A Walmart customer recently tried to pay for his items with thousands of pennies.
Pennies are legal currency, so technically you can pay for whatever you want with them. But that doesn’t mean a store has to accept payment in change. Those that do often require the coins to be rolled.
In this video, the man trying to pay with a jug of pennies nearly got thrown out of the store.
TikTok creator Zak (@everybodyhateszak_) often posts videos of himself doing various stunts. He’s got a series where he tries to scan into the gym with bar codes from various items, including a real fish and body deodorant. (Spoiler, the deodorant worked. The fish didn’t.)
Zak posts about a ongoing beef he’s supposedly got with the content creation group AMP, particularly Duke Dennis. He also did a bit where he deleted TikTok off girls’ phones.
In his latest series, he tries to buy things with pennies.
The Walmart workers he encountered in his latest post were not amused.
How does the Walmart prank work?
In each video, Zak tells viewers what he’s buying. He’s bought—or at least tried to buy—gas, a watermelon, and liquor.
In the Walmart video, Zak says he’s buying “expensive clothes.” The total rings up to approximately $80.
He looks in his wallet, finds it empty, then asks the clerk if they accept change. When she says they do, he picks a jug of pennies off the ground and starts dumping them out in front of her.
She puts a stop to it immediately.
The worker then tells him he’s got to cash in the pennies first. “I’m not taking this,” she says.
Many Walmarts have Coinstar machines that allow you to exchange coins for paper money for a fee. It appears she’s suggesting Zak use it before completing the purchase.
He declines. Instead, Zak remains at the register and continues putting pennies down. Then another Walmart employee walks up. The first worker tells the second she’s explained that she’s not taking the pennies.
Zak responds by insisting she’s going to count the pennies for his purchase. “No I’m not,” she retorts.
The second employee backs up the first. “We’re not gonna count it,” she says.
“Or do you want to be escorted out,” the first one adds.
The video ends when two men, one of whom may have been Walmart security, walk up.
Is it funny or disrespectful?
Some people seemed amused by Zak’s prank. One joked that they’d like to pay their student loans with pennies. Others said that if they’d been the workers, they would’ve sat there and eaten the clock counting pennies.
Not everyone realized it was a joke, however. Those in this camp alternately took Zak’s side, arguing that perhaps he’d fallen on hard times and was down his last dimes—well, pennies—or chastised him for not converting the change into bills first
“Go to a daggum bank, they cash it for free,” wrote one.
Most commenters thought that the stunt was annoying at best.
“Team: cashiers!” one of Zak’s detractors wrote. “No one has time for your jokes!!”
A history of penny pranks
Zak isn’t the first person to attempt to pay for things with thousands of pennies for a laugh.
A common version of the prank involves using change to pay the government. People have paid traffic tickets, taxes, and other fines in this manner.
One man attracted headlines for paying a speeding ticket with 22,000 pennies, which he put in buckets marked “extortion money.”
Sometimes the government accepts payments in pennies; other times not.
Using coins to pay the government is so common that some courts actually have rules governing it.
So while Zak may be the latest penny prankster, he isn’t the first. Nor is he likely to be the last.
@everybodyhateszak_ They brought every Walmart worker to the front ?? ##fyp##explore##walmart##cashier##coins##jobs ♬ original sound – Zak ?
Zak didn’t immediately respond to a direct message seeking comment on Tuesday afternoon.
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