Penny For Your Thoughts

On my way to work I usually stop at an Esso garage to pick up a paper. It has recently been refurbished as a latte-and-pastry stopover before the motorway begins, which would never be found dead calling itself a 'garridge', as we used to say.

The decor and the staff have changed, but one thing it has carried over from its previous incarnation, as a rather tatty garridge smelling of oil and petrol, is a strange and rather subtly offensive feature on the payment counter.

This consists of a small, shallow square tray with a few pennies in it, and a sign that says "Don't bother about the odd penny - please help yourself".

What?

Now I can understand charity boxes and the like positioned on a counter to lure your small change, fair enough. But the 'please help yourself' suggests that either you are the kind of cheap, greedy individual who will take free money even if it is only a few pence, and the garridge is humiliating you by confronting you with temptation to inflame your greed, or it is soliciting your involvement by encouraging you to deposit your spare pennies there to show that you don't need them either but want a part of the fun of taunting those who will take them.

What is going on here? What marketing mastermind launched this baby on a gullible management? I am trying to picture the accompanying Powerpoint Presentation...

Maybe one of the internal security cameras is trained on it, and there is much hilarity among the staff at weekly showings of the footage of the occasional customer who glances furtively round, unable to believe their luck, and swiftlly scoops seven or eight pence out of the tray and into a deep inner pocket.

It seems so utterly without any redeeming features that I keep thinking I must have imagined it until it announces itself the following morning with a clammy, dirty shock.