Wikivoyage:Tourist office/Archives/2019/December

When a cashier gives change in the regions of the U.S. near the southern border, is it as common to find the occasional Mexican peso coin mixed in with the rest as it is to get Canadian coins near the northern border?

I've always been curious about this. -- AndreCarrotflower (talk) 23:48, 19 December 2019 (UTC)

I can't go definitive on this, but I would say it probably depends on how similar the coins are in appearance. Are there peso coins which look like cent coins? Before the new £1 coins (which have a complex polygon shape) were brought in a couple of years ago, from time to time I would find €1 coins hidden in my change. The old pound coins were circular and were very similar in appearance - size, shape, even colour to the still-current euro coin; it was easy to mistake one for the other if you weren't looking closely. Even machines which take coin payment used to accept a €1 coin in place of a £1 coin, in my experience, despite the quite big difference in value at that time.

At risk of reducing this thread to the level of a late-night radio phone-in ("tell us about the most unusual coin you've come across in your purse - ring now and I promise you'll get through"), I have also been given as change small coins from Kazakhstan and Malta which looked superficially like different penny denominations. I even once got given a halfpenny which looked almost identical to a 1p coin, and which must have been in illegal circulation since the 60s.--ThunderingTyphoons! (talk) 23:43, 21 December 2019 (UTC)