. You can have any kind of coin you want made up. The Treasury Department only cares when you try to pass it off as currency.
As to the grocery store, they just want the carts put back. Why would they care if you use a similar size token? You still have to put the cart back to get your token out and as long as the token doesn’t damage the cart, who cares. The store doesn’t make money from the coin/token used, they save money by not loosing employee hours to chasing down carts.
Vending machines use the weight of a coin as a factor in determining if it is a real coin. So, if you had tokens made up of say tin or plastic or what ever, as long as you don’t press them from the same metals in the same mixtures, they’re not going to pass the weight test, so the coin will be rejected. Again, it is perfectly legal to have coins made in the US. It is NOT legal to try to pass them off as US Currency.
Here is an example of a company that makes coins: http://www.coinable.com/
Actually, in the US you can create even your own currency. You just can’t pass it off as US currency ( http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1908421-1,00.html )
I could use one myself, but am not sure where to obtain it (the one flea market I know of in this area is probably 15-20 miles away and parking is such a nightmare I’ve never actually tried to shop there).
I hadn’t thought anyone would pay me to do it. And since I am no longer even a decent shot, they probably wouldn’t.
Oh heck, just do it for free. Consider it to be a public service.
When I moved here, nobody told me that my driveway was the highway for Javalina to get to the tasty plants that people have in their yards. The first thing I did was reinforce my fence.
That didn’t work, they just bulled their way back down.
I changed how I fed the ferals, so no more kibble hit the ground, but that didn’t matter because the javalina were just running though my yard to get to the good stuff.
Finally, I started lighting them up with my paintball gun. The javalina learned to hide behind my barn and then send a scout out. If I hit the scout, the rest of them would just hide. If I didn’t do anything, all of them would rush out. I learned to wait for the scout to run out and then could shoot 3 or 4 of them.
There haven’t been any javalina in my yard for a couple of years. I think its because the males couldn’t get laid when they were wearing pink and purple.
How does this work? How do they make sure you get your not-coin back instead of an actual coin? All the places I’ve ever seen coin operated carts, it’s not as if there’s one coin slot per cart–the coin slot is on the rack.
But, as the article notes, you can’t make your own coins and use them as currency, even if you’re totally honest about it. That’s one of the things that ended the Liberty Dollar.
Yep, there are. I’ve never seen any in Tucson.
Because around here, if the UK is like France, you do have one coin slot per cart.
http://img.alibaba.com/photo/583398649/supermarket_trolley_coin_lock.jpg
I never use actual coins in carts, always tokens, pretty much all supermarkers will give you one or two for free if you ask them. I also sometimes find them on the ground.
How close is your nearest big city? You can’t get in a whole day of shopping without finding one somewhere around here: grocery stores do sell them (often stocked up front, past the check out lines, along the wall near Customer Service). Walgreens/CVS/Target/KMart often, but not always, have them. “99 cent stores”, which are not actual dollar stores where everything costs a dollar, but are discount stores with a variety of household goods and random Stuff will often carry them.
I’m actually planning on picking one up today for laundry. (Stupid landlord put in stupid coin operated washer and dryer. Harrumph! If I’m paying for laundry, I’m going to do all my loads at once in a laundromat!)
Or, of course, you can get one on Amazon.com: Amazon.com : shopping carts folding
In the UK, each cart has a little box with slot in it and a chain dangling underneath with a key-like tongue on it, and they carts are nested together, each chained to the next.
When you insert a coin, the key attached to the chain from the next cart is released from the back of the box - when you return the cart to the stack, you insert the chained key in the back of the box and the coin is released from the front.
The chains are short, so the key from one cart cannot be inserted in the slot of another unless they are nested together properly.
Well, in theory anyway- the local shits around here have discovered that if you turn one of the half depth trolleys around, with a bit of jiggling you can attach it backward to a full size one.
Of course, then no-one else can attach a trolley to it, and because it’s not stacked properly, they stick way out into the car lanes, occasionally blocking them.
I’ll come over there and you can get my shooting skills back up to par, OK?
IMO they’d look up actuary charts and determine this would be too significant an opportunity cost. If someone plans on using a credit card, they’d still likely have the dollar or so without them, but $20 may not be worth the effort and they’d shop with a competitor.