A couple of weeks ago I was in line in a supermarket in Colombia, an Exito, a place where (obviously) I still don't really understand how things work. Inadvertently I got into a line where you can pay with 'puntos.' I'm not entirely sure but as far as I can tell 'puntos' is Colombian for 'coupins.'
Apparently the way to do it is you overload your shopping cart with god knows what, wheel it up to the puntos line and then proceed to change your mind about which items you really want, spending twenty minutes or so deciding which eight of the seventy five things you have in your cart a) you really need and b) fit within your allocation of puntos.
I finally bailed out of that line only to find myself behind an old lady who promptly whipped out a checkbook and wrote a check. They had to call the manager, the assistant to the regional manager, the local congressional representative, the representative of the check writers' union, had to perform a retina scan and a blood test... It had never occurred to me that I might prefer to be in a Walmart behind some redneck who'd snuck coin rolls out of her sock drawer but you know me, I am open to new ideas.
