Here’s A Tip: Don’t Try To Spend It
It’s not every day that hotel staff receive a $250 billion tip, but that’s what happened at the Metropole in Leeds in northern England.
Unfortunately for them, they were Zimbabwean dollars and with inflation there running at a virtually unquantifiable rate (one estimate has the percentage at 5, followed by 21 0s), the ten $25 billion bills were completely worthless and couldn’t be exchanged.
The hotel’s Deborah Heather said: “We thought we’d won the jackpot and imagined how we’d spend it. Then we realised it wouldn’t even buy a penny chew” (cheap candy popular when some of us were young).
She’s right: even a recently introduced bill, with a denomination of 10 trillion Zimbabwean dollars, was worth barely 20 pence (28 cents) and halved in value every few hours.
by Andy Moreton
