Can you….pay for your food with pennies?

Bright and early Sunday morning is the perfect time to grab some coffee. After rummaging through our houses for coins, we found about 624 pennies. The two of us set out for Starbucks, then Togos, bracing ourselves for the employees to throw fits over our special method of payment.

At Starbucks, we bought a drink worth $3.50, amounting to 350 pennies. When counting up even 100 pennies is time consuming, who would want to count up 350 pennies just for a drink? But since we wanted to test this out, we dumped the box of pennies on the counter and began numbering 350 pennies. The employee was much more gracious about it than we thought she would be.

Staring at the pennies with wide eyes she said, “All right, let’s do this.”

Then she began counting the coins. We were very surprised at how nice she was about it. After all, she would have the extra work of counting change, and to top it off, it was early in the morning. There was no sense of anger in her tone, just shock. We assume that not many people go into Starbucks and pay in pennies, but judging from this employee’s reaction, it seemed as if she was having fun with this.

After our visit to Starbucks, we ventured to Togo’s to see how their store employees would react to our piles of change. Our total purchase at Togo’s ended up being around $3, consisting of a regular sized drink as well as a small bag of chips.

As we dumped the large container of pennies we had with us, the look on the Togo’s employee’s face was not as friendly. His eyes grew bigger as more and more pennies came spilling out. It also didn’t help that a line of hungry, sandwich-craving customers was growing behind us.

We attempted to count the pennies as swiftly as possible, seeing that the employee was becoming a bit anxious. Quickly pushing the mound of pennies to the employee over the high counter, we gave him an apologetic look as he scooped up the coins and almost dropped a few of them on his way to the cash register, on a different counter four feet away.

As we walked out of the restaurant, we decided that you definitely can purchase food in pennies; however, do so at your own risk. It can easily lead to glares from stressed employees.