If only they really did this...

[fireheart]

Samsung "pays" Apple with 5 cent coins

While this is fake, I had a bit of a laugh at it.

[PepperElf]

wait... we don't want to give SCs any more ideas.

[draggar]

wait... we don't want to give SCs any more ideas.

They already have that idea.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7adcmv4geQ0

People probably think this is not common but I've seen people try to pay phone bills with 100% coins.

[taxguykarl]

It was bad enough that an SC paid his $250 prep fee in all singles.

[CrazedClerkthe2nd]

It was bad enough that an SC paid his $250 prep fee in all singles.

I've seen a lot of tipped employees pay for $50-100 purchases in all singles. Doesn't really bother me, I can count them up pretty quick.

[Chromatix]

I'm assuming that Paperblog is known for this sort of thing - but here's some maths I did quickly when I first heard about this:

A US 5c coin weighs exactly 5 grams (nominally). You need 20 billion of them to make $1 billion, so that's a total of 100,000 metric tons of coins. Which is a *lot*.

An American 18-wheeler lorry can weigh a total of 40 tons. That's not 40 tons of payload, though. Let's say you can get 25 tons of coins into one of those - you'd then need 4000 lorries to transport the coins, not the quoted 30. (Even at 40 tons payload, it would be 2500 lorries.)

A typical American railway freight wagon - say a coal or ore hopper - can hold about 100 metric tons of material. You would still need 1000 of these wagons to transport the coins. Assuming each wagon is 20 metres long (a number I pulled out of my backside because it's the length of a typical European passenger carriage), a single train containing these wagons would be 20km, or 12 miles long.

That is obviously too long to actually manage as a single train. More likely, it would be split up into several trains, about a mile long each. (Apparently 10,000 ton coal trains are in regular service, but that's about as heavy as a single train can be.)

The only single vehicle that could carry all the coins at once would be a "capesize" bulk freighter - one too big to pass through the Panama canal. Coincidentally, South Korea is the largest builder of such ships.

[taxguykarl]

Not only that but as pointed out here, that would require Samsung to obtain each and every nickle minted over the last 70 years.

[Chromatix]

Yeah, it's a truly colossal number of coins - I'm actually surprised there *were* that many in circulation, even in as widely used a currency as the US Dollar. It corresponds to about 3 coins per man, woman and child on the planet.