As a Canadian, I grew up getting used to throwing away money. Okay, not real money – pennies. In Canada GST is added to everything, so if a price tag says $2, the actual price will be like $2.28 (in Thailand, if the price tag says 143 baht, it’s 143 baht). But the pennies that accumulate in the transaction were the bane of many Canadians’ existence, piling up, filling pockets and jars, and generally being nearly useless (until they discontinued them in 2013). But that was nothing compared to the Thai equivalent – the dreaded satang coin.

The satang – which comes in denominations of 0.50 baht and 0.25 baht – is even more useless. They’re tiny, nearly weightless, and easy to lose. If you had a pocket bulging with them you might be able to buy yourself a cheap bowl of noodles, but not much else. Very few people pay for things using satang, so it’s almost always the customer that is getting satang, rather than giving it away.

Look at the stupid little things, just sitting there all smug on the left. 

So what to do with them? I used to keep them – putting them in a little bag for my infant son to play with one day in the future – until I realized he could eat them or spill them all over the floor (which would necessitate picking them up individually by hand). I hate carrying the stupid little things in my pocket, so I started doing the only sensible thing – throwing them away.

This is the very definition of first world problem, of course, and I realize that this might seem to some like an arrogant, wasteful thing to do, but they always seemed to accumulate, and never get spent. So on a whim the other day I posed the question on Twitter – what do you do with your satang? I thought it would be interesting to display some of the replies here.