14 DAY TRIAL // Earlier this week, on Tuesday, a regular Joe walked into a dealership in the city of Shenyang in China and proudly announced that he was there to buy a new four-wheeler for himself.
So far, so good. Nothing out of the ordinary. After all, that's what car dealerships are for, to pair guys and gals with the perfect ride for them.
The thing is that, when the time came for the man to pay for his newly acquired vehicle, he didn't pull out a credit card, a checkbook or at least a seriously stuffed wallet.
He paid for the car almost entirely in coins
The ride that he got from the Shenyang dealership cost the Chinese man 680,000 yuan (about $110,000 / €98,000), of which 660,000 yuan (roughly $106,000 / €95,000) was paid in coins.
To get the mountain of coins to the dealership, the man had to carefully arrange the bundles in a neat pile in the back of a truck. Together, the coins tipped the scale at about 4 tonnes. As for the pile they were arranged in, it stood about 4 meters (13 feet) tall.
When asked about where he got the coins from, the man, a petrol station employee, explained that he collected them from buses that would stop to refuel, The Shanghaiist tells us.
The dealership didn't turn down the coins
Rather than ask the man to leave and come back some other day when he had more appropriate cash to pay for his new car, the dealership had no trouble accepting the mountain of coins.
Word has it that it took a team of 10 staff members about an hour to carry the coins from the back of the truck into the dealership. Here, they were weighed and counted, just to make sure the man didn't have any other tricks up his sleeve.
True, special arrangements will have to be made to move the money to a bank and the car dealership will also have to pay a handling charge, but at least the man got his car and so can now enjoy the fruit of his hard work collecting coins.
