Venti Rigmarole

Clickbait. Spare change. Rabbit holes. Half-assed investigations. And a lying barista.

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One day, I saw a headline warning that quarters, nickels, dimes, and pennies would soon be obsolete. It was clickbait, and it worked. I read the article and discovered that “soon” might actually mean “later,” and perhaps never. But the algorithms read me like a book, discovering that I am primed for anti-coin messaging. I fell down an ad-supported rabbit hole filled with hundreds of articles, some going back more than a decade, all of them warning that “soon” coins would be obsolete.

It didn’t take long to see what was going on here. I used to be a reporter, and in the digital economy, a big part of that job is feeding the content beast. If the web analytics say people want to read about the death of the dime, you write another story about dying dimes, or you pack your bags.

But after I quit journalism, I went into public relations, and my perspective changed. If journalists are busy feeding the content beast, truth be damned, then it’s the job of the flak to spin that clickbait so that it benefits their client’s narrative.

Who was spinning the anti-coin narrative, I wondered? I made a list of suspects.

1. Big Crypto - They don’t just want to make coins obsolete, they’ve set their sights rendering cash, and maybe even government-backed currency, obsolete.

2. Big Parking Meter - I don’t know about your city, but in Los Angeles the parking meters take plastic because the high prices require a lot of coins.

3. Big Vending Machine - Sell a bag of chips for 50 cents and you’ve got a helluva margin, but sell that same bag of chips for $1.75 and you’ve got money to burn on an anti-coin PR campaign.

Briefly, I thought about dusting off my press pass and launching an investigation.

I could work my crypto sources, maybe get them to spill the beans by promising to quote them anonymously. Aside from ending currency as we know it, isn’t anonymity what they really want? Then again, I’d be going up against Elon Musk, his fanboys, and the Winklevoss twins. That’s a lot of bullshit for one bullshit artist to handle.

I could file a freedom of information request with the city of Los Angeles. Sure, I’d have to overcome years of stonewalling, but eventually I might find the smoking gun—a memo authorizing a stealth PR campaign to discourage the use of coins in order to prop up LA’s parking cartel. Then again, revelations of government conspiracies aren’t what they used to be. All the President’s Men was nominated for eight Oscars, while Snowden has a 61 percent freshness rating on Rotten Tomatoes.

Another idea. I could go undercover, Fletch-style, by getting a job inside Big Vending Machine. With a little luck and a lot of chutzpah, I could gain access to the brain trust behind these anti-coin shenanigans. With a little more luck, I might even be able to tell that story to Ira Glass on This American Life. But would it change¹ anything?

I found myself getting discouraged. The only guarantee was that these potential investigations would take time, and time, as we all know, is money. And the thing about money is there isn’t enough of it in journalism these days, which is why I switched to PR. An investigation just didn’t make sense in terms of dollars and cents.

Then it hit me.

Follow the money!

If Big Crypto, Big Parking Meter, and Big Vending Machine didn’t want my coins, who did?

The answer was right there in the display ads following me around the internet. An outfit called Coinstar was spending money—real money!—on ads to get me to part with my coins. But why? What kind of game were they running?

I thought about the box of coins gathering dust in our entry hall closet. We hadn’t used these coins in years, thanks to Big Parking Meter, Big Vending Machine, and let’s face it, our very own washer-dryer. That meant I had change to spare, and so I decided it was time to leave my clickbait rabbit hole and find out who wants my coins, and why.

---

“I’m going to Coinstar,” I told Christina.

“Coinstar?”

“Yeah, you know the machines they have in the supermarket that take your change and give you cash, or gift cards.”

“Oh, OK. But why?”

Why indeed? Should I tell my wife about the anti-coin media narrative? And if I did tell her, how would I explain Coinstar’s role? It wasn’t immediately clear how their coin-based business model would benefit from an anti-coin narrative. In the short-run, that narrative might drive coin collections. But in the long-run, it would undermine faith in coins, leaving Coinstar holding a bag of worthless metal discs. And then there was Christina to consider; the less she knew, the better, especially if this thing involved Big Crypto. I can take whatever meme-based hell Elon Musk, his fanboys, and the Winklevoss twins throw at me, but my wife just doesn’t need that kind of shit.

“I’m going to exchange the coins for a Starbucks gift card.”

It wasn’t exactly the truth, but it was good enough for Christina and her dirty iced chai latte habit.

---

As it turned out, I wasn’t the only one with coins on his mind. At our local Von’s, there were three people ahead of me in line to use the Coinstar machine.

First up was a man wearing a red MAGA hat. Behind MAGA Man, was a stoner holding what looked like a three-foot bong full of change. Behind Stoner Boy, stood a woman wearing a t-shirt that read, “Decolonize Your Bookshelf.”

For ten minutes, Stoner Boy, Woke Reader, and I waited as MAGA Man loaded thousands of pennies into the machine. The process was tedious, not because MAGA Man had so many pennies, but because he couldn’t be bothered to read the instructions. Had MAGA Man read the instructions, he would’ve known that putting foreign objects and substances into the machine was forbidden.

“What the fuck,” MAGA Man said. “This machine is broken. It’s trying to cheat me!”

“Check the screen,” Woke Reader said. “It says to call the attendant.”

Suddenly, and without explanation, Stoner Boy decided to abandon ship. He took his change-filled bong and wandered deeper into the store in search of snacks.

“Someone help me,” MAGA Man yelled. “I’m being robbed!”

A grocery story cashier came over to investigate. She opened the machine and immediately saw the problem.

“Who put rocks and water in here?” the cashier asked.

MAGA Man looked up at the ceiling.

“You’re not supposed to do that,” the cashier said. “You broke the machine.”

“I didn’t do it,” MAGA Man said.

MAGA Man tried to blame Antifa. Woke Reader rolled her eyes.

“This machine is going to be out of order for the rest of the day, maybe longer,” the cashier said.

Had this whole thing become so politicized that I’d never discover the truth? That was a real concern. But then I remembered what Mulder and Scully always told us, the truth is out there.

So, I went Ralph’s, which also had a Coinstar machine. That transaction was easy as pie—and apolitical too. The Coinstar tallied up my change—$38. I selected a Starbucks gift card, and that’s when the real trouble began.

---

“I’m sorry, but we don’t accept Coinstar credits at this location,” the barista told me.

“But the Coinstar machine said it was a Starbucks gift card,” I said, holding up a flimsy piece of paper and wishing that it was one of those fancy plastic gift cards.

“You have to go to a Starbucks kiosk that’s in a grocery store to use a Coinstar credit.”

“It didn’t say that on the machine,” I protested.

“I know,” the barista said. “It really should tell you that before you select the card. It happens all the time. But I’m sorry, we can’t take that credit here.”

So, I took my business to the Starbucks kiosk at the Von’s where MAGA Man, cutting his nose off to spite his face, struck a blow against the so-called deep state coin conspiracy.

“We don’t honor Coinstar credits here,” the kiosk barista said. “You have to go to a regular Starbucks.”

“But the barista at the regular Starbucks told me they don’t honor Coinstar at their location, and that I had to go to a kiosk. This feels like a Catch-22, which is a great book, but a lousy situation to experience.”

The kiosk barista hadn’t read Catch-22, but he got my drift. We went back and forth for a few rounds. Each time the barista tried to tell me that I was in the wrong place, but I stuck to my guns. Then I said, “Look, either the barista at the regular store is lying, or you’re lying. Which is it?”

My hardball tactics worked. The barista confessed.

“Honestly, I just don’t know how to use the Coinstar credits,” he said.

“So, I’m in the right place?”

“Right place, wrong time.”

“Meaning?”

“The manager can ring you up, but he’s on a break, and won’t be back for thirty minutes.”

Translation: I would have to talk to Mr. Big.

But tracking Mr. Big down would take more time, which again, is money, and I was already $38 in the hole on this one.

“I’ll be back,” I told the kiosk barista.

But who was I kidding? Maybe the clickbait headlines were right. Maybe those fact-free stories had done a number on everyone—MAGA people, woke folk, stoners, baristas, and satirists—convincing each of us that our coins—allegedly backed by the full faith and credit of the United States of America—are, in “reality,” worthless.

And who was behind this con?

Well, I can’t prove it, I think it’s obvious.

Coffee used to cost a nickel, then a dime, then five bucks. That’s what people in the news business call a trend—and this trend doesn’t look good for the consumer. Because these days, Big Coffee takes every coin you’ve got, and you don’t get jackshit.

Thanks for reading! I’ll be off next Sunday because we’ll be visiting family in Florida. The good news is, I get to see some loved ones I haven’t seen in more than a year. But it’s not like you’re missing out. It’s Florida, and so I’m practically guaranteed to come back with at least one weird story.

1. Pun intended