How to make money by paying in euros

[pne]

A long-ish time ago, probably not long after the euro was available as coins and notes, I read a story about a shop in the UK that accepted euros (more as a publicity thing than anything else).

A youth wanted to try that out so he changed some pounds into euros at the bank and went shopping there. They gave him change in pounds—the change was more than the sum of the prices (in pounds) of the goods he had bought! When he pointed that out to the cashier, she says it's what the computer told her to give him.

Turned out, later on, that someone had entered the GBP:EUR exchange rate the wrong way around, so the computer thought it was 1.4 GBP (or whatever) for 1 EUR instead of 1.4 EUR for 1 GBP (perhaps since most currencies are worth less, unit for unit, than the euro, but the British pound is worth more, so the exchange rate is usually x XYZ = 1 EUR with "x" being larger than 1 and XYZ being the local currency).

However, after he pointed out the error to management, they still didn't think it worthwhile to do anything about it. As I remember, the kid kept going back and buying more stuff and getting more money back. He figured after he had tried to tell them twice and they didn't do anything about it, hey, it's free cash.

Can someone find me a link to the story? I haven't been able to dredge it up.

Comments

[tungol.livejournal.com]

I made money in a similar way once, though on a much smaller scale. I was in the US for a week, going to a violin teacher training program, and discovered that the photocopy machine there would accept Canadian money there on par with American money. Photocopies cost 5 cents, and if I put in a Canadian 25 cent piece, the machine would give me 20 cents American in change. The exchange rate at the time was such that 20 cents American was worth slightly more than 25 cents Canadian, so I made money off the photocopy machine. (But obviously not enough that it was worthwhile to use the photocopier just in order to make money.)

[allegrox.livejournal.com]

I would have been making a lot of copies.