A man from Northern China has “coined” a new way of paying for a luxury car.
Staff were left to count money for 12 hours after a customer brought sacks of small coins and tiny denomination notes worth 400,000 yuan or $58,000 to purchase a Toyota Land Cruiser Prado in a shop in Zhengzhou in Henan province.
PHOTO CREDIT: Stomp.com
According to The Straits Times, the largest bills he used were only one yuan and the smallest coins were one jian or one-tenth of a yuan. Reports claimed that the bags of small coins were so heavy that the man blew up a tire while on his way to the car dealer.
One of the staff said: “My hands are still twitching.”
So what exactly drove the man to bring sacks of coins to the shop?
Apparently, the man owns a flour shop and received small change from customers. He tried to buy the luxury car from other dealers but was turned down after discovering his strange form of payment. Moreover, banks refused to change the coins and small notes for bigger denomination notes.
In the past, the man was able to buy a vehicle worth 480,000 yuan coins and succeeded.
How are coins made?
Made of metal, alloy or sometimes synthetic materials, coins are a small, flat, round piece used primarily as a medium of exchange or legal tender. Coins are standardized in weight and produced in large quantities at a mint.
Here’s how US coins are made, according to factmonster.com
- The US Mint purchases strips of metal about 13 inches in width and 1,500 feet in length to make dollar, half-dollar, quarter, dime and nickel.
- The strips, which are rolled in a coil, are fed through a blanking press to create round discs called banks. The leftover strip are shredded and recycled.
- To soften the blanks, they are heated in an annealing furnace. Afterwards, they are run through a washer and dryer.
- To get rid of blanks that are wrong in size or shape, the blanks are sorted on a “riddler”.
- The good blanks then go through an upsetting mill which raises a rim around their edges.
- A press operator inspects each batch of new coins using a magnifying glass.
- All the coins go through a coin sizer to remove any dented or misshapen coins.
- The coins then go through an automatic counting machine that counts them and drops them into large canvas bags. After the bags are sewn shut, they are stored in vaults and shipped to Federal Reserve Banks.