Cafe responds after making woman ‘richest person in the world’ with 100,000 times more wealth than Elon Musk
She briefly had more money than there existed in the world
A café has responded after they accidentally gave a woman a gift card with more wealth than there existed in the entire world.
Nottingham business owner Sophie Downing was recently given a gift card for her local coffee shop 200 Degrees, but when she used it to buy a matcha latte she was surprised to discover she had more money to spend than anyone else in the world.
Provided she could spend it at this coffee shop, which is a very limited form of wealth.
Sophie looked at her receipt to see that her gift card balance was somewhere north of £63 quadrillion, just to jog your memory a quadrillion has 15 zeroes after it.
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This technically made her the 'richest person in the world' for a while, about 100,000 times more than Elon Musk, while she was also briefly worth 22,500 times more than the UK economy.
The fact she now possessed wealth worth about 670 times more than the global economy was a bit of a clue that something had gone wrong.
Indeed, the café has since responded to Sophie's unexpected wealth with a statement where they told the BBC it was a mistake of switched numbers and she has since been given the actual amount on her gift card.
They said: "Due to a technical administrative error, the gift card number, rather than the gift card value was entered into the wrong part of the till.
"As a result, the customer was generated a receipt which suggested they had a rather higher amount of money left on their gift card than they actually did.
"The customer was only charged exactly what they should have been, and after they had completed their purchase, their gift card had exactly the right amount left on it, they just had a receipt which showed a very different amount, which the barista gave them as a souvenir.
"They were then given a correct receipt which showed the true value of the gift card."
I think she might have preferred it the other way around.
When the Nottingham woman first tried to use the card she remembered the guy at the till being 'really confused'.
She said: "This massive number came up on the till. He said 'I've never seen it before but it's fine for you to keep it.’ I didn't clock it until he gave me the receipt. I thought 'surely not, that's actually crazy.’"
That money could only be spent at the coffee shop, and when she used the gift card to buy something else she realised the balance had barely been dented and she had several quadrillion quid to spend in the café.
Being a responsible citizen, she didn't use her powers again (she would probably have been rumbled at some point) and now it's all been sorted.
Just imagine how much tea and biscuits you could buy with £63 quadrillion.
Joe Harker